International law, internationally : meditations on an organizational pilgrimage into the disciplines of global law and policy / Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín

Abstract

What does it entail, methodologically, to study the globe – and its laws? What leads us to think that a topic, building, or organization is clearly “international”, whereas a neighboring institution can be seen as purely “local”? These categories are neither neutral nor self-evident, and they ultimately respond to ingrained assumptions about the relations of adjacency through which we classify the world. To become an international lawyer, one needs to master the two dimensions of the work that the “adjective” is doing here: as a qualifier of a subject, but also as a characteristic of the perspective with which one comes to study it. This is what I call doing international law, internationally. To make sense of these challenges involved in this exercise, I retrospectively make sense of my own experience of becoming an international lawyer through the lenses of the anthropology of pilgrimage. In this way, I provide a reflection on the ways “modern” or “secular” conceptions of space are shaped by models of territorial adjacency still anchored in Christian thought and foreground the sacrifices and opportunities that a career based around worldly movement entails for those aspiring to study the disciplines of global law and policy.