Dr. Nikolas M. Rajkovic, Lecturer in International Law, Kent Law School, will give guest lectures in South Korea 27 October to 1 November on Cartographic Disobedience: Geography, Surveillance and International Legal Blindness as follows:
Guest Lecture by Dr. Nikolas M. Rajkovic
October 27 at 10:30: Kyung Hee University Law School (Seoul)
October 28 at 10:30: College of International Studies Kyung Hee University (Yongin-si)
October 29 at 10:00: Korea University Law School (Seoul)
This lecture looks at the significance cartography and maps as the basis for knowledge, distortion and resistance about the state of the world, and we will do so within a current context where international order is said to have become “topsy-turvy”. We explore the interplay between cartography, geography and surveillance to underline how even scientific maps are social and historical constructions which par excellence visually distort global realities. In this vein, we probe whether International Law has become blinded by the “territorial trap” of physical geography, and specifically the planimetric map of the globe. A series of cartograms are discussed which pressure the naturalness of this iconic world map, and bring us to confront profound transnational consequences that ordinarily are obscured by conventional political and legal geography. This peril of forgetting the distortive qualities of geographic mapping is then extended into the rapid growth of drone surveillance and Giga-pixel mapping technology.