Introduction to the Symposium on Infrastructuring International Law

Abstract

Infrastructures encompass dynamic networks and assemblages that enable and control flows of goods, people, and information over space. These can be physical, informational, or digital; most now are combinations of these, for example, the Internet, or Global Positioning and Navigation Systems (such as GPS and Beidou). Many other things run or depend on an infrastructure—andmost infrastructures depend on or link with other infrastructures. Some infrastructures lie underneath, barely noticed for long periods until things go wrong, while others attract much public and political attention and are joyously celebrated, fiercely resisted, or resignedly accepted. Infrastructures are important, but not much systematic work has been done on the significance of their relationship with international (or transversal) law. Consideration of how infrastructures affect or shape international law entails consideration of how relations, processes, and imaginations of particular infrastructures interact with law, and vice versa. This symposium contributes to the investigation of how infrastructures may work as fundamental components of regulatory ordering—or may work against or orthogonal to some such ordering projects and in support of competing or resistance projects.1 Even if it is not (yet) studied as a field, international infrastructure law is a large practice area and many of its components have long been prominent in specialized scholarship.2 International law—its praxis, doctrines, and structures—is routinely deployed in the enabling and controlling of certain kinds of transnational infrastructures, or the flows these infrastructures channel or block. Some notable infrastructures could barely exist or function without particular international law arrangements (specific infrastructures of this sort include the Suez Canal, the France-UKChannel Tunnel, the Schengen Information System, the World Health Organization’s pandemic monitoring system, and the Nordstream 2 pipeline built but suspended from becoming operational following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine). International law figures in sprawling initiatives of “infrastructural developmentalism” such as the Belt and Road Initiative or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.3 International law enables or regulates financing and investment protection for large physical infrastructures, requirements to obtain