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117 AJIL Unbound 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/ajilunbo117 and id is 1 raw text is: doi:10.1017/aju.2022.74 INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON INFRASTRUCTURING INTERNATIONAL LAW Benedict Kingsbury* Infrastructures encompass dynamic networks and assemblages that enable and control flows of goods, people, and information over space. These can be physical, informational, or digital; most now are combinations of these, for example, the Internet, or Global Positioning and Navigation Systems (such as GPS and Beidou). Many other things run or depend on an infrastructure-and most infrastructures depend on or link with other infrastructures. Some infrastructures lie underneath, barely noticed for long periods until things go wrong, while others attract much public and political attention and are joyously celebrated, fiercely resisted, or resignedly accepted. Infrastructures are important, but not much systematic work has been done on the significance of their relation- ship with international (or transversal) law. Consideration of how infrastructures affect or shape international law entails consideration of how relations, processes, and imaginations of particular infrastructures interact with law, and vice versa. This symposium contributes to the investigation of how infrastructures may work as fundamental components of regulatory ordering-or may work against or orthogonal to some such ordering projects and in support of competing or resistance projects.' Even if it is not (yet) studied as a field, international infrastructure law is a large practice area and many of its components have long been prominent in specialized scholarship.2 International law-its praxis, doctrines, and structures-is routinely deployed in the enabling and controlling of certain kinds of transnational infrastructures, or the flows these infrastructures channel or block. Some notable infrastructures could barely exist or function without particular international law arrangements (specific infrastructures of this sort include the Suez Canal, the France-UK Channel Tunnel, the Schengen Information System, the World Health Organization's pandemic mon- itoring system, and the Nordstream 2 pipeline built but suspended from becoming operational following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine). International law figures in sprawling initiatives of infrastructural developmentalism such as the Belt and Road Initiative or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.3 International law enables or regulates financing and investment protection for large physical infrastructures, requirements to obtain * Vice Dean and Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law, NYU Law School, New York, United States. Benedict Kingsbury, Infrasflecfre and InfraRe: On Rousing the Inernationni 1 tnrdofIs, 8 CAMBRIDGE INT'L L.J. 171 (2019). This is the animating idea of the InfraReg research project at NYU Law School (iilj.org). This AJIL Unbound symposium is a tribute to the memory of the anthropologist Sally Engle Merry, one of the founders of the InfraReg project and an inspiration to the symposium editor and all of the contributors. We collectively thank Galit Sarfaty ofAJIL Unbound, a lawyer and anthropologist whose initiative brought this symposium into being. 2 MARIANAVALVERDE, INFRASTRUCTURE: NEW TRAJECTORIES IN LAw (2022), writing on national or transversal law rather than international law, lists a set of topics in a law of infrastructure frame that help constitute what she characterizes (using Bourdieu's terminology) as the infrastructure-enabling field. These include value-for-money assessments, audits, bonds and other financing, credit ratings, community consultations, contract terms, public-private partnerships, and sectorally specific aspects of cases such as high-speed rail and smart cities. 3 Alejandro Rodiles, In/Nstructural Developmentalism and Its Many Types of Global Law: A Comparative Look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals andi China'r Belt and Road Initiative, LONDON REV. INT'L L. (2022). © Benedict Kingsbury 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press for The American Society of International Law. This is an 1 Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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