Imagine you are in New York, taking a stroll down 46 th Street and suddenly there you see it: the UN Headquarters. It is a building, an icon, the materialization of the organization which name and logo you use repeatedly throughout teaching and research. Here it stands in concrete form: you can touch it, visit it, take a selfie. The UN explicitly facilitates such sightseeing practices on its premises. International law geeks and unsuspecting tourists alike queue up to enter the Visitor Centre, buy a ticket, join a tour, visit the General Assembly hall, and seek out a blue helmet in the gift shop (Figure 1). Children can join the special 'UN Kids Corridor' tour with interactive games, quizzes, and role-playing that 'help young visitors understand the work of the UN and how it relates to their daily lives'. 1 Visitors get acquainted with a carefully crafted narrative about the work of the UN. They can absorb the story, but also ignore it, misunderstand it, criticize it, or be distracted by the surroundings. This spectacular yet trivial manifestation of international law and its partly anticipated, partly unpredictable encounter with a plurality of audiences exemplifies what we call 'international legal sightseeing'. 2 We find these encounters at sites that are particularly designed to gaze at international law, for example, the UN Visitor Centre, or a human rights film festival but also at unexpected places such as a market stall selling Peace Palace cookie jars, or an advert for an international peace movie contest on the window of a bakery. If one takes an approach of wonder and curiosity, 3 encounters with international law can be found in unusual places, sometimes accidental or with unintended effects. 4 Through such occurrences, we have become interested in how international law is presented to 'the public', and in turn in what that public shows up for, and how art often is a mediator in that encounter. The question that drives our engagement with these sites and practices of legal sightseeing is: what is international law doing here? There are at least two ways of understanding this question. On the one hand, it opens-up from our amazement at the manifestation of and encounter with international law at a particular

One of the most iconic and concrete encounters one can have with international law is to visit its institutional buildings. This article aims to shed light on the ambivalent aspirations reflected by the architectural design of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the European Union buildings in Brussels. It provides a sightseeing tour through the architectural landscape of these two 'legal capitals' and explores the architectural embodiment of international law's imaginaries through discussing three main issues: (1) the representation of values and needs; (2) embeddedness within the city; (3) audience expectations. It argues that the physical sites of institutional buildings and the public events that take place at these sites are not trivial to the practice of international law. These sites and the activities and interactions on their grounds (re)produce stories that affect our understanding of what international institutions are and what they mean to us. In particular in the international setting, where institutional legitimacy is not a given, the building's architecture is an important means of communication. This article explores how the architectural design invites or discourages engagement and how it facilitates an encounter between the institutions and their multiple audiences.

In April 2019, an unusual group of artists and international legal academics gathered on an elegant square in The Hague to visit the former American Embassy. This brutalist icon, designed in the 1950s by Marcel Breuer, was recently abandoned by its original inhabitants. The ongoing transition of the building from highly secured embassy to public cultural centre makes for a moment to reflect on the meanings this space inspires. In this special section, we posit the building as a prism through which we probe the connections between art, architecture and international law. In line with the tradition of (re)invention embodied by Breuer’s design, the section breathes experimentation. The contributions are eclectic, unconventional and rough round the edges. The section is structured as a route through the building with no particular order or hierarchy. The ‘façade’ functions as a somewhat natural starting point, thereafter, the reader is invited to choose her own route. All spaces that can be visited are actual spaces in the building and echo the source of inspiration of the contributor. We invite you to join us on our journey and to explore the special issue as you would explore and make sense of an abandoned building where traces of international law abound.

Very shortly after the Russian military invasion of Ukraine on the 24 th of February this year, students and academic staff set out to organise a get-together to reflect on the awful outbreak of the war. The resulting symposium entitled War in Ukraine: Politics, Law & Identity -organised by the department of Transnational Legal Studies and the VU Interdisciplinary Centre of European Studies -took place on 8 March in an overcrowded room at the Vrije Universiteit and more than 60 virtual attendees. In the title, 'war' was meant to avoid the euphemisms that were still in fashion at that time.The words 'politics' and 'law' were intended to acknowledge the fundamental way in which those social domains are mutually constitutive. The word 'identity' to stimulate thinking about the ways in which the war fosters and mobilises old and new identities. International and EU law in (post-)conflict states: any lessons for Ukraine?Davor Petrić 4

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