Westphalia and the many lives of states in Asia

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>PRABHAKAR SINGH&nbsp;</strong> Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School on <strong>Westphalia and the many lives of states in Asia</strong> In the Temple of Preah Vihear case, the ICJ ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia. The Court's ruling was based on roughly four issues: a map cartographed by the French, by reading Thailand's silence as consent, the non-correspondence of map line with the true watershed line as the acceptance of the risk of errors and the subsequent Franco-Siamese conduct confirming original acceptance that precluded subsequent denial by Thailand. When read along with the three dissenting opinions by judges Koo, Quintana, and Spender, in 1962, the ICJ appears to have fretted the opportunity to revisit Asian conceptions of space, boundaries and shared sovereignty. Doctrinally speaking, the ICJ ruling pits France and not Cambodia, an ex-colony of France, against Thailand, a nation never formally colonized. The ICJ ruling confirmed the continuing hegemony of modern geography and cartography over indigenous knowledge and practices in postcolonial times. More recently, Cançado Trindade has opined that the law of territory cannot make abstractions of populations, as population is the most precious component of statehood. As a way forward, the paper argues for a conceptual distinction to be made between space and state in international law. Arguably, this can be achieved by abdicating the totalizing monopoly of territory in defining a state in favour of a construction of state by the periphery and people. <strong>21 October, 2016</strong> <strong>ABOUT THE SPEAKER:</strong>&nbsp;Dr. Prabhakar Singh is Associate Professor and Assistant Dean (Research and Publications) and Executive Director, Centre for International Legal Studies, Jindal Global Law School. He holds PhD from the National University of Singapore, LLM from the University of Barcelona and BALLB from NLIU, Bhopal. He is assistant editor of the Indian Journal of International Law. International Law and international economic law are his primary area of research and writing. He is co-editor of Critical International Law: Postrealism, (New Delhi: OUP, 2014).