This book is an invitation to pause and wonder at the spectacular yet mundane practice that we have come to call legal sightseeing.
Increasingly, international courthouses are becoming top tourist destinations that host public events, exhibitions, and tours. But international law also pops up in more everyday spaces: as the theme for an organised city run or as a symbol printed on a T-shirt or an image on a cookie jar. Legal sightseeing stands for this broad category of encounters between ‘international law’ and ‘the public’ that encompasses many different activities, sites, artefacts, and participants. The book presents a rich collection of images and research that introduces legal sightseeing as both the phenomenon under study and an experimental research methodology. Structured as a catalogue, the book covers a wide range of iconic and surprising instances of legal sightseeing, located, for example, at the former American Embassy in the Netherlands, the Museum of White Terror in Taipei, in Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, and at more traditional sites such as the Peace Palace in The Hague and Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg. Moreover, every chapter advances a particular aspect of legal sightseeing as an innovative, visually oriented, and collaborative method of research. By revisiting a selection of projects curated under the legal sightseeing umbrella, the book contributes to academic discussions on international law’s visual turn, its spaces and materiality, and the plurality of international law’s audiences. Concretely, it offers readers hands-on examples of how to integrate art-based methods such as collaging, drawing, and photography into legal research and teaching practices.
Legal Sightseeing and International Law is an interdisciplinary catalogue that will be a timely resource to students of public international law, politics, and art. The book will also engage readers interested in the intersections of socio-legal studies, critical legal studies, legal anthropology, and international relations. Moreover, it will appeal to legal professionals, artists, and members of the general public.
Reviews of Legal Sightseeing:
“This is a book that makes you see and experience international law anew. Legal Sightseeing and International Law explores what happens when people encounter international law in odd places such as runs, coffee mugs or exhibitions rooms. Original and thought-provoking.”
Professor Wouter Werner, VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
“‘Get on the train, baby!’ Legal Sightseeing and International Law is a magical conducted tour of the worlds of international law, near and far, intimate and expansive, quotidian and spectacular. You will be dazzled, refreshed, and left thinking; and will ever after experience your surroundings differently.”
Professor Surabhi Ranganathan, University of Cambridge, UK.
“Legal Sightseeing and International Law shows that research need not remain stationary; it can also be kinaesthetic, somatic and visual. A breath of fresh air for thinking about, learning, teaching and researching international law, Stolk and Vos’s book offers not only a catalogue of legal sights but also a disposition toward international law that is curious, collaborative and attentive to the spectacular and the mundane alike.”
Tianai Song, Independent Researcher, New York City, USA.
