This roundtable, held as part of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Law Weekend, will examine the intertwined subjects of statehood and sovereignty at a moment of profound strain on the international legal order.

Climate change, artificial intelligence, democratic backsliding, and renewed aggression are placing sustained pressure on the assumptions that have traditionally organized relations among states. One such assumption concerns how sovereign authority is constituted, claimed, exercised, and contested in liminal spaces where territory loses its ordering force.

Panelists will explore case studies from cyberspace, outer space, the unfinished project of decolonization, and the precarious geographies of sinking island states. Drawing on critical approaches to security and responsibility, their discussion will interrogate sovereignty’s external and internal dimensions and ask whether it is fragmenting, or has always been in pieces.

Moderator

• Benedict Kingsbury, Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice, New York University School of Law

Speakers

• Haley S. Anderson, Associate Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School
• Idriss Fofana, Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
• Asaf Lubin, Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

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