Organizing Fragmented Spatiality: An Outline
COST ACTION 1003 WORKSHOP ON “ORGANIZING FRAGMENTED TERRITORIALITY”, HAMBURG, NOVEMBER 15-17, 2012
6 Pages Posted: 8 Apr 2014
Date Written: April 7, 2014
Abstract
While the academic discipline of International Law (IL) has been facing an enormous debate on fragmentation and constitutionalization, the traditional assumption of the territorial grounding of international law had been lost out of sight. Either, it seems, international law follows a territorial paradigm of international normative order or it enters a process of constitutionalization and, in so doing, transcends the territoriality upon which it had once been built. While the territorial grounding of international law in the nation-state appears “old-fashioned,” the merging of territoriality within one unitary global constitutional order seems “post-modern” but also somewhat naïve. Complex phenomena of governance like the fragmentation of international law or the proliferation of global administrative agencies, as well as, more concrete scripts of global regulation like newly emerging forms of global health regulation or the “global” development of domestic antitrust laws indicate that this dichotomy is odd. Debates on the fragmentation of international law and global governance widely overlook that governance practice does in fact produce space, that is, collaborates in the very production of the space they claim to regulate.
Keywords: Territory, Constitutionalism, Fragmentation, International Law, Space, Geography, International Relations
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