Anna Grear - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Anna Grear
This chapter offers one passing presentation of the goal that the Oñati workshop set out towards.... more This chapter offers one passing presentation of the goal that the Oñati workshop set out towards. It is an attempt to draw together threads of philosophy, doctrine, policy, praxis and activism as an uneven thread in a far wider, urgent conversation bringing human rights and the environment into a new relationship. This new relationship necessarily requires, as I argue below, a radical worldview transformation inaugurating a new 'human' subjectivity and, inseparably, a new socio-juridical imaginary reflecting a new vision of 'the world'.
Human Rights and the environment : in search of a new relationship
ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relations... more ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship’, began to trace outa new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the on-going work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE) – the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the ‘environment’. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Onati developed the on-going efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Onati Institute for the Sociology of Law – and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and representa weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Onati, Spain.
Embracing vulnerability
This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order... more This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order to explore embracing vulnerability as one way to re-imagine human rights for a more than human world.
The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', beg... more The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', began to trace out a new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the ongoing work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE)-the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the 'environment'. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Oñati developed the ongoing efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law-and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and represent a weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Oñati, Spain.
Posthuman Legalities, 2021
In 2020, a single virus changed many of the worlds in which humans live. From restrictions on imm... more In 2020, a single virus changed many of the worlds in which humans live. From restrictions on immigration, movement and gatherings, to changes to public health policy, through to economics and housing, the SARS-CoV-2 virus restructured laws and lives. It also changed our more-than-human siblings' worlds: some took the opportunity to roam into the quiet of the relatively human-free spaces produced by lockdown, some provided company to their humans working from home, and some, too, were susceptible to the virus. The dense entanglement of the material and the semiotic and of human and morethan-human worlds evident in this contemporary example has always been the actuality of the lively ecological communities that support life. And, as Indigenous, feminist and materialist scholars have argued, the 'human' always comes about through entanglement with other beings. As the Feral Atlas project puts it, '[e]veryday human life is always a multispecies effort' and '[o]ther species, as well as non-living things, make it possible to be human'. The concept of the 'human' is a far more complex, interdependent and entangled actuality than is presented/represented by the autonomous, bounded individual assumed by Western legal systems. In this sense, 'we' are what de la Cadena calls, a 'complex we': 'a shared condition from which "self" and "other" emerge relationally as intra-acted assertions of divergence', both an 'us' and a 'them ', 3 or what anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has called a 'domain of entanglement'. By far the most productive comparative partner in such relational thinking has been, and at the behest of, Indigenous, black, peasant and other communities. An example is provided by the Yolngu people in northern
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017
This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment focuses on some of the multiple c... more This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment focuses on some of the multiple crises and forms of injusticemost especially the climate crisischaracterizing the present age: The theme of crisis and response is legible in each contribution to this editionas is a concern with various sources and forms of injustice. The first contribution to this edition implicates the deeper epistemological crisis of modernity lying beneath the conceptual poverty of ecosystem approaches in environmental law and offers in response a biopolitical analysis laying this poverty bare and indicating future research directions for a critical environmental law (Vito De Lucia). The second contribution addresses the moral hazard presented by the relatively unquestioned priority given to unproven technical fixes for the climate crisisand offers a response in the form of a critique that suggests the need for a justice-sensitive reorientation of approach (Henry Shue). The third contribution implicates various interwoven crises lying at the heart of the climate crisis and exposes the Eurocentric commitments driving them. In response, new foundations for climate justice are suggested by drawing upon the Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change (Kirsten Davies et al.). The fourth contribution to this edition addresses energy governancean issue intimately linked with climate injustice and the climate crisisoffering in response a comparative analysis of human rights and sustainable development law and their potential to provide a just and future-proofed energy governance system (Vincent Bellinkx and Wouter Vandenhole). The fifth and final contribution addresses a very particular climate justice lacuna in discussions of the Paris Agreement and of climate justice and human rights generally: the failure to address the 'continual' extraction of fossil fuelsto which a response is offered in the form of three analytical concepts aiming to bring rights and justice considerations into the centre-frame of climate change discussions (Julia Dehm). Crisis, injustice and response emerge therefore, as a theme, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, yet always insistently present in the contexts (both background and foreground) of the discussions offered in this edition. In 'Beyond Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: A Biopolitical Reading of Environmental Law', De Lucia examines the binary, linear assumptions lying behind the general enthusiasm for the 'rise of ecosystem regimes' in environmental law. Such regimes are increasingly viewed as pivotal responses to the multiple crises characterizing 'the Anthropocene'. Yet while many scholars and policy makers see ecosystem regimes as suitable for addressing the shortcomings of environmental law, De Lucia sets out to problematize them. He does so by challenging both the linearity of the 'progress narrative' accompanying the development of such regimes and the underlying binary formulation of anthropocentrism v ecocentrism used to frame them. Drawing on what he calls 'an analytics of biopolitics', De Lucia argues that the familiar binary formulation is too simplistic to capture the
Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably ne... more Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably never been more urgent, but the signs are that human rights discourse and environmental discourse have, at present, an uneasy and relatively under-theorized relationship.
Law and Critique, 2020
This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an ima... more This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/s for the Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2020
Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames m... more Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames matter. They bring into view, interpret andin a significant sense materializebring into matteringa set of assumptions, interpretations and practices of circumscription that shape (and interact with), as Gitlin puts it, 'what exists, what happens and what matters'. 1 Moreover, frames matter for law. They determine the conditions under which problems are apprehended by law, and thus can influence the assertion of authority, jurisdiction and institutional responsibility over particular issues. 2 Frames are central to this issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, their significance is apparent, overtly or tacitly, in each contribution. The frames discernible in the contributions are dynamic, emergent, and contested by counter-frames. It is clear that frames can take hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions depending on their location in the emergent energies and contestations at stake in the field in which they function as shape-givers. Frames signal intensities of both focus and of action/inaction, and it seems clear that every framing inevitably involves selection, if not pre-selectionand in that, represents an exercise of power. Contestation, between frames, between the ideological commitments that can underwrite them, between communities and movements both semiotic and material, are also present in this issue. Contestation perhaps inevitably underwrites key contemporary tensions surrounding the dense entanglements between humans and non-humans and convergent and divergent forces, energies and futures in the climate-pressed posthuman ecology of the Anthropocene. In 'Contesting human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council', M Joel Voss is explicit about the centrality and power of framingand of contestationin his analysis. The context for Voss's analysis is provided by discussions concerning the relationship between human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council. Noting how hotly contested the issues are and how fraught the discussions become, Voss conducted participant observation of climate change resolutions at the Council between 2006 and 2019 in order to expose the rival framings of climate change enlivened in the discourses of state participants. Drawing on Payne's work on framing, persuasion and norm-contestation, Voss conceptualizes frames in a way that implies, to our mind, their operation as modes of organizing power: they provide, after all, 'a singular interpretation of a particular
Human Rights Quarterly, 2018
Human rights and radical social transformation: futurity, alterity, power [Review]. Human Rights ... more Human rights and radical social transformation: futurity, alterity, power [Review]. Human Rights Quarterly 40 (3) , pp.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability, 2016
Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependenc... more Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the ‘autonomous’ subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her ‘vulnerability thesis’ represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's ‘vulnerability thesis’. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman’s work, as well as those for whom Fineman’s work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019
Technifications, appropriations, and environmental risk and damage: the search for responsibility... more Technifications, appropriations, and environmental risk and damage: the search for responsibility Despite the differences between the articles published in this edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, the themes of appropriation, technical apparatuses (both material and discursive) and tensions concerning the uneven imposition of environmental damage and risk are either explicitly or implicitly present. The various articles share a sensemoreoverof how important it is to search for ways to construct responsibility for the imposition of such risk and damage. The Anthropocene climate crisis also presses unevenly into view: sometimes overtly addressed, at other times the inescapable background material situation against which all struggles for accountability and 'responsibilisation' (as Lorraine Code might put it) 1 must now take place. The articles here, taken together, raise complex and important matters. In the collisions and convergences between the authors' contributions, a whole continent of possibilities, critiques and lines of thought emerge. One identifiable narrative arc (there may be others) moves along a tangled track between the 'ecologised appropriations' of the Anthropocene (Pottage); the responsibilisation of eco-robotics (eco-robots are emergent forms, arguably, of techno-appropriation) (Donhauser); appropriative dynamics of Eurocentric legal and scientific epistemologies (Townsend); and the tensions between appropriative neoliberal economistic law and the constitutional human right to a clean and healthy environment in Kenya (Mwanza). The edition opens with Alain Pottage's thought-provoking reflection on 'Holocene jurisprudence'. Set against the geological identification of 'the Anthropocene', Pottage frames Carl Schmitt's Nomos De Erde (Nomos of the Earth) as 'the last flourish of Holocene jurisprudence'. Among the multiple themes emerging in Pottage's article are the distinctively Anthropocene entanglements between geology and the social sciences; the non-naturalistic 'general ecology' marking the Anthropocene; the equivocal place of land as the originary site of appropriative claims, and Anthropocene transmutations of appropriation as a persistent, inherently political, dynamic. Appropriation, Pottage argues, for all available jurisprudences of Anthropocene responsibility, can no longer merely be read as appropriation of land in the traditional Lockean sense, for appropriation also takes place in multiple forms of spoliation (such as the pollutant 'atmosphere-appropriations of the industrial powers'). In the Anthropocene, appropriation is now an ecologized process for which 'ecology' can no longer be just a designation placed over 'nature': the Anthropocene is marked by a 'general ecology' as the contingent effect of a diverse assemblage of 'agencies, media, discourses and temporalities'. Pottage positions Schmitt's 'geojurisprudence' as a 1. L Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005).
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019
Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this art... more Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this article offers a critical reading of legal personhood and jurisdiction as mechanisms of privilege and predation. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are, we suggest, the ultimate insider construct for the neoliberal capitalist-techno order. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of corporeal human beings on the move as the marginalized products of that same order (especially refugees and migrants) are confronted by boundaries and barriers all too material in their effect. In an age of anxiety-driven border hardening against mass human migration and of seamless, instantaneous movements of transnational capital and corporate location across jurisdictional boundaries, we examine the patterns of injustice implicated in and between these phenomena, tracing a Eurocentric logic visible in the complex continuities between coloniality, capitalism and the production of precarity in the Anthropocene.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017
The Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change responds to the profound crisis of human hiera... more The Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change responds to the profound crisis of human hierarchies now characterising the climate crisis. The Declaration, initiated prior to the 2015 COP21 meeting by scholars from the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), is one of a convergence of initiatives reflecting the need to understand human rights as intrinsically threatened by climate change. This article introduces the Declaration, the necessity for it, its philosophical and legal background and its support by contemporary cases providing evidence of the escalating legal need for such a tool. A key aim of the Declaration is to trace out a potential normative approach for establishing responsibility towards the planet and redressing unevenly distributed vulnerabilities and climate injustices while recognising that it is vital that respect for human rights should be understood as an indispensable element of any adequate approach to climate change. The Declaration strives to offer a compelling level of ethical appeal, as well as to be legally literate and philosophically rigorous. The drafting process engaged scholars and communities from across the world, prioritised indigenous involvement, and drew on indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Newer philosophical approaches such as New Materialist understandings of lively materiality also informed the drafting process. Accordingly, the language of the Declaration creates space for non-Western ways of seeing and being as well as responding to insights emerging from new scientific understandings of the world.
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2017
The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism i... more The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments.
Feminist Legal Studies, 2018
In this conversation, we set out to ponder the question of what might be next for feminist schola... more In this conversation, we set out to ponder the question of what might be next for feminist scholarship and activism in international law. We start by reflecting on our somewhat different imaginings of feminist futures, before turning to a discussion of contemporary challenges presented by the Trump Administration, set against the contexts and logics of the 'Anthroprocene' (Anna) or as a 'new normal' in the form of a 'post-crisis' era (Di). Either way, we agree that the present world is a dangerous place for all critical and analytical thinking, including feminism, and share some thoughts on how to survive as feminists working in international law and how law might/could/should respond to the life-threatening realities of the present. Anna: Di, let's start by talking about how we, as feminists working in international law, imagine the world(s) we are working to create. Di: That's a great place to start. I think that the lifeblood of all critical and progressive thinking and activism, lies in sharing, contesting and, as far as is possible, practicing our visions of a better world, especially at times, as at present, when they seem most endangered. Without imagined feminist futures it is impossible to have a sense of what needs to be done in the present and what role international and domestic laws should/could be playing. It is not always easy to keep hope alive in this discipline, despite the optimism of the references to 'international cooperation and assistance' in the UN Charter, the peaceful aspirations of public international law and the inclusive promises of human rights law. Notwithstanding many decades of feminist and postcolonial activism and critique, enriched more recently by queer perspectives, 1 there is so much cause for despair. In 2009, I described the spread of feminist ideas throughout the UN system and their institutional cooption as 'the exile of inclusion', 2 which continues to be apt. We are desperately in need of new ways of creating, framing, understanding and applying international law, which enhance rather than diminish the importance and power of local, national and transnational movements for social justice and liberatory change. The long-standing feminist goals of general disarmament, demilitarization and positive peace remain as important as ever, but are today seen by many as impossibly utopian. That the venerable Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) withdrew in 2015 from engagement with the UN Conference on Disarmament, accusing it of having 'lost perspective of the bigger picture of human suffering and global injustice', is a beacon to us all. 3 As their statement read, 'there are better ways' to pursue feminist goals than through international institutions committed to maintaining the status quo. We too need to find 'better ways' to work as feminists in the discipline of international law. My vision of a feminist future is of local and global communities built on what I have recently described as 'feminist logics of social justice and peace '. 4 This logic, as I understand it, is not static, but continually produced, contested, reconsidered and re-envisioned through 1 Dianne Otto (ed), Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2017).
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment
This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the... more This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the environment. With an Editorial Board of excellent quality, the journal has already been praised for the high quality of its contributions. Future contributors include: Laura Westra, Louis Kotze, Naomi Roht-Arriaza, David Nibert, David Kinley, Sarah Joseph, Martha Fineman, Paedar Kirby and a host of others.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2013
Human bodies in material space: lived realities, eco-crisis and the search for transformation Thi... more Human bodies in material space: lived realities, eco-crisis and the search for transformation This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment is dedicated to the greatest struggle of our erathe ongoingand increasingly urgentstruggle to confront the entrenched and growing violence (both epistemic and physical) of a global order that is rapidly entrenching both human and environmental vulnerability. 'Business as usual' is still obdurately committed to the political and juridical primacy of a fundamentally destructive capitalist ethic. What is neededurgently nowis a fundamental worldview shifta shift inaugurating transformed understandings and practices capable of unseating the dominant consumptive, pathological form of capitalism in the name of a renewing transformation of our deepest sense of who 'we' are as earthlings amongst other earthlings and earth systems. In short, a literally life and death struggle is underway in our age for the very meaning of the 'human' in a world which has been destructively subjugated by the violence of the state-market complex for too long. This struggle is characterized, in significant part, by a growing effort to give fuller ethico-juridical significance to the material situations of countless human beings, non-human animals and living eco-systems placed in unprecedented danger by the irresponsible pursuit of profit and by its associated ecological legacies. The evidence of this struggle is everywhere. It takes multiple forms: scholarly engagements with vulnerability and with the radical, ambient insecurity of contemporary existence (precarity); myriad critiques of law's exclusions; calls for animal rights; rights-for-nature arguments; anti-capitalist strategies and agendas; movements to defend indigenous cultures and life-worlds; the struggles of radical lawyers and of a wide range of activist constituencies the world over to give content, meaning and force to what we can think of as forms of eco-humane justice. The task is immense, and the field of engagement challenging. As Weston and Bollier point out in their contribution to this edition, the field is tilted firmly in favour of the commercial and statist imperatives of the global political economy. Indeed, it remains challenging to imagine any 'outside' to the hegemony of neo-liberal ecocidal discourse, governance regimes, institutional structures and regulatory mechanisms. Despite active critique on a number of fronts the values and structures of neo-liberal hegemony continue to prevail and it remains the case that our national and international legal orders are structurally committed to them and to assumptions and closures that, if their trajectory continues uninterrupted, will ultimately threaten the existence of the entire living order. This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment grapples with the important task of considering how to create space for the materialities of human embodied existencein a lively world of beings and systems, scenes and contexts, environments and ecosystemsto feature much more potently in our ethico-juridical deliberations and structures. This edition therefore grapples with the need to find a
Research Handbook on Fundamental Concepts of Environmental Law
Embodied Vulnerability and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Redirecting Human Rights, 2010
We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its rel... more We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its related themes) in the context of discussing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the emergence of the modern discourse of rights. We have also noted the sense in which the dominant conception of the rights-bearer as an autonomous and rational subject has produced forms of closure in rights discourse, paying particular attention to the way in which the central case universal rightsbearer is an abstract entity: either ‘man’ (in the French Declaration) or the ‘human being’ in the UDHR. This abstractionism, it has been suggested, plays (and continues to play) a central role in the production of the quasidisembodiment of liberal legal theory, and is a key mechanism in the production of a system of legal rights in which the corporation is arguably the perfect fit for the quintessential legal subject, radically continuous with liberal law’s analytical and ideological closures. In the light of the role of disembodiment in the construction of the human rights universal and the legal subject of human rights, it is now time to explore the role of embodied vulnerability in the UDHR paradigm, and the extent to which it can be said that embodied vulnerability undergirds a rather different theoretical reading of universal human rights discourse — one in which the corporation would appear to be disqualified as a suitable beneficiary of human rights protections.
This chapter offers one passing presentation of the goal that the Oñati workshop set out towards.... more This chapter offers one passing presentation of the goal that the Oñati workshop set out towards. It is an attempt to draw together threads of philosophy, doctrine, policy, praxis and activism as an uneven thread in a far wider, urgent conversation bringing human rights and the environment into a new relationship. This new relationship necessarily requires, as I argue below, a radical worldview transformation inaugurating a new 'human' subjectivity and, inseparably, a new socio-juridical imaginary reflecting a new vision of 'the world'.
Human Rights and the environment : in search of a new relationship
ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relations... more ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship’, began to trace outa new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the on-going work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE) – the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the ‘environment’. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Onati developed the on-going efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Onati Institute for the Sociology of Law – and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and representa weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Onati, Spain.
Embracing vulnerability
This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order... more This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order to explore embracing vulnerability as one way to re-imagine human rights for a more than human world.
The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', beg... more The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', began to trace out a new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the ongoing work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE)-the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the 'environment'. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Oñati developed the ongoing efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law-and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and represent a weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Oñati, Spain.
Posthuman Legalities, 2021
In 2020, a single virus changed many of the worlds in which humans live. From restrictions on imm... more In 2020, a single virus changed many of the worlds in which humans live. From restrictions on immigration, movement and gatherings, to changes to public health policy, through to economics and housing, the SARS-CoV-2 virus restructured laws and lives. It also changed our more-than-human siblings' worlds: some took the opportunity to roam into the quiet of the relatively human-free spaces produced by lockdown, some provided company to their humans working from home, and some, too, were susceptible to the virus. The dense entanglement of the material and the semiotic and of human and morethan-human worlds evident in this contemporary example has always been the actuality of the lively ecological communities that support life. And, as Indigenous, feminist and materialist scholars have argued, the 'human' always comes about through entanglement with other beings. As the Feral Atlas project puts it, '[e]veryday human life is always a multispecies effort' and '[o]ther species, as well as non-living things, make it possible to be human'. The concept of the 'human' is a far more complex, interdependent and entangled actuality than is presented/represented by the autonomous, bounded individual assumed by Western legal systems. In this sense, 'we' are what de la Cadena calls, a 'complex we': 'a shared condition from which "self" and "other" emerge relationally as intra-acted assertions of divergence', both an 'us' and a 'them ', 3 or what anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has called a 'domain of entanglement'. By far the most productive comparative partner in such relational thinking has been, and at the behest of, Indigenous, black, peasant and other communities. An example is provided by the Yolngu people in northern
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017
This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment focuses on some of the multiple c... more This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment focuses on some of the multiple crises and forms of injusticemost especially the climate crisischaracterizing the present age: The theme of crisis and response is legible in each contribution to this editionas is a concern with various sources and forms of injustice. The first contribution to this edition implicates the deeper epistemological crisis of modernity lying beneath the conceptual poverty of ecosystem approaches in environmental law and offers in response a biopolitical analysis laying this poverty bare and indicating future research directions for a critical environmental law (Vito De Lucia). The second contribution addresses the moral hazard presented by the relatively unquestioned priority given to unproven technical fixes for the climate crisisand offers a response in the form of a critique that suggests the need for a justice-sensitive reorientation of approach (Henry Shue). The third contribution implicates various interwoven crises lying at the heart of the climate crisis and exposes the Eurocentric commitments driving them. In response, new foundations for climate justice are suggested by drawing upon the Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change (Kirsten Davies et al.). The fourth contribution to this edition addresses energy governancean issue intimately linked with climate injustice and the climate crisisoffering in response a comparative analysis of human rights and sustainable development law and their potential to provide a just and future-proofed energy governance system (Vincent Bellinkx and Wouter Vandenhole). The fifth and final contribution addresses a very particular climate justice lacuna in discussions of the Paris Agreement and of climate justice and human rights generally: the failure to address the 'continual' extraction of fossil fuelsto which a response is offered in the form of three analytical concepts aiming to bring rights and justice considerations into the centre-frame of climate change discussions (Julia Dehm). Crisis, injustice and response emerge therefore, as a theme, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, yet always insistently present in the contexts (both background and foreground) of the discussions offered in this edition. In 'Beyond Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: A Biopolitical Reading of Environmental Law', De Lucia examines the binary, linear assumptions lying behind the general enthusiasm for the 'rise of ecosystem regimes' in environmental law. Such regimes are increasingly viewed as pivotal responses to the multiple crises characterizing 'the Anthropocene'. Yet while many scholars and policy makers see ecosystem regimes as suitable for addressing the shortcomings of environmental law, De Lucia sets out to problematize them. He does so by challenging both the linearity of the 'progress narrative' accompanying the development of such regimes and the underlying binary formulation of anthropocentrism v ecocentrism used to frame them. Drawing on what he calls 'an analytics of biopolitics', De Lucia argues that the familiar binary formulation is too simplistic to capture the
Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably ne... more Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably never been more urgent, but the signs are that human rights discourse and environmental discourse have, at present, an uneasy and relatively under-theorized relationship.
Law and Critique, 2020
This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an ima... more This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/s for the Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2020
Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames m... more Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames matter. They bring into view, interpret andin a significant sense materializebring into matteringa set of assumptions, interpretations and practices of circumscription that shape (and interact with), as Gitlin puts it, 'what exists, what happens and what matters'. 1 Moreover, frames matter for law. They determine the conditions under which problems are apprehended by law, and thus can influence the assertion of authority, jurisdiction and institutional responsibility over particular issues. 2 Frames are central to this issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, their significance is apparent, overtly or tacitly, in each contribution. The frames discernible in the contributions are dynamic, emergent, and contested by counter-frames. It is clear that frames can take hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions depending on their location in the emergent energies and contestations at stake in the field in which they function as shape-givers. Frames signal intensities of both focus and of action/inaction, and it seems clear that every framing inevitably involves selection, if not pre-selectionand in that, represents an exercise of power. Contestation, between frames, between the ideological commitments that can underwrite them, between communities and movements both semiotic and material, are also present in this issue. Contestation perhaps inevitably underwrites key contemporary tensions surrounding the dense entanglements between humans and non-humans and convergent and divergent forces, energies and futures in the climate-pressed posthuman ecology of the Anthropocene. In 'Contesting human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council', M Joel Voss is explicit about the centrality and power of framingand of contestationin his analysis. The context for Voss's analysis is provided by discussions concerning the relationship between human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council. Noting how hotly contested the issues are and how fraught the discussions become, Voss conducted participant observation of climate change resolutions at the Council between 2006 and 2019 in order to expose the rival framings of climate change enlivened in the discourses of state participants. Drawing on Payne's work on framing, persuasion and norm-contestation, Voss conceptualizes frames in a way that implies, to our mind, their operation as modes of organizing power: they provide, after all, 'a singular interpretation of a particular
Human Rights Quarterly, 2018
Human rights and radical social transformation: futurity, alterity, power [Review]. Human Rights ... more Human rights and radical social transformation: futurity, alterity, power [Review]. Human Rights Quarterly 40 (3) , pp.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability, 2016
Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependenc... more Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the ‘autonomous’ subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her ‘vulnerability thesis’ represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's ‘vulnerability thesis’. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman’s work, as well as those for whom Fineman’s work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019
Technifications, appropriations, and environmental risk and damage: the search for responsibility... more Technifications, appropriations, and environmental risk and damage: the search for responsibility Despite the differences between the articles published in this edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, the themes of appropriation, technical apparatuses (both material and discursive) and tensions concerning the uneven imposition of environmental damage and risk are either explicitly or implicitly present. The various articles share a sensemoreoverof how important it is to search for ways to construct responsibility for the imposition of such risk and damage. The Anthropocene climate crisis also presses unevenly into view: sometimes overtly addressed, at other times the inescapable background material situation against which all struggles for accountability and 'responsibilisation' (as Lorraine Code might put it) 1 must now take place. The articles here, taken together, raise complex and important matters. In the collisions and convergences between the authors' contributions, a whole continent of possibilities, critiques and lines of thought emerge. One identifiable narrative arc (there may be others) moves along a tangled track between the 'ecologised appropriations' of the Anthropocene (Pottage); the responsibilisation of eco-robotics (eco-robots are emergent forms, arguably, of techno-appropriation) (Donhauser); appropriative dynamics of Eurocentric legal and scientific epistemologies (Townsend); and the tensions between appropriative neoliberal economistic law and the constitutional human right to a clean and healthy environment in Kenya (Mwanza). The edition opens with Alain Pottage's thought-provoking reflection on 'Holocene jurisprudence'. Set against the geological identification of 'the Anthropocene', Pottage frames Carl Schmitt's Nomos De Erde (Nomos of the Earth) as 'the last flourish of Holocene jurisprudence'. Among the multiple themes emerging in Pottage's article are the distinctively Anthropocene entanglements between geology and the social sciences; the non-naturalistic 'general ecology' marking the Anthropocene; the equivocal place of land as the originary site of appropriative claims, and Anthropocene transmutations of appropriation as a persistent, inherently political, dynamic. Appropriation, Pottage argues, for all available jurisprudences of Anthropocene responsibility, can no longer merely be read as appropriation of land in the traditional Lockean sense, for appropriation also takes place in multiple forms of spoliation (such as the pollutant 'atmosphere-appropriations of the industrial powers'). In the Anthropocene, appropriation is now an ecologized process for which 'ecology' can no longer be just a designation placed over 'nature': the Anthropocene is marked by a 'general ecology' as the contingent effect of a diverse assemblage of 'agencies, media, discourses and temporalities'. Pottage positions Schmitt's 'geojurisprudence' as a 1. L Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005).
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019
Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this art... more Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this article offers a critical reading of legal personhood and jurisdiction as mechanisms of privilege and predation. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are, we suggest, the ultimate insider construct for the neoliberal capitalist-techno order. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of corporeal human beings on the move as the marginalized products of that same order (especially refugees and migrants) are confronted by boundaries and barriers all too material in their effect. In an age of anxiety-driven border hardening against mass human migration and of seamless, instantaneous movements of transnational capital and corporate location across jurisdictional boundaries, we examine the patterns of injustice implicated in and between these phenomena, tracing a Eurocentric logic visible in the complex continuities between coloniality, capitalism and the production of precarity in the Anthropocene.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017
The Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change responds to the profound crisis of human hiera... more The Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change responds to the profound crisis of human hierarchies now characterising the climate crisis. The Declaration, initiated prior to the 2015 COP21 meeting by scholars from the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), is one of a convergence of initiatives reflecting the need to understand human rights as intrinsically threatened by climate change. This article introduces the Declaration, the necessity for it, its philosophical and legal background and its support by contemporary cases providing evidence of the escalating legal need for such a tool. A key aim of the Declaration is to trace out a potential normative approach for establishing responsibility towards the planet and redressing unevenly distributed vulnerabilities and climate injustices while recognising that it is vital that respect for human rights should be understood as an indispensable element of any adequate approach to climate change. The Declaration strives to offer a compelling level of ethical appeal, as well as to be legally literate and philosophically rigorous. The drafting process engaged scholars and communities from across the world, prioritised indigenous involvement, and drew on indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Newer philosophical approaches such as New Materialist understandings of lively materiality also informed the drafting process. Accordingly, the language of the Declaration creates space for non-Western ways of seeing and being as well as responding to insights emerging from new scientific understandings of the world.
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2017
The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism i... more The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments.
Feminist Legal Studies, 2018
In this conversation, we set out to ponder the question of what might be next for feminist schola... more In this conversation, we set out to ponder the question of what might be next for feminist scholarship and activism in international law. We start by reflecting on our somewhat different imaginings of feminist futures, before turning to a discussion of contemporary challenges presented by the Trump Administration, set against the contexts and logics of the 'Anthroprocene' (Anna) or as a 'new normal' in the form of a 'post-crisis' era (Di). Either way, we agree that the present world is a dangerous place for all critical and analytical thinking, including feminism, and share some thoughts on how to survive as feminists working in international law and how law might/could/should respond to the life-threatening realities of the present. Anna: Di, let's start by talking about how we, as feminists working in international law, imagine the world(s) we are working to create. Di: That's a great place to start. I think that the lifeblood of all critical and progressive thinking and activism, lies in sharing, contesting and, as far as is possible, practicing our visions of a better world, especially at times, as at present, when they seem most endangered. Without imagined feminist futures it is impossible to have a sense of what needs to be done in the present and what role international and domestic laws should/could be playing. It is not always easy to keep hope alive in this discipline, despite the optimism of the references to 'international cooperation and assistance' in the UN Charter, the peaceful aspirations of public international law and the inclusive promises of human rights law. Notwithstanding many decades of feminist and postcolonial activism and critique, enriched more recently by queer perspectives, 1 there is so much cause for despair. In 2009, I described the spread of feminist ideas throughout the UN system and their institutional cooption as 'the exile of inclusion', 2 which continues to be apt. We are desperately in need of new ways of creating, framing, understanding and applying international law, which enhance rather than diminish the importance and power of local, national and transnational movements for social justice and liberatory change. The long-standing feminist goals of general disarmament, demilitarization and positive peace remain as important as ever, but are today seen by many as impossibly utopian. That the venerable Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) withdrew in 2015 from engagement with the UN Conference on Disarmament, accusing it of having 'lost perspective of the bigger picture of human suffering and global injustice', is a beacon to us all. 3 As their statement read, 'there are better ways' to pursue feminist goals than through international institutions committed to maintaining the status quo. We too need to find 'better ways' to work as feminists in the discipline of international law. My vision of a feminist future is of local and global communities built on what I have recently described as 'feminist logics of social justice and peace '. 4 This logic, as I understand it, is not static, but continually produced, contested, reconsidered and re-envisioned through 1 Dianne Otto (ed), Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2017).
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment
This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the... more This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the environment. With an Editorial Board of excellent quality, the journal has already been praised for the high quality of its contributions. Future contributors include: Laura Westra, Louis Kotze, Naomi Roht-Arriaza, David Nibert, David Kinley, Sarah Joseph, Martha Fineman, Paedar Kirby and a host of others.
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2013
Human bodies in material space: lived realities, eco-crisis and the search for transformation Thi... more Human bodies in material space: lived realities, eco-crisis and the search for transformation This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment is dedicated to the greatest struggle of our erathe ongoingand increasingly urgentstruggle to confront the entrenched and growing violence (both epistemic and physical) of a global order that is rapidly entrenching both human and environmental vulnerability. 'Business as usual' is still obdurately committed to the political and juridical primacy of a fundamentally destructive capitalist ethic. What is neededurgently nowis a fundamental worldview shifta shift inaugurating transformed understandings and practices capable of unseating the dominant consumptive, pathological form of capitalism in the name of a renewing transformation of our deepest sense of who 'we' are as earthlings amongst other earthlings and earth systems. In short, a literally life and death struggle is underway in our age for the very meaning of the 'human' in a world which has been destructively subjugated by the violence of the state-market complex for too long. This struggle is characterized, in significant part, by a growing effort to give fuller ethico-juridical significance to the material situations of countless human beings, non-human animals and living eco-systems placed in unprecedented danger by the irresponsible pursuit of profit and by its associated ecological legacies. The evidence of this struggle is everywhere. It takes multiple forms: scholarly engagements with vulnerability and with the radical, ambient insecurity of contemporary existence (precarity); myriad critiques of law's exclusions; calls for animal rights; rights-for-nature arguments; anti-capitalist strategies and agendas; movements to defend indigenous cultures and life-worlds; the struggles of radical lawyers and of a wide range of activist constituencies the world over to give content, meaning and force to what we can think of as forms of eco-humane justice. The task is immense, and the field of engagement challenging. As Weston and Bollier point out in their contribution to this edition, the field is tilted firmly in favour of the commercial and statist imperatives of the global political economy. Indeed, it remains challenging to imagine any 'outside' to the hegemony of neo-liberal ecocidal discourse, governance regimes, institutional structures and regulatory mechanisms. Despite active critique on a number of fronts the values and structures of neo-liberal hegemony continue to prevail and it remains the case that our national and international legal orders are structurally committed to them and to assumptions and closures that, if their trajectory continues uninterrupted, will ultimately threaten the existence of the entire living order. This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment grapples with the important task of considering how to create space for the materialities of human embodied existencein a lively world of beings and systems, scenes and contexts, environments and ecosystemsto feature much more potently in our ethico-juridical deliberations and structures. This edition therefore grapples with the need to find a
Research Handbook on Fundamental Concepts of Environmental Law
Embodied Vulnerability and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Redirecting Human Rights, 2010
We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its rel... more We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its related themes) in the context of discussing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the emergence of the modern discourse of rights. We have also noted the sense in which the dominant conception of the rights-bearer as an autonomous and rational subject has produced forms of closure in rights discourse, paying particular attention to the way in which the central case universal rightsbearer is an abstract entity: either ‘man’ (in the French Declaration) or the ‘human being’ in the UDHR. This abstractionism, it has been suggested, plays (and continues to play) a central role in the production of the quasidisembodiment of liberal legal theory, and is a key mechanism in the production of a system of legal rights in which the corporation is arguably the perfect fit for the quintessential legal subject, radically continuous with liberal law’s analytical and ideological closures. In the light of the role of disembodiment in the construction of the human rights universal and the legal subject of human rights, it is now time to explore the role of embodied vulnerability in the UDHR paradigm, and the extent to which it can be said that embodied vulnerability undergirds a rather different theoretical reading of universal human rights discourse — one in which the corporation would appear to be disqualified as a suitable beneficiary of human rights protections.