This article adopts the concept of frontier encounters to explore the continuities between extractivism as a phenomenon characterising the immediate colonial phase in Australia following assertion of British sovereignty, and a contemporary energy resource extraction frontier in the Northern Territory. Drawing on the wider historical context whereby various capitalist forms of extraction have precipitated the imperial transposition of colonial governance into the land and waters occupied by Indigenous peoples, it 'reads in' the dispossession of Aboriginal Peoples as integral to the trajectories of resource exploitation in Australia. Through a retrospective reading of Mabo v Queensland [No 2], it demonstrates how the colonial imposition of sovereign title over resources has provided the underlying legal property form, including the derivate native title regime, that bridges colonial dispossession and Australia's continuing contribution to climate change via export of carbon resources. In articulating the interlinkages between the two phases of frontier encounter, the article challenges the designation of the Anthropocene as an explanatory rationale. It suggests that the underlying knowledge and legal system supporting the Anthropocene are part of an ideology and set of scientific practices that are entwined with the histories and legacies of colonialism and imperialism, as well as the shifting parameters of capitalism across time.
This paper begins with the quest by a Kenyan small-scale gold miner for a mining license that turns out to be almost impossible to secure. The artisanal and small-scale mining license is a comparatively recent focus of the assemblage of transnational law and policy initiatives organised around the promotion of sustainable or 'responsible' mining. Consensus is emerging across this assemblage that the formalisation of artisanal and small-scale mining, principally through licensing, is essential for enhanced development outcomes through improved mining regulation. This paper explores the emergence of this license within transnational law and policy initiatives as an account of the ritualistic law reform processes underway to address various social and environmental dynamics linked to mining. In tracing the colonial and post-colonial contexts in which artisanal and small-scale mining becomes a category of regulation, the paper focuses on the material practices and discursive possibilities that emerge in the spaces of tension created when law reforms are enacted, almost ritualistically, in the full knowledge of their near impossibility. Drawing on research conducted in a Kenyan gold mining area as well as in transnational policy arenas, the paper argues for closer examination of the sites where legal regulation unfolds in relation to resource extraction.
Taking the form of an invitational score, this paper responds to a question posed by the guest editors: What can dance do for law? My contribution is to show how site dance can further develop movement as socio-legal method. Site dance, as a choreographic practice that takes dance out of the parameters of formal performance, cultivates an embodied attentiveness to space, time, and the everyday. At the same time, a developing concern within socio-legal studies is the use of mobile methods to illustrate law’s involvement in making and unmaking space, place, and the everyday. Drawing site dance and movement as socio-legal method into conversation, I focus on walking as a shared mode of inquiry. Walking choreographically, as site dance invites us to do, encourages a mode of disorientation. The concept of chassé, in which the score is presented, a framing device and material metaphor for the interdisciplinary work of dance and law. The chassé aims to encourage a way of engaging with movement as socio-legal method through three micro gestures that serve as choreographic practice: tilt, breathe, listen.
This paper offers a reflexive analysis of how choreography may serve as both method and mode in legal research. It does so by presenting a case study of Bodylex (2021) – an original dance work choreographed by the author exploring the ways the body is “constituted by and constitutive of” laws (Shaw 2024:107). The stage production forms part of the author’s broader, ongoing practice-based inquiry into the corporeal manifestations of legal systems that engages with both the textual and aesthetic expressions of the law. As law manifests as an embodied practice, it can only fully be accessed and understood via corporeal means. Choreography echoes this logic, as it also systematically turns ideas and statements into embodied actuality (Lepecki 2010). It follows that choreographic approaches to the law, realised through the medium of dance, allow us to unlock latent (creative) jurisprudential perspectives that are otherwise held in virtual reserve. For Bodylex, such methods included the transliteration of legal doctrines into movement scores, abstract applications of textual representations of the law, and (re)creation of rule-based systems in improvisation and performance contexts. The result is a plurality of movements, gestures, sensations and affects which offer novel and expanded readings of the law for both participant and spectator.
This special issue on Law and Extractivism in the Anthropocene explores the extractive machinery of late liberalism through the prism of law. Our introduction outlines the stakes and complexities of theorising extractivism and situates the contributions within this scholarship. The extractive sequence of the conventional mining cycle - prospecting, expanding, restoring - thematically organises the issue. From different points of departure, each article explores the intractable relationship between law and extractivism, collectively unearthing the historical and ideological origins of extractivism, its present currents and instantiations in projects across the world, and the possible future courses that a post-extractivist order might take.
This article draws on insights gained from many years of community-engaged work alongside Neskantaga First Nation, a small remote Anishinaabe community in Treaty No.9, whose Indigenous homelands are being pressured by the global thirst for critical minerals. In line with recent writing on 'green extractivism', I detail how mining's new legitimacy in the boreal peatlands of the far north of Ontario, Canada, gained strength over the past decade from a pitch that associates it with battery metals for electric vehicles, and thus the transition to a 'net-zero' economy. The seduction obscures the social and ecological destruction that mining entails, and instead frames it as not only compatible with climate change, but crucial to our collective capacity to survive it. I argue that the power of net-zero is in the way it has provided a new, green economy rationale that shields old-economy extractivism from scrutiny to the detriment of the Indigenous stewards of lands and waters. The urgency of the climate crisis legitimizes the 'fast-tracking' of new critical minerals mining in a manner that overrides the inherent jurisdiction of Indigenous peoples, and their attempts to restore their territorial governing authority in line with their own laws. Major global geo-politics shifts are underway as this article goes to print, fueled by Trump 2.0's rejection of liberalized trade and the international climate order and his embrace of economic nationalism. As such, the seductive power of net-zero may already be diminishing, but over the past decade, it provided significant momentum to ongoing Indigenous dispossession in the boreal peatlands of Treaty No.9.
But how shall we fix things in their proper place and how shall we ground them twixt heaven and deep earth? The land has no markers of possession and no boundaries of division, it is terra nullius whispered the Strange God who sat on the right hand of the Sovereign: the Sovereign who was no longer God but merely King. Ah, replied the Sovereign, we shall ground and fix it in law (Godden 2003: 61).
The current organisation of our food systems is embedded in a profoundly extractivist paradigm and its unviability has intensified calls for urgent transformation. The domination of agrarian extractivism in food systems has been a major driver of climate change and ecological harm. At the same time, agrarian extractivist processes have adversely affected peasant communities dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, which have experienced severe disruptions to their traditional farming practices, socio-economic structures and ways of life. Drawing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas ('UNDROP'), this essay positions peasant culture as an alternative to agrarian extractivism. Following a short account of agrarian extractivism as the dominant modality structuring the organisation of our food systems, I shift attention to peasant communities and their culture by reference to their recent recognition under international law. I argue that the legal pronouncement of peasant culture under UNDROP - a normative development driven by grassroots politics - could contribute to a recalibration of the epistemological and ontological narratives that shape food systems and animate their future imaginaries.
