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Unpacks key assumptions about the 'environment', its relationship with violent conflict, and the justification for its protection underlying international law.
The connection between ecology and conflict has been the object of extensive study by political scientists and economists. From the contribution of natural resource 'scarcity' to violent unrest and armed conflict; to resource 'abundance' as an incentive for initiating and prolonging armed struggles; to dysfunctional resource management and environmental degradation as obstacles to peacebuilding, this literature has exerted a huge influence upon academic discussions and policy developments. While international law is often invoked as the solution to the socio-environmental challenges faced by conflict-affected countries, its relationship with the ecology of war and peace remains undertheorised. Drawing upon environmental justice perspectives and other theoretical traditions, the book unpacks and problematizes some of the assumptions that underlie the legal field. Through an analysis of the practice of international courts, the UN Security Council, and Truth Commissions, it shows how international law silences and even normalizes forms of structural and slow environmental violence.
Conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights present delicate trade-offs when concerns for social and ecological justice are increasingly intertwined. This book retraces how the legal ordering of environmental protection evolved over time and progressively merged with human rights concerns, thereby leading to a synergistic framing of their relation. It explores the world-making effects this framing performed by establishing how 'humans' ought to relate to 'nature', and examines the role played by legislators, experts and adjudicators in (re)producing it. While it questions, contextualises and problematises how and why this dominant framing was construed, it also reveals how the conflicts that underpin this relationship – and the victims they affect – mainly remained unseen. The analysis critically evaluates the argumentative tropes and adjudicative strategies used in the environmental case-law of regional courts to understand how these conflicts are judicially mediated, thereby opening space for new modes of politics, legal imagination and representation.
Three experts present their perspectives on the Security Council's role in maintaining peace in a changing international order.
Gail Lythgoe challenges readers to reconsider the territoriality of the contemporary global order. This study sits at the intersection between international law, geography, and global governance, examining the spatial assumptions of legal practice and power and offering a new legal account of territory and geography for the global order.
This book analyses how existing international law limits the use of means of warfare utilising the properties of nanomaterials.
This volume offers a series of short and highly self-reflective essays by leading international lawyers on the relation between international law and crises. It particularly shows that international law shapes the crises that it addresses as much as it is shaped by them. It critically evaluates the modes of intervention of international law in the problems of the world. Together these essays provide a unique stocktaking about the role, limits, and potential of international law as well as the worlds that are imagined through international lawyers’ vocabularies.
How might law address the multiple crises of meaning intrinsic to global crises of climate, poverty, mass displacements, ecological breakdown, species extinctions and technological developments that increasingly complicate the very notion of 'life' itself? How can law embrace — in other words —the 'posthuman' condition — a condition in which non-human forces such as climate change and Covid-19 signal the impossibility of clinging to the existing imaginaries of Western legal systems and international law? This carefully curated book addresses these and related questions, bringing 'law beyond the human' (drawing on Indigenous legalities, life ways and ontologies) and New Materialist and Posthuman/ist approaches into stimulating proximity to each other.
The adage 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' is significantly inaccurate. Ignorance and mistake of law do, under certain circumstances, exclude responsibility both in national and international criminal law. This monograph updates the existing reviews of law and practice on the topic, aiming to go a step further: it takes the analysis of mistake of law as a starting point for systematic observations about international criminal law in general. First, the volume defines the contours of the defence of mistake of law in general theory of criminal law, distinguishing it from cognate defences and highlighting, most notably, its connection with superior orders. Secondly, it gives an overview of t...
This book examines the dynamics of natural resource conflicts in Africa and explores the different governance approaches for securing sustainable peace. One of the most prominent challenges facing Africa today is the consequences of natural resource extraction. While these resources hold the potential for economic transformation across Africa, their extraction also comes with a range of environmental, social, and economic consequences, including issues related to governance. This book assembles a unique cohort of peacebuilding, environmental justice, and sustainable development scholars and practitioners from Africa and beyond to examine the dynamics of natural resource conflict and explore ...