During the next meeting of the Maastricht Foundations of Law Colloquia, Zülâl Muslu from Tilburg University will talk about his paper. The paper explores what might be called an epistemology of encounter, that is, a mode of knowing that arises from contact across unequal worlds, attentive to translation, tension, and creative transformation. Focusing on late Ottoman engagements with Hugo Grotius, it examines how Etienne Carathéodory, Ali Şahbaz Efendi, and Ibrahim Hakki Pasha read and reworked De Jure Belli ac Pacis and Mare Liberum amid imperial reform and Western pressure.

By tracing these Ottoman echoes of Grotius, the paper challenges teleological understandings of international law’s development. It argues that such encounters show how thinkers in the Global South have long engaged and re-situated Western legal theories within their own conceptual and political horizons, generating plural and context-bound lessons rather than a continuous and single historical trajectory.