The Concept of Motion in International Law

This book provides the inaugural jurisprudential account of the concept of “motion” in international law. The unprecedented shifts characterizing our times, propelled by rapid technological advancements, environmental transformations, and increasing mobility of humans and non-human beings across the planet, have led to a conceptualization of the present period as the Kinocene, the Era of Motion. In a transforming world, understanding how international law handles motion becomes critical. Using the theory of kinopolitics as an analytical lens, the study reveals how legal modernity ontologically reduces complex manifestations of motion to simple locomotion in order to discipline them within rigid geographies. Subsequently, it illuminates how sovereign power persistently others, controls, or instrumentalizes locomotion within the Arctic Ocean space, the epicentre of the Kinocene, while showcasing how non-conforming motions operate as a force of material and political resistance that exposes the inherent limits of international law in our epoch. This book is primarily intended for scholars, researchers, and advanced students of international law, critical legal theory, legal philosophy, as well as the law of the sea, polar law, and Indigenous studies. The book will also appeal to researchers in mobility studies and the wider social sciences interested in the implications of the “mobility turn” for law.