Call for Papers: SWAIL II- Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds, 16 – 17 November 2026, Singapore
Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds:
Middle Powers, Semi-Peripheries and Shifting Hierarchies in the Global Legal Order
Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University
16 – 17 November 2026, Singapore
This conference broadens exploration of SWAIL as
a critical lens for exploring international law’s operation across openly defined liminal contexts.
Contributions need not focus on the geographically defined Second World qua former Soviet space or
processes. Papers that interrogate broader dynamics of semi-peripherality, inter-imperial contestation,
and conditional ex-/in-clusion in international law are encouraged.
We welcome contributions that
engage theoretically, empirically, historically, etc. with the following non-exhaustive themes:
• Second World(s) as in-between actors in international law and global governance, including
middle powers and semi-peripheral (economic) agents but also various non-state actors that
shape and contest normative authority
• Epistemic marginalization and the politics of knowledge production in international law as seen
from in-between spaces, including scholars, civil society, international institutions and states
• Practices of conditional sovereignty, liminal recognition, and multidimensional hierarchies
• Processes of translation, imitation, and mimicry in international legal discourse, including how
such practices reproduce, negotiate, or destabilise classificatory schemes framed in terms of
civilisation, development, or liberalism
• The political economy of middle-power support for international law, including the costs and
benefits of disengagement
• Critiques of transition narratives, modernization, and legal temporality
• Case studies from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Eurasia and other semi-peripheral contexts,
for instance (Ottoman) Turkey, (Imperial) Japan, China or Ethiopia
• Applications of SWAIL to specific fields, e.g. human rights, security and foreign policy,
development, investment, rule of law, environment and sustainability
• SWAIL in dialogue with critical international scholarship, Marxism, feminism, TWAIL,
political economy, queer studies, cross-disciplinary methods, etc., including self-reflection on
the promise and limits of SWAIL
Call for abstracts
Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be emailed to lawandsustainability@smu.edu.sg by 1
August 2026. Please also attach a brief bio or 1-page CV. Selected speakers will be notified by 21
August 2026.
All speakers will be required to submit a working paper (4,0000 – 6,000 words) before the conference
by 1 November 2026. It is anticipated that a special issue based on the conference will be published by
a prominent peer-reviewed journal.
For more details, refer here
