ABSTRACT
The Peace Palace is a top tourist attraction in The Hague. Even so, few visitors know it is the seat of the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and even fewer visitors know what these institutions do. In this chapter, we zoom in on the everyday or even trivial yet spectacular encounter between the Peace Palace and the general public, or to put it differently, the normalisation of the eventisation of international law at this iconic site. Our interest is with the multi-layered-ness of these premises. More precisely, with the mix between law, history, and (popular) culture that becomes tangible and material here and that is not easily disentangled. Nor are public responses to this potpourri of historical and cultural layers uniform. To study legal sightseeing here is thus to analyse a material interface between law and culture on which a hotchpotch of legal and non-legal actors engage and where the boundary between law and non-law fades. On a methodological level, we argue that a legal sightseeing lens provides us with a better understanding of international law as a sensory experience. As part of this argument, we push the methodological strategy from textual to material too. Our study of the Peace Palace grounds therefore combines more traditional empirical components of interviews, (onsite and online) observations, and visual analysis with artistic research methods of collage and frottage.
