Off the Map: A Critical Geography of International Law (LSE International Studies) - Softcover

Rajkovic, Nikolas M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1009444387 ISBN 13: 9781009444385

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Off the Map challenges how international lawyers picture the world. While traditional scholarship continues to treat the 'World Map' of states as natural, this book exposes the discipline's cartographic inheritance and its growing fatigue. Drawing on critical geography, international relations, and media theory, Nikolas M. Rajkovic reveals how global authority now operates less through contiguous territories than through infrastructures, corridors, and nodes. Introducing the concept of 'juriscapes,' he illuminates the legal significance of ports, data cable landings, aviation hubs, sanctions screens, and cloud regions – sites where rules bite and power circulates. He also develops the idea of pointillistic geographies, showing how law is enacted through coordinates, flows, and switches that escape the flat image of bordered states. Provocative yet accessible, Off the Map revisualizes international law for a fractured global order, equipping readers with the concepts to see where authority truly moves today.

About this title

About the Author

Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and a senior faculty member of Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy. He was awarded a Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute (2021–22) and continued as a Visiting Fellow at its Law Department from 2022–2025.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009444387
• ISBN 13: 9781009444385
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260