On fragments and geometry: The international legal order as metaphor and how it matters

This 9, 871 word article was published in a special issue sponsored by the Institute for Global Law and Policy of the Harvard Law School. It questions how international legal theory is consumed over whether international law is “fragmenting”, yet without ever questioning where the meaning and spatial metaphor of the fragment came from historically. I argue that speaking about international legal space via the metaphor of the fragment implicates the epistemological, geometric and imperial history of scientific positivism; and how this “naturalizes” our perception of social and legal space as being solely planimetric. In the literature thus far, a recent publication in a leading journal on transnational law credits my article with developing the notion of “geometries of rule”: (page 4, note 2) Gavin Sullivan, “Transnational Legal Assemblages and Global Security Law: Topologies and Temporalities of the List”, 5 Transnational Legal Theory (2014), 81‐127. Further, this article has been translated for and re-published in the Turkish journal Küresel Bakış Çeviri Dergisi (2015)