David Roth-Isigkeit is a Research Fellow at Normative Orders, Cluster of Excellence at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and the author of The Plurality Trilemma . Read the Introduction free until March 23.

Writing an Introduction sounds like a more basic academic exercise. So when I decided to write The Plurality Trilemma: A Geometry of Global Legal Thought—with an aim to provide a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field of global legal thought—I believed I would simply copy an image of the scientific discourse I have in my mind and put it in written form. Soon I realized that it would be much more complex than that. If you denote something as an introduction, you convey that you can deliver a view that is not merely yours but rather a more objective one that students and practitioners alike can use to get a first grasp of an academic field. In other words, you are providing the map that other people are looking for in order to understand a discourse and, ultimately, the social world.  

While at first it seems that with writing an introduction you are somehow distant from the actual argument of the discourse, where academics argue about the details, the truth is that you are more in the center of it. Introductions, as everyone knows from their academic practice, contribute to the formation of our beliefs on the actual composition of the academic field. When you make a discourse more accessible, it is up to you to decide how and to what information you provide access.

In the process of writing, I have been constantly thinking about this bias. I have tried to clarify for myself that without these simplifications and clarifications from my personal perspective, the introduction would be of little use. Thinking about this, I stumbled upon a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called “On Exactitude in Science.” Borges describes in a few lines a fictional country in which the art of map-making reached such perfection that the size of the maps that were produced equaled the size of the territory they were supposed to describe.

Of course, the cartographers recognize that such map becomes useless. To transfer this example to my academic field of global law, someone trying to grasp the complexity of legal practice by looking directly at cases and institutions might miss the wood for the trees. The task of an introduction is to guide the view towards patterns and regularities and, in this way, facilitate access and understanding. I realized that this reduction in complexity necessarily comes with a certain bias – what makes the difference between a good and a bad introduction is how you deal with it.

Commenting on Borges’ short story, Umberto Eco highlights an ironic twist. In the case of the map covering the territory of the country where cartography reached perfection, Eco adds the story that it altered the ecological equilibrium of the territory because it prevented the sun and the rain from reaching ground. Eco means to say here that maps might change the environment they are supposed to cover.

Naturally, we should not understand this literally. Yet, as far as maps of social phenomena are concerned, they might indeed shape the view of their object. In this special case, mapping the social world is a particularly delicate exercise since it cannot rely on a physical territory. Customary international law, for example, requires the shared belief that a certain course of conduct is legally required. Whether or not this belief is taken does not depend on criteria of pedigree but simply on a mapping of the social world.

In my book, I try to reflect on some of the general complexities that are involved in these mapping exercises. Most importantly, what I believe to be central about writing an introduction as an author is to deal with this responsibility in a conscious way.