This introductory article challenges foundational assumptions that structure how international legal theory conceptualizes “the Global.” The prevailing approach remains anchored in a Eurocentric legacy that conflates the earth with a geometrically spherical, chronometrically linear, and cartographically fixed model of space and time. This triad has rendered “the Global” an ostensibly objective terrain—embodied by an iconic World Map of states that is presumably atheoretical and transhistorical. I argue this is a form of “misplaced concreteness,” which constrains international legal thought as it confronts increasingly fluid and non-contiguous patterns of global ordering that have become difficult to visualize via the reigning cartographic imaginary. Further, it ignores how “the Global” was constructed by multiple and intersecting types of power, which together manifested demarcations, borders, territories and states as proclaimed mimetic reflections of planetary reality. As contemporary challenges—ranging from e.g. climate change to cyber governance—create trans-territorial or planetary scales of consequence, time is ripe to unfold international legal theory beyond the legacy of a priori conceptualization. Accordingly, the special issue encourages bottom-up, practice-oriented approaches, inviting international lawyers to explore how global spatiality and temporality are actively (re)produced across diverse legal contexts—from mobility regimes and global value chains to counterterrorism forums and planetary systems. Rather than treating “the Global” as a fixed totality or singular map, this special issue reframes it as a historically engineered concept, shaped by ongoing practices of geo-political, geo-economic and legal world-making.

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

From global tourism and free movement to refugees and climate-related displacement, human mobility is both a driver and an effect of what we think of as globalisation. Yet, the role of international law in constituting human mobility remains critically undervalued. In this contribution, we call for a radical rethinking of the role of international law in shaping our globe through the tenets of the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences. More specifically, we argue for the adoption of a mobile ontology of international law, which pits the constant flow of persons, goods and capital against dominant globalisation narratives predicting the end of place to take a focus on re-territorialisations of power. Taking human mobility as our starting point, we first show how mobility has been central to the foundation of key building blocks of international law. Second, we turn to the example of the global tourism regime to explore how law recursively disperses mobility around the world. Third and finally, we argue that the relationship between international law and human mobility is co-constitutive, as constant shifts in mobilities create unexpected effects, which in turn prompt further evolutions in law. We conclude by reflecting on the space for empirical and critical investigation that may open up by re-imaging (international) law as quintessentially mobile.

Contemporary practices of authority by states and non-state actors alike are at odds with international law’s orthodox time-spaces, causing disciplinary anxiety. As a result, although there is a sense of the importance of global value chains (GVCs), these are invisible to the disciplinary gaze. This is not limited to international law; neo-formalist contract law and private international law suffer the same fate. There is for some a turn to ‘the global’ to understand alterity. In this paper, I argue that understanding the time-spaces created by the practice of contracting can offer important reflection on, among other things, what ‘the global’ is. The paper explores the practice of exercising authority through contractual relations at the level of the individual contract, the chain as a whole, and the use of standardised contractual clauses and model contracts. The article suggests these contractual relations are constitutive not only of spatiality but of territoriality. As such, it is possible to reterritorialise global phenomena, and ‘the global’, that have until now been understood to have deterritorialised from state or international legal orders.

This article rethinks ‘the global’ by analysing the emergence and growth of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), an informal platform of multilateral counterterrorism co-operation which has been instrumental in the making of post-9/11 global security law and governance. It problematises and empirically analyses how global scale is enacted through the socio-material practices of translation and assemblage that have been deployed in the construction, maintenance and extension of the GCTF governance network. Drawing from interviews with policy experts and GCTF members, and from participant-observation in GCTF and UN events, the article contributes to the theme of the Special Issue and wider legal debates about the spatiotemporal dynamics of global law and governance by critically analysing how global scale is fabricated in practice and unpacking the politics of GCTF’s global scale-making processes. Focusing on specific techniques and norm-creation processes of the GCTF, like watch-listing toolkits and ‘good-practice’ documents on foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and countering violent extremism (CVE), the article analyses how translation, problematisation and enrolment practices have assembled the GCTF as an ‘apolitical’ global security governance body. Our approach opens novel possibilities for socio-legal research on the politics of scale-making and critiquing global security power in action through empirical attention to its assemblage practices.

This article brings together different strands of literature to explore how time operates in international law as a technique of inclusion and exclusion. The question of reparations for enduring colonial and ecological injustices provides a useful entry point to examine, at a more granular level, the temporal foundations of the field and their distributive outcomes. Concepts of restitution, compensation, satisfaction as well as the doctrine of causation in the law of state responsibility, encode a specific understanding of time. This understanding, I argue, is embedded in a modernist worldview characterised by linear, abstract and universal notions of time. Calls for reparatory justice for colonial and climate wrongs attempt to defy and interrupt law’s forward motion by binding together interconnected (though unequal) pasts, presents and futures. In examining how international law reacts to those claims, and manages the conflict between law’s temporal abstractions and the concrete tempos of those seeking redress, this article reinvigorates the conversation on the politics of time in international law.

Earth–outer space interactions challenge conventional legal structures through dynamics that transcend jurisdictional boundaries and temporal scales. International law historically operates through specific spatiotemporal assumptions: geometric space, chronometric time, and cartographic politics. These elements structure how legal authority is conceptualised and enacted. This study recognizes the interconnectedness between Earth and outer space, positioning legal thought and practice within planetary and cosmic contexts. This integrative framework moves beyond anthropocentric and state-centric paradigms to address the indeterminate nature of multifaceted systems. The research employs an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates legal theory and doctrine, systems engineering, and systems science to analyse emergent phenomena such as orbital debris dynamics. The study concludes that addressing Earth–outer space interactions effectively requires not merely integrating existing legal regimes but reconceptualizing core legal concepts to align better with complex, multi-scalar and emergent dynamics.