SWAIL II - Mapping International Law's Second Worlds: Middle Powers, Semi-Peripheries and Shifting Hierarchies in the Global Legal Order

SWAIL II - Mapping International Law's Second Worlds: Middle Powers, Semi-Peripheries and Shifting Hierarchies in the Global Legal Order is an international academic conference to be held on 16 - 17 November 2026 at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University, Singapore. It builds on an inaugural SWAIL event held in Vienna in 2025 and broadens the exploration of Second World Approaches to International Law (SWAIL) as a critical lens for examining international law's operation across openly defined liminal contexts. The conference is an in-person event, and submissions from scholars at all career stages are welcome.

The conference is organised by the Centre for Commercial Law in Asia's (CCLA) Singapore Sustainable Futures Initiative (SSFI), based at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University, with the support of Prof Liu Nengye's Yong Pung How Fellowship and in collaboration with Central European University (CEU). It is convened by two Conference Co-Chairs: Associate Professor Liu Nengye of the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University, whose work sits at the nexus of the law of the sea and international environmental law and who is the Founding Director of the Singapore Sustainable Futures Initiative; and Assistant Professor Patryk Labuda of Central European University, an elected Board Member (2024-28) of the European Society of International Law working at the intersection of international law, peace and security studies, and global history.

The global legal order faces growing contestation, with multilateralism and transnational cooperation increasingly yielding to competitive bilateralism and transactional coexistence. While hegemonic and (neo-)imperial ideologies, concepts, and arguments are retrieved, refined, and reasserted, uncertainty reigns about how these shifts are best understood and conceptualised, with divergent perspectives emerging from the Global East(s), South(s) and West(s). International law's role in perpetuating hierarchy, domination and exclusion, and the (post-)colonial foundations of global order, are increasingly acknowledged even in mainstream disciplinary accounts. However, less attention has been paid to the experiences, practices, processes, vocabularies and perspectives of in-betweenness that defy binary classifications of North-South, core-periphery, liberal-illiberal, and similar.

Recent debates have centered the notion of 'middle powers', a term encompassing actors as diverse as Canada or Australia at one end of the spectrum, or Turkey and BRICS+ at the other end. Applied unevenly to Latin America or Eastern Europe, the 'semi-periphery' traditionally described in-between and incomplete (usually economic) subordination or transition. Drawing on Second World Approaches to International Law (SWAIL), a self-reflexive project exploring how international law produces and manages 'in-betweenness' across different registers, this call invites contributions that explore these themes, whether articulated as conceptual semi-peripherality and incomplete integration, or as actor-based claims to middle-power or emerging-power agency, including practices of asserting legally grounded sovereignty under imperial pressure. The central question is how international law's dominant classificatory schemes shape doctrines, institutions, and epistemic authority while flattening, marginalizing and occluding in-betweenness that does not fit within the hegemonic paradigm(s).

Building on emerging scholarship from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, SWAIL seeks to unsettle binary and often hegemonic classificatory schemes such as North/South, market-/state-based economy, liberal/illiberal, core/periphery, democratic/authoritarian, capitalist/socialist, developed/developing, Europe/non-Europe, civilized/uncivilized, perpetrator/victim, colonizer/colonized, and empire/subaltern divisions of the globe. It conceptualises the Second World(s) not merely as a geographical label nor as a historical or ideological Cold War category, but as an analytical device for exploring structural and epistemic governance within the global order. The conference hopes to diagnose overlooked forms of hierarchy and expand the critical vocabulary available for understanding international law's uneven global functioning.

The conference welcomes contributions that engage theoretically, empirically, historically and otherwise 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, and similar, including self-reflection on the promise and limits of SWAIL

The call is open to scholars worldwide at all career stages. 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 equally encouraged.

• Abstracts must be no more than 500 words.
• Each abstract should be accompanied by a brief bio or a 1-page CV.
• Abstracts must be emailed to lawandsustainability@smu.edu.sg by 1 August 2026.
• Selected speakers will be notified by 21 August 2026.
• All selected speakers will be required to submit a working paper of 4,000 - 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.

The conference will be held at the SMU Yong Pung How School of Law as an in-person event. It is free of charge for selected speakers. However, travel expenses are expected to be self-funded. The conference is organised by CCLA's Singapore Sustainable Futures Initiative (SSFI), with the support of Prof Liu Nengye's Yong Pung How Fellowship.

Interested scholars should email an abstract of no more than 500 words, together with a brief bio or 1-page CV, to lawandsustainability@smu.edu.sg by 1 August 2026. Selected speakers will be notified by 21 August 2026 and must submit their working paper (4,000 - 6,000 words) by 1 November 2026.