This paper examines the jurisdictional challenges faced by victims of human rights abuses resulting from the operations of transnational corporations (TNCs), particularly in cross-border contexts involving subsidiaries or complex supply chains. It analyses the structural and procedural barriers that often lead to corporate impunity and the denial of justice for affected communities, with particular emphasis on the difficulty of securing access to a competent judicial forum in cross-border cases. While not all corporate conduct results in harm, this study focuses on cases where legal responsibility is diffuse and accountability elusive. To address these issues, the paper proposes a new framework for transnational corporate accountability grounded in an objective minimal contact test and deconstructing the concept of forum necessitatis into two distinct forms: mandatory and discretionary forum necessitatis supported by an institutional mechanism to support victims in transnational litigation. The framework aims to reduce jurisdictional uncertainty and facilitate access to judicial forums in cross-border human rights and environmental claims, offering a coherent procedural complement to emerging binding business and human rights regimes. Overall, the paper argues that a restructured jurisdictional approach is essential for strengthening corporate accountability and advancing access to justice in the global economy.
Emily Jones’ article, ‘No Future for Future Generations: Who Is International Environmental Law for?’ makes a powerful contribution to an emerging body of critical scholarship that is exposing the ambiguities, contradictions and exclusions in the legal concept of the right of future generations, its unequal application, its exclusions and how it might be rethought. This response takes up Jones’ invitation to understand the right of future generations in less anthropocentric terms but suggests that this move does not address the biopolitical governmentality that the right of future generations is enmeshed within. Instead, this response suggests that one way forward lies in reorientating away from a legal concern with ‘life’ as such, or bare life, and instead engaging with ‘forms of life’ or ways of being and living in the world.
Environmental defenders are the category of human rights defenders most at risk. In carrying out their work, they face threats to their rights to life and security, as well as to their freedoms of expression and association, their right to access to justice and more. In the face of this dire reality, the fact that state obligations to protect environmental defenders are scattered across different international law instruments fosters not only a complex legal landscape but also an urgent practical challenge. This article asserts that international environmental and human rights laws are convergent. Accordingly, the very definition of an environmental defender and states’ obligations towards such a person under the Aarhus Convention and the Escazú Agreement must be interpreted in light of the European and American conventions on human rights. Juxtaposing these instruments, as implemented by their respective mechanisms, the article clarifies who an environmental defender is and what duties states bear towards this category of rights holder, including in the highly salient context of civil disobedience. After the much-lauded ‘greening’ of human rights law, this article, therefore, argues for the ‘humanizing’ of international environmental law, pursuant to the principle of systemic integration under international law.
Climate-amplified emergencies are vital sites for Indigenous resistance and resurgence, even as climate change compounds layers of colonial oppression. Drawing on the experiences of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation before, during and after record-breaking wildfires in the Nation’s territory (in British Columbia, Canada), this article describes how the Tŝilhqot’in employ strategies of resistance to presumed state authority and resurgence of their own laws and jurisdiction in response to the climate emergency. These record-breaking wildfires vividly illustrate how colonial laws and policies have converged over a century to produce the climate emergency. And yet, dominant discourses around climate change and emergency reproduce Indigenous erasure, vulnerability and marginalization. Counter to these discourses, the Tŝilhqot’in Nation has advanced sophisticated emergency responses in relation to the state. Moreover, the wildfires have prompted Tŝilhqot’in communities to revitalize deep-seated fire stewardship laws and responsibilities to properly care for the land, wildlife and each other in the face of the accelerating climate crisis. The Tŝilhqot’in Nation’s experiences reclaiming fire show how Indigenous resurgence provides pathways out of the climate crisis while also attending to its colonial roots and decolonizing the responses to it.
This short intervention draws on Jane Bennett's work to reflect on the implications of that work for deep-sea mining regulation. The intervention is written in a creative style, from the perspective of a manganese nodule. Manganese nodules are balls of minerals found on the deep seabed and are to be the main target of deep-sea mining, if it is legally authorized. Debates on the authorization of deep-sea mining remain ongoing at the International Seabed Authority.
This short intervention draws on Jane Bennett’s work to reflect on the implications of that work for deep-sea mining regulation. The intervention is written in a creative style, from the perspective of a manganese nodule. Manganese nodules are balls of minerals found on the deep seabed and are to be the main target of deep-sea mining, if it is legally authorized. Debates on the authorization of deep-sea mining remain ongoing at the International Seabed Authority.
Scholars have urged the examination of how Nature’s rights may link with other rights-claims to impact political struggles between local communities and central governments over decision-making authority. This article examines two court cases that were decided by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in order to shed light on the ability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Ecuador to employ the rights of nature in their efforts to contest the approval of extractive projects. The article contends that conjunctions between nature’s rights, human rights and the precautionary principle have challenged three patterns of knowledge creation and use that have supported the primacy of the national interest. The first is the presumption of co-existence of Indigenous land uses and mining projects. The second is the state’s power to classify land based on the level of protection for which it is eligible. The third is the treatment of differentiated actors as equivalent stakeholders.
This paper reflects on the contributions of Jane Bennett and William Connolly at the seminar in Cardifffrom the perspective of a new materialist social scientist. Ifirst consider the distinction between philosophy and social inquiry, focusing on translating complex philosophical concepts into practical research methods. The paper then explores how - using Deleuze's ethological framework - new materialist, posthuman and vital materialist ideas offer fresh perspectives on sociological data. I then make links between vital materialism and the monism and post-anthropocentrism of new materialism, indigenous ontologies and feminist posthumanism, applying these insights to the topics of environmental sustainability, sustainable development and environmental justice. I suggest that this interdisciplinary approach can provide innovative frameworks for addressing real-world challenges for society and the environment.
This essay considers modes of engagement in contemporary times of ‘meltdown’. Written in 2022, prior to the recent escalation of Israel-Palestine-Lebanon conflict in the Middle East, it engages with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and varied threats of nuclear mobilization in this context: from damage to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power station, to launches of nuclear attack. In doing so, the lethal competitive links between fossil fuel and nuclear economies are foregrounded, reminding us of Cold War times when it was nuclear annihilation, rather than climate change, that threatened an unliveable planet. In engaging with these threatening dynamics, I also work with historical and present experiences and definitions of genocide and ‘theatres of war’, drawing on research regarding one of the first Indigenous ‘uprisings’ in Namibia – then German South West Africa; a context that also experienced one of the first modern genocides. In doing so, I raise the spectre of how it remains exceptionally difficult for legitimacy to be granted to the disruptive voices, experiences and perspectives of those beyond, and mostly written out of, the formal written historical record. Ultimately, the essay focuses on the following and increasingly pertinent questions. What transformational forces may turn around war’s worlding to mutate the experience, witnessing and haunting of terror into healing? And what practices may help us find paths of coherence amidst experiences of meltdown?
Of the many environmental and ecological crises engulfing human societies, one of the less remarked upon is a global sand crisis. This article asks how thinking with sand’s liveliness, dynamism, and agency might serve as an imaginative exercise in developing new ecological habits and sensibilities. It asks whether thinking with sand’s characteristic forms of drift and movement might help in thinking and writing dynamic eco-social rhythms through a new materialist lens. The chapter develops a style that thinks through and as drift. Drawing on Bennett’s retheorization of material agency via the ‘middle voice’, I argue that drift offers a distinctive way of thinking and writing in the middle voice. The chapter then starts to flow in drifts of granular particles, influenced by the material agencies of sand and its distinctive styles of granular flow, drawing on Benjamin’s and Caillois’ evocation of a mimetic faculty as a way of becoming non-human that opens up a world of ‘cosmic meaning’. Empirically, the chapter works through archival records of Hong Kong’s endlessly-repeating catastrophe of colonial sand extraction and environmental degradation, as well as accounts of the 2019 ‘Water Revolution’.
The subterranean has been imagined throughout history in a variety of ways, from religious ‘underworld’ narratives to more science-based constructions that utilize visualization technologies such as drilling or sensing. As these technological methods get more sophisticated, it seems the ultimate goal is to uncover the truth of what is down there; a process of excavation that values scientific objectivity and mastery over imaginaries that capture the underground as dynamic, relational, and full of life. This article takes a journey beneath the surface of Arctic Russia, dwelling within several manifestations of the subterranean: the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a utopian Soviet project to drill the deepest hole in the world; permafrost tunnels that store cores and other scientific data used to gain a further understanding of Arctic permafrost; and the tension between Indigenous Sakhan permafrost legends and a rise in the practice of extracting mammoth tusks from thawing permafrost. Across these stories and histories, I argue that the subterranean, far from being a static, knowable, excavatable thing, is in fact a discontinuous entity: impossible to grasp through scientific method alone, and instead an agential, unpredictable and heterogeneous materiality.
This article invokes Rick Barot's poem On Gardens to trace the interrelations of gendered violence and colonial legal enclosures in the Anthropocene, ultimately proposing a radical jurisprudence of gardens. Drawing on posthumanist feminist, eco-feminist, and decolonial feminist theories, I employ & eacute;criture f & eacute;minine alongside autoethnography to work through these interrelations. Written in the personal voice, I offer a narrative woven through empathy, desire, and wonder. I begin by reflecting on my own heritage and its intersections with the questions provoked by Barot's poem. I then move to theorize the garden as a space for the human yearning for innocence, but also as a site of colonial and gendered violence, human care, and the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. This reveals how gardens - and law - serve as a placeholder both of violence and for new possibilities. Moving between theory and lived experience, I use On Gardens to bring forth my own journey through the intersections of law, gardens, gendered and academic life, highlighting the violence embedded in these spaces. I bring this to bear on the radical jurisprudence of gardens which the article proposes. In the concluding section, I celebrate the joys of posthuman feminist transversal kinship, envisioning and embodying a transformative way of living, writing, and becoming in the Anthropocene. The article invites readers to reconsider gardens as sites of an intra- and inter-species radical jurisprudence of care, resistance, and renewal in the face of contemporary challenges of the Anthropocene.
This short intervention draws on Jane Bennett’s work to reflect on the implications of that work for deep-sea mining regulation. The intervention is written in a creative style, from the perspective of a manganese nodule. Manganese nodules are balls of minerals found on the deep seabed and are to be the main target of deep-sea mining, if it is legally authorized. Debates on the authorization of deep-sea mining remain ongoing at the International Seabed Authority.
‘Climate activism is needed.’ This essay examines the dominant model of action often implied in that truism. Such a model tends to posit a self who, exercising a uniquely human power, ‘takes action’ in a field or spatial locale that is not itself considered as having a comparable kind of efficacy. It imagines the actor as, ideally, acting from a perch above the fray, free from the strivings of other bodies and forces before the ‘intervention’ is made. But the Anthropocene is, among other things, a world of vibrant matter where human efforts are forces internal to planetary processes that include many, many other types and scales of effort. And this suggests the importance of exploring models of action and efficacy which take nonhuman agencies into account and which understand human action as radically entangled with them.
As both Jane Bennett and William Connolly have argued, time is an ever-present reference point for climate action and for the Anthropocene. The era is characterized by temporal thresholds and tipping points as well as historic junctures that indicate a radical shift in geo-, bio-, and atmospheric processes. In the context of prevailing narratives of late planetary capitalism and the Anthropocene, 'we' - the Western anti-heroes of planetary destruction - have a problem with time. Namely, we are 'running out of it' or have already arrived at our 'last best chance' or we have already passed the threshold and it has become 'too late'. In the face of this crisis of time, Bennett writes, there is a presumption that the necessary response is one of immediate action. The kind of action that, perhaps, f'ollows the science' to institute transformative political change, in which a 'uniquely human' and sovereign power '"takes action" in afield or spatial locale that is not itself considered to have a comparable kind of efficacy' (Bennett, this special issue). In this reflection on Bennett and Connolly's work, I consider the temporal dimensions of political subjectivity and action in the Anthropocene. In conversation with my own work in the science of jellyfish research, I consider what it might mean to take seriously the 'heterogeneous temporalities' (Connolly, this special issue) that constitute the earth as an abstract machine. I follow Bennett's line of questioning to ask after the kinds of action appropriate to a plurality of geographies and temporalities. Ultimately, I argue that taking heterogeneous temporalities seriously will require new forms and methods of inquiry, scientific and otherwise.
Towards the end of 2019 Jane Bennett and William E Connolly visited Cardiff University as keynote speakers for the speaker series, ‘Imagining the Eco-Social: New Materialist Reflections for the Anthropocene’. Organized by Anna Grear, the series sought to push the boundaries of the social into more complex material engagements and brought law and justice-based questions haunting the so-called Anthropocene into conversation with new materialist and posthuman thinking. The speaker series was hosted by the Centre of Law and Society and by what was then known as the Environmental Justice Research Unit (later renamed the Centre for Environmental Law and Policy). The keynote events were co-organized by Anna Grear and Dot Kwek. Before these two full and intense days, Bennett and Connolly joined Grear and Kwek for an interview. (The interview was filled with laughter and has been lightly edited for clarity.)
The idea that the environment must be protected for future generations has been gaining traction in recent years. This article argues that the concept of future generations, as deployed in international environmental law, is, however, deeply exclusionary, with only some humans being envisaged as future generations. It is furthermore argued that the concept is anthropocentric in that it focuses only on human future generations. The article discusses whether the concept can be recast considering these critiques, deploying queer and decolonial approaches to do so. In particular, Indigenous understandings of future generations are highlighted as offering an alternative framing. The article concludes by arguing that legal concepts must be carefully designed to ensure the construction of a future whereby climate change and environmental degradation are addressed in an equitable and just way, providing three pathways that can be used to begin to reframe the concept of future generations accordingly.
After reviewing the notion of an abstract machine elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Connolly shows how the Anthropocene itself is an abstract machine vastly exceeding its human components. It is composed initially of capitalist emissions of CO2 and methane joined to a host of impersonal amplifiers. The amplifiers show how the effects of capitalist emissions far outstrip the initial power of the emissions themselves. An ocean conveyor shutdown, glacier self accelerations, and the radical shifts in the formation of wild fires provide merely a couple of examples. A brief discussion of the ‘Antique Little Ice Age’ in Rome helps to show how planetary volatilities have come into being in other times and places. The essay closes by exploring possible fascist responses in temperate capitalist states spurred to a notable degree by the climate refugees these very states have helped to create. And it explores the type of politics needed today to respond to climate wreckage and curtail the danger of fascism.
