Fairness and International Law: across Space and Time Workshop with Early-Career Scholars
If international law aims at realising fairness, it should be interpreted to accommodate the legitimate interests of individuals and communities affected by decisions taken wherever its rules are applicable (for an outline of our approach to fairness, see here). Given international law’s traditional reliance on territoriality and its presentist stance, this poses special challenges when it comes to accommodate geographically distant interests (‘fairness across space’) or interests grounded in the past, or those yet to emerge (‘fairness across time’).
The Max Planck Law Fellow Group project on Fairness and International Law led by Prof. Andreas von Arnauld at the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law (WSI), in collaboration with Prof. Anne Peters at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL), and Prof. Marie-Claire Foblets at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI Eth), wants to explore possibilities and limits to address these challenges.
For this reason, we invite interested early-career researchers (PhD students or postdocs) to take part in a workshop and explore the spatial and temporal dimensions of fairness in selected areas of international law. The three-day event will take place from 10 to 12 May 2026, in Kiel, Germany. In the months following the workshop, the participants will be invited to a series of online events where they will receive feedback from their peers as well as leading scholars of their field (including the Max Planck Law Fellow Group), giving them opportunities to further develop and refine their arguments. Initial results will be published in the working paper series of the participating institutes. The findings will also form the basis of a subsequent, in-person academic conference, tentatively taking place in the Spring of 2027.
The workshop contributions should focus on how the tools of legal interpretation could address fairness challenges across current geographical and temporal limitations in select established and emerging areas of public international law. These selected areas, along with examples of possible thinking trajectories (for illustrative purposes only) can be found below:
Established areas of international law
Environmental protection and climate change: Access, standing, regime interlinkage and interpretative issues to clarify and implement the interests of nature and people.
Protection and promotion of human rights: Evolution, interaction and complementarity between extraterritorial human rights obligations of public and private actors in the light of new treaty commitments, guiding principles and/or authoritative interpretations.
Peace, security and armed conflict: Whose security? International law’s role in protecting ‘distant innocents’ from harms arising from conflicts.
International economic law: Approaches to reconfigure economic relations (procedural
frameworks, substantive protections and unilateral steps) for sustainability and equal capability of
nations and communities.
Emerging areas of international law
Decolonisation movement and TWAIL: Redress of historic/colonial wrongs. Restoration of
cultural and heritage objects.
Critical resources and global commons: Exploitative patterns of transboundary critical resources
value chain. New approaches for just distribution.
Regulation of migration: Questions of territorial and border governance, legitimacy of state
orchestrations (e.g. pull-backs) and legal principles for a safe, orderly and regular migration regime.
Regulation of digital and new technologies: The permeability and inequality of states’ regulatory domains in the cyberspace. Just digital transition to address the growing technology divide.
Submission Guidelines
Interested early-career researchers are requested to submit an abstract of not more than 1,000 words connected to one of the abovementioned areas, using this link (requires a Google account). Submissions should clearly outline the research question, identifying in particular the challenges involving fairness across space/time in the chosen area and briefly mentioning how new legal and interpretative approach may address those. The abstract should also be accompanied by a short CV (not more than 2 pages) in the same document.
The submission deadline is 12 December 2025. Selected participants will be expected to hand in a draft paper by 26 April 2026. Accommodation expenses of all participants will be covered in accordance with the institutional policy.
Here is a direct link to the google form for abstract submission: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScl3GzE5B_8EQla8e7ttYytqEzW_1uQaREYOulzjlDSNxVZcw/viewform?usp=header
Any queries can be directed to Dr. Zaker Ahmad (zahmad@wsi.uni-kiel.de).
Website: https://www.mpil.de/en/pub/research/projects/research-groups/fairness-and-international-law.cfm