Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities

Shane Chalmers, Sundhya Pahuja, Shane Chalmers, Sundhya Pahuja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000385762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

This Handbook brings together 40 of the world's leading scholars and rising stars who study international law from disciplines in the humanities – from history to literature, philosophy to the visual arts – to showcase the distinctive contributions that this field has made to the study of international law over the past two decades.

Including authors from Australia, Canada, Europe, India, South Africa, the UK and the USA, all the contributors engage the question of what is distinctive, and critical, about the work that has been done and that continues to be done in the field of 'international law and the humanities'. For many of these authors, answering this question involves reflecting on the work they themselves have been contributing to this path-breaking field since its inception at the end of the twentieth century. For others, it involves offering models of the new work they are carrying out, or else reflecting on the future directions of a field that has now taken its place as one of the most important sites for the study of international legal practice and theory. Each of the book's six parts foregrounds a different element, or cluster of elements, of international law and the humanities, from an attention to the office, conduct and training of the jurist and jurisprudent (Part 1); to scholarly craft and technique (Part 2); to questions of authority and responsibility (Part 3); history and historiography (Part 4); plurality and community (Part 5); as well as the challenge of thinking, and rethinking, international legal concepts for our times (Part 6).

Outlining new ways of imagining, and doing, international law at a moment in time when original, critical thought and practice is more necessary than ever, this Handbook will be essential for scholars, students and practitioners in international law, international relations, as well as in law and the humanities more generally.

Concepts for our time

31
International law and the humanities in the Anthropocene

Kathleen Birrell and Julia Dehm

In this chapter, we will address the various ways in which key concepts that frame and animate thought and scholarship in international law and the humanities are being rethought and reanimated in response to the ‘Anthropocene’.¹ The Anthropocene thesis, originating in geological and Earth systems science, controversially proposes the inauguration of a new geological epoch, in accordance with which the impact of the anthropos – the human – has assumed geological proportions. While this appellation remains relatively undertheorised in legal scholarship,² we draw upon an expansive literature in the humanities and social sciences to consider its implications for international law. The ascription of this term to the present moment is highly contested, invoking a variety of normative claims and imperatives. Given that understandings and implications of the Anthropocene thesis are subject to political contestation and normative choice, we emphasise that it does not impel a singular mode of engagement but, rather, poses critical questions about the futures we wish to collectively build. Described as a ‘portmanteau term’,³ the Anthropocene concept might be also considered a galvanising idea that marshals different interdisciplinary engagements between law and the humanities, and indeed draws attention to the inhuman in the humanities.⁴ We foreground the inherent political choices in different ways of engaging the Anthropocene thesis that could variously reinforce dominant frames or unsettle and pluralise international law. While acknowledging its critical reception, we suggest that as a conceptual frame and provocation as well as a proposed epochal demarcation, the Anthropocene might be adopted in more counter-hegemonic ways to illuminate rather than perpetuate the hierarchies and abstractions implicit within its nomenclature. Further, it might prompt legal scholars to relinquish modernist claims to mastery in the pursuit of a determinate trajectory or universalising law. Ultimately, we suggest that an embrace of the plurality of the broader Anthropocene concept enlivens new collective possibilities and encounters within and between communities as well as scholarly disciplines, and might facilitate a more responsive, radical and open international law.

1We use single quotation marks to acknowledge contestation surrounding this term. While continuing to acknowledge this, quotation marks are dropped hereafter.

2See however, Louis Kotzé, Global Environmental Constitutionalism in the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Louis Kotzé, ed., Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene (London: Hart Publishing, 2017).

3Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 4.

4Elizabeth Grosz, Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark, “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical” (2017) 34(2–3) Theory, Culture and Society 129–146, 131.

To begin, we discuss the contested reception and interpretation of the Anthropocene thesis and suggest ways in which these critical engagements could compel alternative conceptualisations of a more radical counter-Anthropocene. Turning to emergent critical thought on approaches to history and temporality enlivened by the Anthropocene, conceived as both scientific thesis and conceptual provocation, we then examine the proposed collapse of distinctions between geological and human world history and different temporal modalities illuminated. We particularly consider the implications of these temporal recalibrations for international law, including the reappraisal of linear temporal accounts and distinctions between human and geological timescales. We reflect upon the spatial abstractions that the Anthropocene concept reveals within the global imaginary of international law, and the different ways in which the ‘globe’ of ‘globalisation’ and the ‘global’ of the planetary are imagined. We emphasise the need for new imaginaries and representational strategies to render visible incremental violence and injustice and to bear witness to grounded and more extensive articulations of justice. We consider broader conceptualisations of agency inaugurated by the Anthropocene, including the need to account for the agency of the more-than-human and the implications of this for international legal scholarship. Finally, we suggest that the Anthropocene prompts a rethinking of modes of connection and inter-species entanglements, as well as of the nature of obligations, responsibilities and relationships arising from lawful encounters, with particular reference to Indigenous jurisprudences. We conclude with reflections on the opportunities provided by a critical and political engagement with the Anthropocene to imagine the pluralisation of international law.

The very idea of the Anthropocene, as a new global narrative, conceptual apparatus and provocation, as well as a proposed new geological epoch, has been met with both approval and censure. Initially presented in the International Geosphere Biosphere Program Global Change Newsletter in 2000 and subsequently published in the journal Nature in 2002, Dutch geochemist Paul Crutzen and American biologist Eugene Stoermer identified ‘the central role of mankind in geology and ecology’.⁵ Whether conceived as epoch,⁶ ideology,⁷ condition,⁸ thesis,⁹ trope¹⁰ or turn,¹¹ this concept has provoked enormous contestation surrounding its interpretation in the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. Beginning as a tentative proposition in the physical and earth sciences¹² – a proposition that remains under review by a special working group of the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy – the Anthropocene thesis contemplates the naming of a new geological epoch to reflect the relatively recent and catastrophic impact of humanity upon the Earth. Attribution of meaning to the term has now extended beyond geoscientific authority as the concept has rapidly entered broader scholarly, political and cultural discourse.¹³ Irrespective of its confirmation as a geological epoch, the Anthropocene is understood to be both ‘a collective assemblage of scientific enunciation’, as well as ‘an inherently political concept’,¹⁴ which operates as an ‘invitation to rethink conventional philosophical and political categories’.¹⁵

5Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41, no. 1 (May 2000): 17.

6Ibid.; Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 1 (January 2002): 23.

7Jeremy Baskin, “Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Values 24, no. 1 (2015): 10–11.

8Purdy, After Nature, 4.

9Jean Luc Nancy, “The Existence of the World Is Always Unexpected,” trans. Jeffery Malecki, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 87; Daniel Matthews, “Law and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: From the Rights of Nature to the Aesthesis of Obligations,” Law, Culture and the Humanities (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872119871830.

10Anna Grear, “Deconstructing Anthropos: A Critical Legal Reflection on ‘Anthropocentric’ Law and Anthropocene ‘Humanity’,” Law and Critique 26, no. 3 (2015): 226–27. See also Louise Kotzé, “Reflections on the Future of Environmental Law Scholarship and Methodology in the Anthropocene,” in Perspectives on Environmental Law Scholarship: Essays on Purpose, Shape and Direction, ed. Ole Pedersen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 140.

11Manuel Arias-Maldonado, “The ‘Anthropocene’ in Philosophy: The Neo-Material Turn and the Question of Nature,” in Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking, eds. Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 50.

12Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene”; Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”; Paul Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl, “Living i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction. Practice, Craft and ethos: inheriting a tradition
• Formation
• Sense
• World-making
• History-telling
• Community
• Concepts for our time
• Index