Where is the SWAIL II conference being held?

The SWAIL II conference is being held in the city of Singapore (SGP), specifically at SMU's Yong Pung How School of Law.

When does the SWAIL II conference take place?

The conference is scheduled to run for two days in November.

SWAIL II – Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds

Name: SWAIL II – Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds
Start: 2026-11-16T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-11-17T00:00:00Z
Location: Singapore

Nov 16–17, 2026Singapore, SingaporeIn-person

Registration open

The SWAIL II conference, held in Singapore, focuses on mapping the 'second worlds' of international law. This event, hosted at SMU's Yong Pung How School of Law, aims to explore the diverse and often overlooked interpretations and applications of international legal frameworks. It seeks to move beyond traditional, Western-centric understandings to uncover alternative perspectives and practices that shape global governance.

Committees & topics

Topics
International Law and the Second World · Global Governance and Its Contested Architectures · Middle Powers in a Multipolar Order · Semi-Peripheries in the World System · Epistemic Marginalization in International Law · The Politics of Knowledge Production · Conditional Sovereignty in Contemporary Practice · Liminal Recognition and Contested Statehood

Why it matters

Understanding the 'second worlds' of international law is crucial for a comprehensive grasp of global legal dynamics. Traditional international law often reflects a limited set of perspectives, potentially marginalizing the experiences and contributions of many states and regions. By examining these alternative interpretations, the conference contributes to a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of how international law operates in practice.

This exploration is vital for policymakers, legal scholars, and international relations practitioners. It highlights the need for a more adaptive and context-aware approach to international legal engagement, moving beyond a singular, dominant narrative. Recognizing these diverse legal landscapes can foster more effective multilateral cooperation and conflict resolution, as it acknowledges the varied legal rationales and cultural contexts that influence state behavior.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for this conference should focus on developing a robust understanding of diverse legal traditions and their interaction with international norms. A key aspect of preparation involves engaging with the concept of stakeholder mapping, particularly in identifying and analyzing the perspectives of hidden stakeholders in international legal discourse. This includes understanding how different cultural, historical, and political contexts shape legal interpretations.

Furthermore, participants should consider how to apply dynamic analysis to international legal frameworks, recognizing that law is not static but evolves through varied interpretations and applications. Preparing case studies or examples that illustrate alternative legal 'worlds' will be particularly valuable. Engaging with materials that challenge conventional international legal narratives will enhance contributions to the discussions.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Singapore

As the host nation, Singapore provides a strategic location for discussions on international law, particularly given its role as a global hub for trade and diplomacy, and its unique legal system blending common law traditions with local adaptations.

Role in topic

Singapore (SGP) serves as the host for this significant conference, providing a neutral and globally connected platform for discussions on the diverse interpretations of international law. Its position as a key economic and diplomatic player in Southeast Asia, with a legal system that navigates both global and regional influences, makes it an ideal setting for exploring the 'second worlds' of international law. The host institution, SMU's Yong Pung How School of Law, further underscores the academic rigor and regional relevance of the event.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

International Law and the Second World

Modern international law emerged from a European state system codified in the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and elaborated through the nineteenth-century 'standard of civilization,' which conditioned full legal personality on conformity to European norms. Decolonization after 1945 nominally universalized the system: newly independent states joined the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the law-of-the-sea and human rights regimes, and movements such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) of the 1970s sought to rewrite rules on sovereignty over resources, investment, and trade. Yet the substantive content of international law — its doctrines on intervention, investment protection, recognition, and jurisdiction — continued to reflect the priorities of states that had drafted it. Scholarship grouped under Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) has, since the late 1990s, mapped how formally neutral rules reproduce hierarchies among states. The 'second worlds' framing extends this critique beyond a binary North–South map, asking how semi-peripheral, post-socialist, and middle-power jurisdictions both contest and entrench the existing order. Contemporary flashpoints — sanctions regimes, ICC jurisdiction over non-party states, investor-state arbitration, and competing readings of self-determination from Palestine to Western Sahara to Kosovo — show that the foundational questions of who makes law, who is bound by it, and who can invoke it remain unsettled.

Key players

Global Governance and Its Contested Architectures

Global governance refers to the dense network of institutions, regimes, and informal forums — the UN system, Bretton Woods institutions, the WTO, the G7 and G20, standard-setting bodies, and treaty regimes on climate, health, and trade — that coordinate state and non-state behavior in the absence of world government. Its current shape was set largely between 1944 and 1995, from Bretton Woods through the founding of the WTO, with weighted voting at the IMF and World Bank and a permanent-five veto at the UN Security Council embedding the post-war balance of power into ostensibly multilateral institutions. The last two decades have produced sustained pressure to reform that architecture. The 2008 financial crisis elevated the G20 over the G7; the BRICS grouping launched the New Development Bank in 2014; China established the AIIB in 2016; and African, Latin American, and Asian states have repeatedly demanded redistribution of IMF quotas, expansion of the Security Council, and revision of WTO dispute settlement, whose Appellate Body has been effectively paralyzed since 2019. Climate finance disputes at successive COPs and pandemic-era debates over vaccine access and a WHO pandemic treaty have further exposed the gap between universal rhetoric and concentrated decision-making. The current question is whether reform proceeds inside existing institutions or through parallel structures that fragment governance along geopolitical lines.

Key players

Middle Powers in a Multipolar Order

The category of 'middle power' emerged in mid-twentieth-century Canadian and Australian diplomacy to describe states that, while lacking the material capabilities of great powers, exercise outsized influence through coalition-building, niche diplomacy, and institutional entrepreneurship. Classic middle-power activism produced the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines (1997), the Cairns Group on agricultural trade, and significant peacekeeping and human security agendas. In the post-Cold War unipolar moment, middle powers largely operated within the liberal order, amplifying or moderating great-power initiatives. Multipolarity and US–China competition have transformed the strategic terrain. A newer generation of middle powers — including Türkiye, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and South Africa — practices what analysts call 'multi-alignment' or 'strategic hedging,' refusing binary choices on Ukraine, technology decoupling, or sanctions enforcement. Traditional middle powers such as Canada, Australia, and the Republic of Korea, by contrast, have moved closer to the US-led security architecture through AUKUS, the Quad, and trilateral arrangements. The contemporary debate concerns whether 'middle power' remains a coherent analytic category, and whether these states function as norm entrepreneurs, swing voters, or buffers within a fragmenting order.

Key players

Semi-Peripheries in the World System

The semi-periphery is a category drawn from Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis, denoting states that occupy an intermediate structural position — neither core economies setting the terms of global capitalism nor peripheries supplying raw labor and materials. Semi-peripheral states typically combine industrial capacity, regional dominance, and partial integration into global value chains with persistent dependence on core financial and technological flows. Historical examples include late-imperial Russia, interwar Eastern Europe, and Latin American developmentalist states; contemporary candidates include Brazil, South Africa, Türkiye, Mexico, Poland, and Malaysia. The concept has acquired new salience as supply-chain reshoring, sanctions, and industrial policy redraw the map of global production. Semi-peripheries are courted by both Washington and Beijing as 'connector economies' or 'friend-shoring' partners, and they often host the assembly, refining, or rerouting activities that allow great-power economies to remain interlinked despite formal decoupling. At the same time, these states face the classic semi-peripheral dilemma: their leverage depends on remaining indispensable to core economies, yet upward mobility — the so-called middle-income trap — remains rare. Debates today concern whether industrial policy, regional integration (Mercosur, ASEAN, the AfCFTA), or BRICS+ arrangements can shift their structural position.

Key players

Epistemic Marginalization in International Law

Epistemic marginalization describes the systematic exclusion of certain knowledges, languages, and intellectual traditions from authoritative international legal and political discourse. International law's canonical texts, citation practices, and elite training pipelines — Oxford, Cambridge, Leiden, Harvard, Sciences Po, the Hague Academy — privilege European languages and doctrinal lineages. Decolonization brought new states into the system but did not redistribute interpretive authority: African, Asian, Latin American, Indigenous, and Islamic legal traditions are routinely treated as objects of study rather than sources of doctrine, even where they precede or rival the European canon. Movements including TWAIL, decolonial theory, feminist approaches to international law, and Indigenous rights scholarship have documented how this hierarchy operates through case selection in textbooks, the geography of journals and editorial boards, the cost and language of legal education, and the practice of 'expert' witness testimony. Concrete consequences include the marginalization of African Union positions on ICC complementarity, the treatment of Indigenous legal orders in resource and climate disputes, and asymmetric uptake of Latin American doctrines such as the Calvo and Drago clauses. Contemporary efforts to address epistemic marginalization range from curricular reform and open-access publishing to the rise of regional human rights jurisprudence and the citation of non-Western sources in landmark ICJ proceedings.

Key players

The Politics of Knowledge Production

Knowledge production in international affairs is concentrated in a small number of states and institutions: roughly two-thirds of the most-cited international relations and international law journals are edited in the United States and Western Europe, English dominates as the lingua franca, and global rankings privilege Anglophone universities. Research funding flows — from national science foundations, the European Research Council, and large private foundations such as Open Society, Ford, and Gates — further shape which questions are asked, which methods are legitimated, and whose voices count as expert. Think tanks, ratings agencies, and international NGOs operate within similar geographies. These structures have political consequences. The framing of issues from 'fragile states' to 'transitional justice' to 'good governance' typically originates in core institutions before being operationalized through conditional lending, peacebuilding mandates, or treaty negotiations. Responses include the growth of Global South research consortia, open-access mandates, South–South academic partnerships, and state-backed alternatives such as Chinese, Russian, and Gulf-funded universities, journals, and indices. The current debate concerns whether genuine pluralization is occurring or whether new producers are being absorbed into existing hierarchies of prestige and citation.

Key players

Conditional Sovereignty in Contemporary Practice

Sovereignty in classical international law is presumed absolute and equal, but in practice it has long been conditional. Nineteenth-century capitulations, mandates under the League of Nations, and Cold War spheres of influence all qualified the formal sovereignty of weaker states. After 1990, conditionality intensified through new doctrines and instruments: IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs, EU accession criteria, post-conflict international administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste, and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine endorsed at the 2005 World Summit, which articulated conditions under which sovereignty could be overridden to prevent atrocity crimes. The post-2011 record — NATO's Libya intervention, the contested status of Crimea, prolonged sanctions regimes against Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, FATF grey-listing, and EU rule-of-law conditionality against member states — has made conditionality a routine feature of international order rather than an exception. Yet its application is widely seen as selective: powerful states condition the sovereignty of others while resisting reciprocal scrutiny, as illustrated by responses to ICC arrest warrants and ICJ provisional measures. The contemporary question is whether conditional sovereignty can be reconciled with sovereign equality, or whether it codifies a tiered system in which some states are subjects and others objects of international governance.

Key players

Liminal Recognition and Contested Statehood

Statehood under the 1933 Montevideo Convention requires a permanent population, defined territory, government, and capacity to enter relations with other states; recognition by existing states is, in classical doctrine, declaratory rather than constitutive. In practice, recognition has become the decisive variable for entities occupying liminal positions: Taiwan, Kosovo, Palestine, Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Somaliland, and Nagorno-Karabakh (until 2023) all exercise varying degrees of effective control without unanimous international acknowledgment. Each case combines a distinct history — decolonization, secession, occupation, or post-conflict partition — with a particular geopolitical alignment. The ICJ's 2010 advisory opinion on Kosovo found that the declaration of independence did not violate international law but stopped short of resolving the recognition question; Kosovo is today recognized by roughly half of UN member states. Palestine has observer-state status at the UN and recognition by approximately three-quarters of UN members but remains outside the General Assembly's full membership. Taiwan participates in international economic and technical regimes without UN representation. These cases test the boundary between facts on the ground and legal status, and they highlight how recognition is wielded as a geopolitical instrument — extended, withheld, or rescinded — far more than as a neutral application of legal criteria.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for SWAIL II – Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Singapore November 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

SWAIL II – Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds

Nov 16–17, 2026Singapore, SingaporeIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
International Law and the Second World · Global Governance and Its Contested Architectures · Middle Powers in a Multipolar Order · Semi-Peripheries in the World System · Epistemic Marginalization in International Law · The Politics of Knowledge Production · Conditional Sovereignty in Contemporary Practice · Liminal Recognition and Contested Statehood

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Singapore

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

International Law and the Second World

Key players

Global Governance and Its Contested Architectures

Key players

Middle Powers in a Multipolar Order

Key players

Semi-Peripheries in the World System

Key players

Epistemic Marginalization in International Law

Key players

The Politics of Knowledge Production

Key players

Conditional Sovereignty in Contemporary Practice

Key players

Liminal Recognition and Contested Statehood

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for SWAIL II – Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal 2026 Election

Trump's Legal Battles Impact 2026 Elections

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Singapore November 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Regional Outlook Forum 2026 – Confronting Chaos: The Future of International Order in Southeast Asia

Raffles Policy Dialogue 2026

International Conference on Privacy and Information Security Law (ICPISL)

IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026: Managing Regional Tensions Amid Global Competition

SISMUN Conclave 2026

International Conference on Public Policy, Globalization, and Democratic Rights (ICPPGDR - 26)

Frequently asked questions