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

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.