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