(Re)Searching for SWAIL. Part I

This is Part I of the interview. Part II follows later today. The conversation also appears in the CEU Review of Books.

Dear Patryk, dear Marek, in February of this year, you held an academic workshop at Central European University (CEU) entitled ‘In Search of SWAIL (Second World Approaches to International Law)’, which we both had the honor of attending. Was there a particular moment, scholarly or political, that crystallised the need for SWAIL? What does SWAIL react to, and is it also proactive in some way?

Patryk Labuda (PL): Thank you for the invitation, Polina and Hendrik. It’s great to have this opportunity to expand on some themes from our workshop.

For me, SWAIL grew organically in the wake of February 2022. After moving semi-permanently abroad following university in Poland, I had long wondered about Eastern Europe’s peculiar place in European and global politics, culture, history… and eventually in (international) law. I never had an opportunity to dig into these themes, owing mainly to the political economy of Western legal academia, where Eastern Europe barely registered. However, observing how parts of the Western and non-Western commentariat (mis)understood Russia’s full-scale invasion forced a reckoning, including with the dominant frames that some scholars in our field used to analyze these events.

Absorbing the 2022 invasion from Senegal, where I then lived part-time—often engaging in surreal conversations about my region—I wrote a short piece in EJIL:Talk! that critiqued the reductionism of some international lawyers, both mainstream and self-styled ‘crits’ who discussed issues like self-determination and double standards, but made oversimplifications or got things wrong because they wrote on a context they had never studied yet felt oddly entitled to lecture on. My post triggered many emails, especially from non-Westerners who said it helped them revise their reading of the invasion, which then led to further questions, writing, and interactions with people who shared similar questions about our field.

Three years later, I remain bemused how many people feel entitled to write about Eastern European issues without ever studying the region or bothering to consult local stakeholders. Integrating lived experiences and a general humility about one’s positionality has become de rigueur in the academy, but ‘local’, ‘situated’ or ‘post-colonial’ perspectives in relation to Eastern Europe just don’t seem that important in international law. In that sense, SWAIL’s appeal to engage Eastern Europe as a distinct site of international law knowledge production is partly a reactive framework vis-à-vis some post-2022 trends, notably West- and Russo-centric mental maps of our region and an overdue reckoning with Russia’s ‘imperial innocence’ (Botakoz Kassymbekova). But it has various proactive dimensions we will surely come back to later, not least an appeal for a multi-directional decolonization—I use this contested term so our message is intuitively understandable – of our discipline’s relationship to Eastern Europe, which includes a strong self-reflexive dimension aimed at Eastern Europeans themselves.

Marek Jan Wasiński (MW): I agree that February 2022 was that moment when the need for SWAIL crystallised quite clearly. But let me approach your question from a slightly broader historical angle—because I assume you expect nothing less than Woody Allen’s famous precision, right? He once said that a modern man is any person born after Nietzsche’s edict that ‘God is dead’, but before the release of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. So, if I were to aim for something similar, I’d say that SWAIL wouldn’t be possible without David Kennedy’s Spring Break and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. So, we’re back, roughly, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In short, I use Kennedy’s text here as an example of self-exposure and honestly expressed epistemic vulnerability. I mean stopping the pretence that the international lawyer is—to use Jean d’Aspremont’s word—an ‘invincible’ protagonist. No, they aren’t. They are part of the very problem they try to resolve, explain, or simply describe. That Kennedy article was an act of turning the intellectual camera inward, and that borders, as Frédéric Mégret has already put it, existential angst. I remember reading that text. There were passages in which the author openly reflected on being fascinated, almost erotically, by the prisoner he was interrogating during a mission. I was chuckling as I imagined how such radical self-reflexivity would be swiftly rejected by most leading academic journals in Eastern and Central Europe.

But that kind of radical academic self-reflexivity needs to be understood in its broader historical context if we’re really going to answer your question. It coincides with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the fact that some of the Soviet Union’s so-called ‘allies’—a label some contemporary international legal scholars still use rather smoothly and uncritically—eventually became members of the European Union and… There’s a song by my favourite band, The Dreadnoughts, called The Storm. I’m not sure I’m doing the song any favours here, but to me, it’s deeply Hegelian and perfectly suited to describe the recent history of those Eastern and Central European states. It’s about how the children of the revolution become ‘rich men, big men, fattened up, happy, reborn.’ They gained ‘safety by the fire so warm.’ But they also lose, and they are dialectically changed. I remember my PhD supervisor, Professor Piotr Daranowski, telling stories from the early 1980s. Back then, workers’ union activists would come to him asking how the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights might help defend basic freedoms in Poland, treating the treaty almost like a mythical amulet. Some twenty years later, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, international law was no longer the focus of concern. Instead, people speculated about the prospects of securing a national occupation zone in Asia. This was a symptomatic moment of losing that, perhaps poignantly naïve, myth of universal, neutral international law governing all who live on this white-blue marble ball travelling through the Universe. A kind of end of innocence, so to speak. And now, another twenty years on, we face questions about the Global South’s refusal to issue unconditional condemnations of Russia’s illegal aggression against Ukraine or to endorse the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. These perplexities mark, once again, the kind of reckoning that February 2022 made unavoidable.

The Vienna workshop in February 2025 marked the first dedicated gathering on SWAIL. How did it go? What are the key ‘findings’ for you? Were there any common themes, concerns, or interests that stood out across the presentations and conversations? Did anything surprise you?

MW: Well, it felt refreshing. Especially, in some ways, it ran counter to Geraldine Van Bueren’s well-founded diagnosis that ‘in academia, people don’t feel able to talk about their backgrounds freely because they think it will negatively affect their career.’ Let me pick up from there.

The workshop had a reassuring effect. When Patryk and I published the call for papers, neither of us could predict whether the concept of SWAIL would resonate within the academy. And even if it did, could it spark intellectually stimulating conversations that would persist beyond the ritual and courteous concluding remarks announcing the end of the event? There were other sources of unease as well. One was the worry about reinventing the wheel: after all, there have been scholarly publications—judging by their titles, at least—claiming to explore ‘international law from a Central European perspective’. Another concern was whether the whole thing might collapse into a kind of collective ‘coming out’, a massive therapeutic session addressing the exclusions and blocks experienced by people from semi-peripheral backgrounds.

But—and this is both the reassuring effect and, for me, the key finding of the workshop—it turned out that we can exchange ideas forged through various disciplinary toolboxes: international law, international relations, history, economics, philosophy. And we can use these diverse tools to produce understandings of international law as a normative system, and a set of professional practices at the same time, that are deeply shaped by place, experience, and context. Of course, such scholarship has existed for some time, but it often boiled down to presenting legal or political perspectives from isolated points of view. What the Vienna workshop demonstrated is that it’s possible to speak about international law—both as a product and as a key factor shaping global relations—from the perspectives of Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, or Greece in a global context, without those perspectives being reduced to merely ‘regional’, isolated accounts.

Thus, the vision that emerged was global in scope, and this is absolutely fascinating, even though it was rooted in particular experiences. It allows us, for instance, to speak about how the fabric of global economic-institutional-political-legal space is, from the perspective of geopolitical swale, curved and tweaked by imperial powers that can shape the normative core of international law. In other words, this fabric may not only look different, but also be and feel different when observed and lived from within different vantage points. Again: I know this might sound heretical to international lawyers who recoil from any suggestion of relativism. But this isn’t relativism. It’s a form of scepticism that pushes back against the false necessity of believing that the dominant understanding of international law is like Newtonian time: absolute and flowing uniformly, whether here or at the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy.

PL: Immodestly perhaps, I found the workshop fascinating. Many people shared similar reactions—hopefully they weren’t just being nice!—and so one takeaway is that there’s something there. That might not sound like much, but it was rewarding that the questions posed by the SWAIL call for papers resonated in the different papers, presentations, and spontaneous conversations. People didn’t agree on everything—thankfully!—but one overarching conclusion was this sense that Easterners lacked a voice or place in mainstream and critical debates in international law. It’s something I have long felt oddly unaddressed in our field, and it was certainly interesting to see how many people from the region have struggled to define their relationship to Europe, the West, the socialist period, debates over the colonial origins of international law, historical trajectories of doctrine in the region, etc.

Another recurrent theme was the shadow of Russia and how people from smaller and weaker states in the region should think about international law in addressing the ongoing war. There’s a historical dimension to this, but also a more forward-looking element that forces us to consider international law’s promise and limitations from the perspective of liminal actors in the global order, which means taking seriously the context that underlies, for instance, Ukraine’s legal and policy choices.

Lastly, there seems to be a recognition that mainstream approaches in Eastern European universities, heavily focused on doctrine and apolitical in nature—understandable as that may be historically, tied partly to resisting communist domination—are inadequate to the task of international law’s challenges in today’s world and, consequently, that scholars from the region might be missing what’s unique about our situation. In that sense, SWAIL is heavily self-reflexive and self-critical, aiming to bring interdisciplinary ‘ways of seeing the world’ to bear on Eastern Europeans themselves.

So, all in all, while there was some disagreement about, for instance, how relevant Russia should be for SWAIL as a possible movement, approach, or whatever else we might call it, I was mainly surprised by how the common themes resonated and how people of different political and methodological persuasions bonded at the workshop.

Now that the Vienna workshop has taken place, how would you define SWAIL: is it a method, a grouping sharing a commonality of concerns and particular sensibilities?

MW: What we’ve been saying so far suggests that what lies at the heart of SWAIL is existential and epistemic self-reflection. That’s why I’ve never thought of it as a kind of local version of the New Haven School: policy-oriented, technocratic theoretical engine providing legal practitioners a practical method for making and justifying decisions… But, perhaps, it’s worth pausing to return to the workshop in Vienna. There were people with different educational, cultural, and social backgrounds. Yet we had all gathered around a shared sense of personal and epistemic struggle: how to situate ourselves in the academic world while navigating dilemmas that cut across disciplinary, political, and emotional boundaries. I hope I’m not projecting too much of my own experience onto the other SWAILERs… But what I sensed was a common difficulty in making academic choices. Choosing a research topic. Selecting a method. Negotiating writing. Confronting one’s ideas with dominant frameworks of intelligibility. Well, obviously, normal academic stuff, still, what matters here is that all these struggles ultimately lead back to a question posed in the workshop’s concept note: where is Eastern and Central Europe located on the mental maps of international lawyers? A region semiperipheral, liminal, and hard to pin down.

To me, this is what SWAIL signifies. It is an intellectual meeting point for people who share not only epistemic concerns but also existential experiences. This is the kind of environment where, I hope, no one is baffled by one of my favourite piercing lines in international legal scholarship. I mean the one from Andrew Lang and Susan Marks, who wrote: ‘We are all always, in some sense, writing about ourselves, and it may well be that we are most eloquent on the subject insofar as we keep silent about it.’

PL: For now, I would say SWAIL is an invitation to think together about some issues that have been under-theorized, oversimplified, or reduced to the margins of international law. In my current writing, I label SWAIL ‘a state of mind’, drawing on Jakub Mikanowski, which I suggest reflects the peculiar psychosocial condition of many Eastern Europeans who struggle with their own liminal positionalities, and a sense of (non-)belonging and (self-)marginalization. Drawing on the region’s ambiguous position within the global order and an ethics of ‘passionate humility’, echoing Xymena Kurowska (my colleague at CEU) on Ukraine-related knowledge production, I hope SWAIL will help international law stakeholders grapple with what Manuela Boatcǎ, building on Dipesh Chakrabarty, labels asymmetric ignorance, or ‘a structurally unequal distribution of attention, which favours well-known works at the expense of the neglected works and their contexts of origin’ [note: the original focus on ‘literary works’ refers here to experiences/ scholarship/epistemologies more broadly].

I can only speak for myself, but it’s been rewarding to broaden the conversation and learn from the communities of Eastern European and central Asian scholars who write on the inequities of scholarly analysis in relation to Russia, critique uneven global responses to the 2022 invasion, and promote (self-)critique at universities in the former Second World. My sense is that much more introspection about analogous issues has been done in neighbouring fields, for instance in IR, where a tradition of thinking about Eastern Europe through a critical lens is more developed. In international law, Eastern and East-Central Europe as concepts are less prominent—one of our research assistants at CEU actually conducted an empirical review of what international law textbooks and journals had to say about the region; the results, which we’ll publish at some point, are revealing.

More generally, I would add that we increasingly have productive interactions with other regions, methods, and walks of life, which move our conversations beyond the 2022 invasion or the legacies of Russian imperialism, which in turn speaks to the open-endedness of SWAIL as an approach. Some of the more surprising emails I’ve received have come from China, Singapore, and India, where scholars see potential in moving beyond mainstream and staid critical approaches that oversimplify historical patterns in international law and misdiagnose or miss huge shifts in the world that do not map onto Global South/North or West versus Rest binaries. All in all, there seems to be an appetite for thinking beyond such simplifications, discovering neglected liminality, and engaging the obfuscated ‘Easts’ in international law on their own terms.

What constitutes the ‘Second World’ has historically been under-theorized in international law? How would you describe the intellectual, political, and institutional stakes of recognizing it as a distinct epistemic space?

PL: We’re figuring this out as we go, so my answer is necessarily tentative. I don’t have grand plans for SWAIL (or whatever term replaces it), but you are probably right that a SWAIL-like idea has certain stakes, carrying with it both opportunities and risks. I didn’t fully appreciate that dimension, but we are intervening in a crowded attention economy, where (too) much is published and people are overstretched. For now, let me bracket the political and institutional dimension of your question (though it matters), and focus on the intellectual stakes and motivations for this project.

One thing I would note at the outset is that ‘Second World’ in SWAIL is meant metaphorically. I never intended it to refer to just a narrow geographic space like Eastern Europe—an ambiguous term that is itself heavily loaded and usually resented by local populations—or to the legacies of the Cold War as a temporal frame. The more I thought about it, the appeal of ‘Second Worldness’ resided in its intrinsically ‘in-between’ and ‘liminal’ connotations, which seem to characterize a lot of the brainstorming we’ve done in the past two years. As I noted before, a recurrent theme in Vienna was the fact that attendees didn’t feel they fit into the boxes that the discipline had created for them. Are Eastern Europeans really part of the West? How do we think about our own struggles for self-determination compared to other places? What role did imperialism play in shaping international law in this part of the world?

At the risk of stating the obvious, the answers to these questions are complex. Notwithstanding indictments of ‘Eurocentrism’, widespread in our discipline, Eastern Europeans occupy something of a liminal and semi-peripheral space within global civilizational hierarchies that is often missed due to how longer-term processes of imperial and colonial domination within the region have been airbrushed out of the international law canon. To be clear, some of this is well known and theorized in neighbouring disciplines like history, IR, and sociology, but my point is that these insights seem to have barely registered in international law debates.

Building on that, my sense is also that other scholars might need to grapple with some version of our questions about liminal experiences within global hierarchies in an increasingly interconnected world. To take one example, some of our work will raise questions about how to think of actors and places like Turkey or ‘Latin American’ international law, which are often amalgamated with the ‘Global South’, obscuring important dissimilarities with, say, Africa, and – conversely – revealing striking similarities with Eastern Europe. Aside from its historical dimension, my hope is also that a liminal frame may help us think more proactively and constructively about how weaker and smaller actors in the global order navigate inter-imperial rivalry and great power competition in a time of resurgent empires and territorial conquest.

MW: I think Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics offers a helpful framework for teasing out what’s at stake—intellectually, politically, and institutionally—when we begin to recognize SWAIL as a distinct epistemic account. At the heart of Gadamer’s thinking is the idea of understanding, which, in simple terms, reflects our human drive to make sense of the world. It’s a drive that stems from curiosity and, I must say, genuine curiosity feels like a vulnerable species, especially in the humanities. Academics in the humanities seem to be affected by the same problem as professional poets. It’s hard to be a poet who came so much for beauty, when you’re expected to produce poetry simply because it’s what is demanded by those who pay the bills for your retreat from life. And, too often, academics resemble figure skaters in the short program: technical, polished, and rewarded for form rather than substance. Coming for beauty and coming for more understanding can be demanding and painful in a strikingly similar way.

Back to the point: Gadamer distinguishes three dimensions of understanding. The first is cognitive: the act of grasping meaning or how something works. The second is practical: the skills and know-how required to do something, whether that’s practicing law, making artwork, or playing rugby. And the third is dialogical: the transformative process of engaging with another perspective to reach a shared, more complex comprehension in what he called a ‘fusion of horizons’.

I think SWAIL has the potential to enrich international legal scholarship across all three of these dimensions. Let me illustrate with three brief examples. First, at the cognitive level: if we stop treating international law as a self-evident normative system and instead as a structure shaped by dominant discourses, then we must ask whether there’s room to enrich the existing anticolonial meta-narrative, which has largely centered on Third World contestations of Western legal orders. Can that narrative be extended or complicated by engaging with experiences from Central and Eastern Europe? This is the kind of task that Raluca Grosescu, Ned Richardson-Little, and their collaborators have begun to take on.

Second, in terms of the practical dimension: why are scholars from Central and Eastern Europe underrepresented in international law publishing? Is it, as Tamás Hoffmann once put it so sharply, because ‘our articles are sometimes laconic but never Lacanian’? What are the institutional and linguistic forces at work here? And what are the consequences of this structural silence?

Third, the dialogical aspect. Today, we are witnessing the reassertion of imperial ideologies, the weakening of multilateralism, and a deepening estrangement between the Global South and Central and Eastern Europe. These regions often operate in distant cognitive bubbles, separated by either mutual disinterest or accusations of double standards. Could SWAIL serve as a bridge? Could it help generate a genuine fusion of horizons, as we begin from non-imperial positions and work toward reimagining a more just and stable international legal order?

So yes, the stakes vary, but across all dimensions, they are potentially deeply consequential.

Milan Kundera once described Central Europe as ‘on the eastern border of the West’, mapping a cultural geography of marginality. In the workshop announcement, you write that Eastern Europe is subject to a ‘dual exclusion’ from both mainstream Western and non-Western approaches to international law. Could SWAIL be read as a response to this enduring condition—an effort to trace legally what Kundera once mapped culturally? What are the risks and possibilities of anchoring a legal approach in such positioning?

MW: Postcolonial studies in literature, history, and politics have already initiated serious discussions about the consequences of imperial subjugation in Central European states. It’s quite telling then, that this fundamental—almost therapeutical—exercise in dissecting identity formation has been largely avoided by international lawyers from the region. Perhaps this is because, within the prevailing scholarly mindset, international law has been treated as a sacrosanct language—a kind of shibboleth, mastery of which signified belonging to the Western tradition, and promised liberation from the shadow of the Eastern Empire. But if admission requires a shibboleth, then you are never really seen as ‘in’—only as someone trying to get ‘in’.

I can imagine that a wider audience might still find the notion of ‘dual exclusion’ difficult to accept, or even distasteful, especially in light of the political and economic transformations in Central Europe after 1989. It might appear as a kind of dreadful parochialism, considering that international lawyers from the region used to perceive themselves as a part of ‘the West’. Or, even worse, as a cynical act of intellectual posturing aimed at satisfying the academic market’s neurotic appetite for ‘fresh brains’. But the drive behind SWAIL lies elsewhere: we were cautioned early on by TWAIL not to believe too readily that we are all equally clever, classless, and free.

The idea of ‘dual exclusion’ invites reflection on how international law, as a system of not only norms, but thought and practice as well, shapes how we understand the world and our place in it. I hope that SWAIL draws attention to the ways language and institutional practices of international law mediate our perception of reality. This becomes particularly salient when we recall that dominant discourses in international law have long been structured around a clash between imperial and anti-imperial projects. The civilizing mission of the West was condemned as paternalistic and exploitative. The development agenda has been cast simultaneously as emancipatory and as a neo-imperial imposition of a singular vision of modernity that colonizes not land, but minds. Even values such as democracy and human rights are not immune to being reframed as both: civilizing and hegemonic tools. I want to stress that these discourses tend to operate mostly through a binary between former colonial powers and their non-European former colonies. This leaves little room for those whose historical experience doesn’t fit neatly into either camp. And here we have one layer of the dual exclusion. But there is also another one. International legal scholarship carries cultural barriers of its own: fashionable themes, rhetorical styles, argumentative conventions, and implicit intellectual reference points. These often render contributions from outside the dominant academic cores less visible, less legible, or entirely absent. As a result, these cores tend to amplify voices that reinforce the dominant discourses mentioned above, validating one another while further marginalizing alternative perspectives.

So yes—SWAIL aims to respond to these two forms of dual exclusion, sustained by both westsplaining and southsplaining. Patryk has already outlined the legal and political stakes of the former. I would add, in more general terms and following Philip Allott, that international law exists nowhere else but in the minds of those who think and speak about it. And it is only there that it can be transformed: through scholarship, education, and the dissemination of knowledge.

SWAIL, then, is meant to encourage scholars, also from Central and Eastern Europe, to consider how their ‘otherness’ might be a resource. Not a deficiency, but a dialogical standpoint from which one can rethink the assumptions embedded in dominant discourses. This isn’t about clinging to victimhood or cultivating a sense of exoticism. It’s about enriching international law with more grounded, locally resonant perspectives that capture how law is lived, interpreted, and contested in spaces that are neither l’Europe européenne nor the Global South.

PL: Kundera’s essay got at something important in his time, meaning a particular moment in the 1980s. While SWAIL echoes some of its themes, including on issues of liminality and marginalization, Kundera has a tendency to wall some of the region’s constituencies off from the others. Notwithstanding its relevance then, I can’t say I subscribe to the vocabulary of Central Europe that shapes today’s debates in our region in a subtly exclusionary way by positing artificial boundaries of where a more ‘advanced’ centre begins and a more ‘backward’ east begins. In that sense, Martin Müller’s ‘Global East(s)’ framework offers a more direct inspiration for SWAIL, acknowledging how the East(s) fall between the cracks of dominant epistemological categories, residing in something of an intellectual ‘no man’s land’, yet avoiding some of ‘Central Europe’’s essentializing pitfalls and encouraging multidirectional thinking that eschews binary perpetrator and victimhood categories.

To be clear, Eastern Europe’s ‘dual exclusion’ should not be misinterpreted as a form of ‘victimhood competition’—on the contrary, SWAIL demands that we reckon with the region’s dark sides, whether it be Poland’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq or Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust (I obviously feel more comfortable citing Polish examples, but regional cases can be multiplied). At the same time, outsiders who don’t study Eastern Europe should not blithely assume West-centric categories and interpretive schemes developed for other contexts can be mechanistically transferred here… because ‘Europe is Europe’. Setting aside a long but still undertheorized history of differentiation between the continent’s parts, our invocation of ‘dual exclusion’—drawing on Müller, Tlostanova and others—gets at how surprisingly easy it is to speak about or on Eastern Europe’s behalf without knowing the region or seeking any input from local stakeholders, often reproducing one-dimensional essentialist stereotypes of regional inferiority and backwardness in ways that would be unacceptable for semi-peripheral or post-colonial spaces like the Middle East or Latin America. Broadening the conversation through SWAIL is supposed to guard against that by decolonizing ‘knowledge’ – both West- and Russo-centric – of the region, while encouraging Eastern Europeans to engage with contextual, historical, comparative, and critical approaches to international law. The hope is that treating Eastern Europe as an autonomous and complex site of ideational divergence—as our work aims to demonstrate—may allow us to reassess ideas and doctrines in international law, whether it be on sovereignty, great power intervention, human rights, or the global economy. So, while SWAIL grapples with many concerns that nourished Kundera’s thinking, it takes Eastern Europeans’ complex interactions with international law as a point of departure for something that extends beyond this region and might help people elsewhere think through their own often liminal relationship to the discipline’s inclusions and exclusions.