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Lys Kulamadayil, "Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law" (Bloomsbury 2025)
01:05:45
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host Raghavi Vishwanath and today I have the opportunity to be in conversation with the exceptionally talented Liz Kulamadale about her open access book that's called the Pathology of Natural Resources in International Law, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Liz is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambition Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and the principal investigator of a project that's called Law by Color Code Locating Race and Racism in International Law. Pathology of Plenty is a really incisive story that takes use of resource curse and paradox of plenty theories as a starting point to illustrate international law's role in resource cursed countries as being constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive all at once. Thank you so much Liz for taking the time to speak to me and with all of us at the New Books Network.
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Oh very thank you very much for having me.
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As we customarily do with most authors on this podcast. To start off, could you perhaps take us through the perfect personal journeying that occurred in the run up to but also alongside the writing of the book, what was it about the resource curse, the pathology of plenty, as you say in postcolonial states, particularly that called to you and why?
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A
Oh, that's a great question. So I have always been interested in questions of ecological and social justice. So during my studies I focused on climate change, socioeconomic rights, particularly the right to water. And then going into the Ph.D. i realized that this is what I wanted to continue working on. So I came to this topic with naivete, if I may say so about myself, of a fairly young student who was just really eager to understand why some things were were going wrong in the world. Bearing in mind that the invasion of Iraq made quite the impression on me. I was a high school student at the time, I think, and it was quite shocking to see that and to read news accounts of this. So with this sensitivity I came across the term resource curse and started started familiarizing myself with different theories but then very quickly realized that there really wasn't an international law perspective on this. So it seemed that political scientists, geographers, economists working on the resource curves or the pathology of plenty often framed law as being part of a possible solution to addressing the economic and political effects of resources wealth in post colonial countries. And by effects, I should say adverse effects. Of course now I had at that point already realized that international law can often be part of the problem. So I Was really interested in just adding somewhat of a critical international law perspective to the conversation. Thank you so much, Liz.
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This is really, really enlightening, especially to try and understand, you know, as I'm speaking for myself here, I grew up in Kuwait and the Iraq invasion was such a sort of deep imprint on people of color who lived there. And you didn't know that there was international or the background of these big conflicts to so. To suddenly see it being spoken about so centrally. And it's really helpful, I think, for me to hear how it sort of fed into your interest in. In writing this story. And as we're speaking about writing about international law, I know we've spoken about it before as well. I find that one of the perils of making sense of international law, as you say in the book, is how it shape shifts so fast. The rules you are starting to get to know shatter before you know they exist. Normativities are changing so fleetingly. To take from the title of the book, what were the. The pathologies of international law that you had to navigate when you were sort of trying to write the story? Wow.
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So that's a really interesting question. I think with pathologies, I was making more reference to the pathologies of natural resources, wealth. But it's true that international law just as well came with its own sets of pathologies that I had to work my way through. And maybe I should start by saying that of course there is an incredible wealth of insightful scholarship out there that seeks to unpack why international law is sometimes failing its aspirations of constraining power politics and maintaining international order. This comes from postcolonial studies, but also even from rational choice theorists. Right. We have all of these explanations. I was really trying to work my way through these different explanations and ultimately realized that it was only getting me so far in the sense that making a contribution to this particular conversation within international law, and particularly within the philosophy of international law, was, I'm not going to say difficult, but it just was a different type of story that I would have had to write. Whereas my motivation for writing this book really came from lived experience and on ground experiences. Right. So I wasn't necessarily so interested in adding to conversations around why international law fails more often than it does not when it comes to the experience of marginalized communities, but rather it was a how is it that international law fails? So if I guess now that you asked me, reflecting back, I would say that the pathologies I was interested in came from a grounded perspective and that grounding being communities immediately affected by the exploitation of natural resources, but also affected through, in a broader sense, through the effects that resources wealth then caused within the particular governmentality that we're subjected to.
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B
Yeah, thank you, thank you for that. That's really helpful. And it ties to another question I had when I started reading the book, which is your opening vignette in the book. Right. Which is. Which is Congo. You speak about Congo struggles with Belgian colonialism, with mercenaries, and then with the Mai Mai militia, and how the post colon. There are continuities between the colonial story and the post colonial story. And these continuities ultimately create corporatized monster like a global mineral supply. CH and I wanted to ask a few because these are struggles I grapple with as well. What do we gain from using the continuities as a starting point? I know that as someone who studies international law, you often read scholarship where the critique is saved for later, the continuity is almost saved for later. But here you open with the continuity. You situate yourself in many ways outside of international law and speak in to you, speak into you observe from the outside. And I wondered what that methodological choice was, was. What did it mean for you when writing this?
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Well, I think it very much came from the. I should say that the choice of vignette at the very beginning came from the field work that I'd undertaken in the drc. So it was a very personal story to me in that sense. I know I'm not from Congo, but I have to say, just being there in 2016 and 2017 and observing the struggles of local civil society organizations to hold mining contracts and government representatives accountable for the revenues drawn from the extraction of resources in Katanga. But also even trying to frame some sort of environmental consciousness and pointing towards the tangible environmental damage and resulting health risks posed to the local communities was really something that I will say guided me as I was writing the book, even though that particular field work doesn't even feature in it. So the only nod that I give to that experience is really with the vignette that I put at the very beginning. And I guess part of the reason that I start with continuities is because there is absolutely no other explanation of why the people of Katanga were in a state where they were facing incredible inequalities and unspeakable atrocities. Because honestly, it's paradise on earth. Otherwise, like, it's incredibly beautiful. The earth offers everything that one would need for subsistence. So it's clear that the state of Katanga right now was created and it was created by colonialism. So how could I not start with that? And to be honest, not starting with that would have permitted for explanations that blame the people right now for the conditions they're facing. And that is not the case. So it is not on the people living today. But the conditions today are the result of colonially created patterns of inequality and power.
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B
Of course. Thank you. Thank you for that. Also to hear about the fact that you've done field work and it's. The vignette was inspired by that lived experience was. It's really very helpful. And as I was listening to you right now, I was thinking there's such a deeply entrenched running affective thread in the book as well. When you speak about minerals, when you speak about natural resources, just as you are doing now, there is such a. An emotional affective dimension to it. And I wanted to ask you, you know all the chapter titles as well. When you speak about Hope of Plenty, Pain of Plenty, to me these were all sort of the continuous refrain was one of emotion, which usually you don't see captured very well in legal vocabulary at all. And I wanted to ask you how you sort of navigated the big elephant in the room in this story, which is also that of aff. How does affect kind of inform the various dimensions you document of the problem of natural resources? The economic dimension, the political dimension, the ecological dimension. How does affect kind of. Where does that fit in that story?
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So that's a really difficult question. I think affect is an underrated part of legal thinking. Right. So the idea of law as technique is already flawed to begin with. And it's exacerbated sometimes by the idea of scholarship as neutral or technical. So when you have both the idea of law and the idea of scholarship viewed as a technique, it creates this compacted space of the non being for marginalized communities who many international law scholars write about that sometimes don't seem to be relating to. And the choice of effective language to some extent was my hope of having this relation and the solidarity shimmer through.
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B
Oh, thank you so much. You're so perfectly right that there's such a technicization in the way you're taught law in the way you're told law should be done in the way you're told in international law must be imagined that. I remember Susan Sontag used to write about it. We often don't even read to care. We don't read anymore barely to care, to feel what we are reading. We're just reading to sort of sight, especially as scholars, you're just reading your mining literature in order to put it somewhere else. So it's really quite lovely that the scholarship we see now, which kind of forecrowns this feeling, the scaring and the affect. I know that the times we live in, just as we were speaking before this call, are so precarious but also so devastating in that they infuse a spirit of absolute hopelessness in many people engaged especially in the project of international law. We're seeing resource fueled interventions in Venezuela, in Nigeria, in Sudan, maybe Greenland. And as you see in the book, lots of these interventions are justified using the principle of effective control, effectively that whoever has control over the resources, they also then enjoy unchecked power. I wondered if you could speak to us about the logic of civilization within this doctrine of effective control. What is the civilizing narrative there, if at all?
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That's one of modernity, right? And at the same time, from today's perspective, it's also archaic. So I was just thinking about the intervention, the US intervention in Venezuela. And in a way, this fetishizing of oil is such an archaic way to relate to the planet, but also to the economy, right? So it's very 60s, 70s, 80s if I may say so. And really out of step with what, honestly governments in the Global south will tell you, which is that there is just no space, space to put the waste that we produce. We are running out of spaces to create new sacrifice zones, which is probably why we're moving. We're trying to engage in new projects of conquest. So as I'm observing contemporary politics, I feel that we are somewhat stuck in the past, or let's say we are returning to the past. But on the question of hope, right, or devastation, I will say this. I don't think that we as international lawyers or scholars are entitled to be devastated in the sense of devastation can only, in my mind at least, is something that only those who are immediately affected by the acts of imperial powers get to claim for themselves or get to experience. Because honestly, the fact that international law is not being breached by one of the largest liberal powers in the world, that's just part of our profession's responsibilities to have to deal with that and to have to make sense of that. So that's not something that I get to and now almost contradict myself, but that's not something I get to get emotional about. It's just something that I have to deal with and make sense of. That's my responsibility. This being said, I do think that there is a role for empathy and for riding out of empathy and being driven by empathy for those who are suffering the effects of new imperial and settler colonial projects.
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B
Oh, thank you so much. As I was listening to you, you know, you were saying this. There's such an archaic. This is such an archaic logic. There's no newness really, in the fact that countries are being captured, invaded, and those motivations are resource driven. But also within the discipline of international law and people speaking to international law, you see the constant refrain of crisis now. And we have been seeing this for a while. The language of crisis. And the language of crisis, at least to me, appears to sort of exceptionalize the situation. Right. It appears to tell you that this is the first time this legal order, this liberal legal order, has been fractured in this way to this extent. And I know that in the book you also sort of allude to that, in part, you're sort of speaking about, no, this is not a new problem, just like you did now. And I was wondering if you could speak to us about your ideas or your thoughts on this discourse of crisis that seems to be, you know, pasted everywhere in international law conversation now.
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A
Yeah, I'm sorry to have to break this to fellow international lawyers, but international law is not in crisis. Really, it's not. However, most parts of the world are in crisis and the planet is in cr. These are two different things. I get very tired with the crisis discourse about international law, but I do acknowledge that we are in an era where so many parts of the world and people in the world are facing overlapping forms of marginalization that leads to crises. And that if I may say so, not crisis as an acute phenomena, but crisis as a way of being, if that makes sense. So, yes, unfortunately, we will have to continue thinking about crisis, but not within international law, rather outside of it.
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B
Yes, you're so right that there are different levels of crisis taking place, ideally, and unfortunately, the crisis that the self interest in preserving the discipline is making us turn a blind eye to the actual crisis, which is the crisis of the planet, the crisis of how we are as human beings in our relations with the planet. And so it is a sort of misdirected discourse, as you say. And also I think in many ways it's an even more insidious logic, the logic of crisis, because it's deliberately asking you to ignore the repeated patterns of settler colonialism, of resource extraction. And just in that context, I wanted to sort of speak about the chapter of the book where you discuss the differences between intervention in resource driven conflicts. So intervention using force. Use of force. Domain and intervention military occupation. So the difference between the use of force domain and the use in bellow military occupied territory domain. And it would be, I thought it would be helpful if you could speak to some extent about what different legal tools kind of are usually invoked when these different domains come into the fold. Right? Especially in the context of natural resources extraction. In the book you speak about Israel's 1967 occupation of Sinai in Egypt, of west bank of Golan Heights in Jordan, and how the occupied territory domain allowed the use of different kinds of legal tools. And I wondered if you could speak to us a little more about that. What are the implications of these different legal tools?
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So I should maybe start by saying that while I do think that my book is critical, it's also fairly doctrinal and that's something I fully acknowledge. And part of that move of writing a fairly doctrinal book was to somewhat give the empirics of why international law is to some extent complicit in creating what I call the peril of plenty. So the particular proneness to armed conflict in regions that are coveted for their resources, or that are coveted for other reasons, but happen to have resources that then can become part and parcel of a project of displacement. So in that chapter, the Peril of Plenty, I focus on the principle of.
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User frogt.
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Which in the broadest of terms is principle of the laws of armed conflict, meant to give the occupying power which exercises effective control over the population under occupation, the means to care for that population. So there is a humanitarian intention for that principle. At the same time, it of course lends itself to co optation in the sense of giving occupying powers. That decree of control over public resources, including natural resources, comes with economic incentives. And then there is a question, and this is what I try to flesh out in my chapter. There's a question a how far reaching that degree of control is, but also quite interestingly contrasting the extent to which occupying powers can seize control of public property with the degree to which they can control private property. And of course, I'm not trying to make a case where they should also be able to seize private property, to the contrary, but I'm just saying it's interesting that what is the public good has less protection while at the same time time being the currency that the population under occupation will have eventually to rebuild their countries, at least in the logic of resources driven economic growth. So there's this correlationship between A being an incentive for occupation, B being an incentive for what Israeli legal advisors like to call prolonged occupation and then see this contradiction between prolonged processes of exploitation that may have been put in place by resources, contracts, let's say concession agreements or production sharing agreements that will last beyond the state of armed conflict and carry on to a processes of, well, what people like to call post conflict situations. Right. So where patterns of inequality are established beyond the time of armed conflict through the occupying power. So it's really worth reflecting on the work that this principle that had the stage, again, a humanitarian intention does in conflicts today. So that's what I was alluding to in that chapter.
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That's really helpful because there's a part in the book where you speak about the political position as being distinguished from the economic position. There's almost artificial lines that often drawn between the political impact of imperialism, colonialism and the economic impact of it. And whereas the story, as you say, is the connections are far deeper, the roots are all coming from the same place. Just as you speak about Yusuf Rock and how there is a humanitarian kind of ambition, but that humanitarian ambition is eroded quite quickly, I wondered if we could also flip the coin. Right, so in chapter three of the book you offered a really incisive. I was fascinated to read it, an exposition of the formation and insertion of the permanent sovereignty principle into the, you know, permanent sovereignty over natural resources into the international liberal legal order. And when you do that, you also touch on the centrality of self determination, which is people's right over natural wealth and resources. And I thought it would be nice to ask you if you could speak a little bit more about how self determination, which quite intuitively even is, it appears as a kind of, you know, it has a secessionist fracturing kind of logic. How is it that these two principles sort of inserted themselves into the liberal legal order? And in the book you speak about how self determination had the backing of lots of postcolonial states. And you also remind us to think of it as a victory of the Third World project. In some ways it's the victory of the third World human rights advocacy. But I wanted to ask you if you could, if you could speak in more detail about whether self determination was in fact motivated by human and human rights interests at all. Like, is that, can you locate human rights, all that centrally in the backstory of self determination?
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Yeah, so self determination is a really interesting one. Right. Because you know, really the. There are many scholars who have written on self determination. It's a popular subject area for legal scholars and there are some who are much better placed to speak to the intentionality of that right My story really comes again from the perspective of people living in resource cursed countries and trying to understand how they have experienced the principle of self determination throughout time. Right. So I start with the formation of the nation state and the question of who gets to exercise self determination. And from the very beginning it was clear that this right of peoples was co opted by the state and specifically the postcolonial state, which through that right also had a claim to governing the resources under its control. And that came with access to enormous wealth in some cases, which again then has led to. Governments claiming the right to economic self determination towards others and towards their own people in a strange way, opposed to this being a right that postcolonial peoples were able to claim towards their government, which is somewhat putting the idea of that principle on its head. And again, this is something that is rather driven by observation from how the principle has played out. I think it's an observation that is shared with by people who have written in what is now called fourth world approaches to international law. So the scrutiny of how is it that postcolonial governments relate to the rest of the world, but how is it that the people of the third world relate to their governments? And while my chapter is certainly not an explicit contribution to this dream, it's certainly motivated by similar concerns.
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B
Yeah, thank you. As you say, there's a. It's, it's so interesting to map how a principle that was originally sort of created in order for people to be able to exercise their right to choose their cultural, social, economic identity as against the state came to be instrumentalized by the sovereign itself vis a vis other sovereigns. And in some ways that, some might say that it was an innovation that post colonial states had to do. But also as you say, so much of international law has been focused on the figure of the state that barely, you know, not too many people have looked at how the post colonial state has sort of internalized the same statecraft that it, it has claimed to be marginalized by speaking of the sovereign. I wondered if you could speak to us about how the shape and form of the sovereign itself has changed because of international laws, governance of natural resources. I ask this because in the chapter on anti money laundering laws and anti corruption laws, you see that the main players there are banks are civil society actors, governmentality there is completely diffused amongst actors who don't correspond to the template of the conventional sovereign. And I wondered if there's a particular story there about natural resources sort of, you know, pivoting, allowing these pivots to New governmentalities even. It would be really great to hear your thoughts on that.
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A
Yeah. So I will now reveal a secret that is that, that's my favorite chapter and in part because it's so mind boggling. So this chapter in a nutshell speaks to how well it draws on two case studies to investigate how international money laundering law and international anti corruption law are put into effect, focusing on two state owned companies and the money laundering operations that were undertaken through this instrument of the state owned company. So one is one mdb, the other is Odessa. And there are a few things that really struck me as I was reading press statements by financial oversight authorities, case law surrounding these cases produced by different national courts. And that is their blind trust in financial institutions being willing participants in upholding the rule of law and safeguarding against money laundering. As if somehow, which is, I mean again, mind boggling to me, as if somehow they had some sort of incentive to do that. So the way that financial institutions are, the role that is assigned to financial institutions in both anti corruption law and anti money laundering law is as guardians of financial transactions. I would say they're somewhat deputized to enforce and uphold the law in that regard. Again, towards corrupt people, or I should say corrupt government officials, and particularly of course, corrupt government officials in the Global South. Of course we can write, and people have written a lot about that. And it's not that I want to diminish that. We have corruption in resource rich countries, of course that's a major problem, but at the same time what I call grand theft. So the ability to steal significant wealth from public coffers is only possible because the international financial system permits for this to happen. One couldn't steal billions of coffers, billions of dollars from public coffers if there was no infrastructure to do so. And I am really urging my readers to pay closer attention to this infrastructure of grand theft, which by the way is primarily monitored by domestic institutions. So that's another thing. Oftentimes I, I feel that there is a certain nonchalant attitude when we say, oh, it's a problem of corruption in the Global south. So there's really nothing that we can do about this. Yes there is. We can hold our own institutions accountable who are allowing for this corruption and money laundering to happen. So yeah, I will say this. It was the most difficult chapter to write, but also the one that I had the hardest time putting down just because made me want to become a financial lawyer at some point.
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B
No, I can imagine. The chapter is so fascinating because you're Speaking about, as you said, banks making voluntary commitments. These are sovereign seeming functions. You're speaking about how the law governing natural resources sort of straddles public law, carcerality, private law. It straddles so many different planes. And I think most importantly, as you said now that chapter to me was also a complete breakdown of the logic of good governance. Right. Good governance and rule of law tends to shroud, as you say, how the system enables grand theft. Right. Like it's a. The system was created in order for these breakages, in order for the rule of law to collapse. And to see the rule of law is the logic that's used to safeguard the system. The system comes undone in that chapter, I think, which is why it's so effective. And in the run up to that chapter, you also speak about regional alliances, the role of regional alliances in the development of natural resources, sovereignty, as well as the self determination principle. And I wondered if you could speak to us more about that as well. You speak about, of course, the Arab state coalitions, but how regional alliances kind of disrupting or what were the, what were the new ripples that these alliances were creating in this story?
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Yeah, so that's something that I wished I had had a chance to develop further because this is really interesting. In a way we honor OPEC and we think of it as a cartel or sometimes operating like a cartel and as such creating disruptions to the market. Now I wonder how many people would frame the US intervention in Venezuela as a disruption to the market. And problem as it as such, there is rarely an economic argument made against that intervention, even though it's probably or will prove to be just as disruptive to the market as any intervention of OPEC was to exercise influence on the market. So it seems that we are okay with, and by we I mean some of the petro capitalists are okay with market interventions by governments if they are meant to cheapen the costs of resources, but problematize it when the opposite is the goal. So this brings me to the broader question of producer alliances. I think they are viewed with a certain degree of suspicion unless their role is really clearly defined and very limited. So producer alliances that are meant to, let's say, improve the quality of, of rubber are not problematized. But the second that they then enter the economic sphere is when we seem to want to regulate them as a disruption to the market. And I just, especially as we are moving into the era of having to change how we generate energy and how we use resources. How interesting is that, right? That we're willing to make interventions against a regulation, and sometimes a regulation with a view of decreasing the exploitation of certain resources, but very willing to embrace them when it comes to creating future access. And again, I don't want to be misunderstood here. Understand that many people have spoken out against the interventions in Venezuela, but the argument has often been made from it being a breach of global order or it being a breach of sovereignty, but less people have pushed back against it from an economic perspective and a resources and environmental perspective.
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B
Yeah, no, that's a, that's a really interesting and important point you make, which is that there is a kind of assumption which you speak about in the book as well at great length, that there is a kind of assumption that the market will regulate itself, that the market is a good thing. And rarely enough, rarely do you see scholarship that kind of pokes holes at the neutrality of the market or the benevolence of the market, a system that we know has traditionally been stacked against people of marginalized locations. In the same chapter that, in which you discuss the anti money laundering laws and anti corruption laws, you point to the entry of carcerality quite explicitly. Right. So in chapter five you discuss the punitive responses to the grand theft cases in Venezuela. And we're also discussing Venezuela again now, Malaysia. And I was wondering if you could speak to us about the deficiencies of carcerality generally. But what kinds of injuries in the context of natural resource extraction are particularly seen as carceral? There's one thing to speak about criminal legal, criminal law being activated, but carcerality is far broader than just criminal law. And I wondered if you could sort of trace the, you know, if at all intersecting or diverging travels of these two.
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A
Yeah, so in that chapter I unpack the one MDB scandal, including the various criminal. Judicial processes that followed from it. And at the time that I was writing it, one thing that really struck me was that the person who in this whole scandal that had involved several billions of Malaysian public wealth being laundered out of the country and used for private, for private purposes by people associated to this, this state owned company, what really struck me was the person who served the longest prison sentence was the whistleblower. So that's one side of it, right? Is who. How do we value the degree of infraction? And it just seemed that revealing corporate secrets was a more significant infraction than aiding government officials to set up a money laundering scheme. So if you compare the prison sentence of the whistleblower to some of the sentences that were that were rendered against Goldman Sachs executives who helped Malaysian officials to set up the scheme. It's really very telling about what we find worthy of punishing and what we don't think is quite as bad. But there's another story there which is the ability of using casuality to put things into the past. So with rendering a conviction against someone, regardless of the severity of that. Right. A case is somewhat closed. And in this context of grand theft, well, the case is not closed because the people are still in debt because of that action. But then the way that media works and the way that to some extent also related government action or action by bureaucracy's work is that there is then less priority given to all of the follow up. So it seems that the criminal system permits to channel attention towards individuals and the punishing of individuals opposed to the structural problem that permitted for the operation to be possible in the first place and for the recovery or questions of reparations that should result from these operations. So one might ask, how is it that we don't think that the system, including the structural breakdown of financial institutions and the lack of oversight of government oversight bodies, hasn't resulted in state responsibility? So that's something that isn't even considered. But then it is a breakdown at every level by the receiving states of laundered wealth. So that's something that one could certainly consider. Yet I think this is where criminal law is actually very beneficial to capitalism because it does permit for the creation of scapegoats.
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B
Yeah, thank you for that. As I was listening to you sort of unpack the deficiencies of criminal law, I was trying to recall the next chapter of the book, which is about human rights. And it appeared to me that the same deficiencies could be attached also to human rights. In that there is a neglect towards systems, there is a sense of closing the, you know, closing the case. That's a question of the past. How do you think the human rights response to the resource curse or the Pathology of Plenty compares to the carceral response to this issue?
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A
So the Pain of Plenty, which is the chapter where I speak on human rights, has been the most difficult one to write for me. It's maybe the shortest chapter, but also the one that I worked on for the longest amount of time, in part because I kept oscillating between different positions. I am fully aware of the limits of human rights law, so I understand the individualization of rights. I understand the degree to which even some of the major cases that were won against petroleum companies, and one can certainly start with the agony case I understand how important they are and at the same time how they were often also associated with symbolic gestures. And that's of course very problematic at the same time. And this comes from my experience of working with marginalized communities or being an opportunity observer to some of the ways in which they negotiated their rights towards power, be it in the form of company executives or government representatives. I saw human rights was the language they relied on because it was an established language that was recognized both by government officials and by company executives, whether or not they were expected. That language is of course a different story, but at least they recognized it. And as such, human rights did fulfill a certain vital function. This being said, I again, this is, you see me oscillating to this day, remain very skeptical of the, let's say, over emphasizing of the victories won with the environmentalization of human rights. So I'm not necessarily sure that this will provide an answer to some of the structural reasons of planned misery, to use Susan Knox's term.
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B
Yeah, you're quite right in that for lots of communities that suffer the miseries of law, human rights, even if not human rights law, human rights continues to have such emancipatory value. They turn to human rights because it renders them legible. It renders, it makes them feel seen. It has an immediate kind of normative currency, an affective currency. There's something about human rights that draws people to it in a way that sometimes I fear that it also disallows people from seeing how it sort of feeds into capitalist modernity. Right. Like you, you sometimes, because of the appeal allure, the humanitarian allure of human rights, you, you can also perfectly easily not see that human rights is the reason why development and culture being being pitted as being in opposition to each other in the same way. As you see in the book, something I was wondering about now, just as you were speaking, and in the course of this conversation we have spoken about anti money laundering laws, anti corruption laws, the legal regime that operates in times of occupation, human rights carcerality. How are these legal conversations, according to you, still taking place in silos? Or do you see within the context of natural resource extraction, do you see people speaking across these sites of containment? Because ultimately these legal fields are sites of containment. They have their own misconstrued assumptions, they have their own Eurocentric baggages. In what ways do they speak across to each other? Or are they still kind of happy to be in their own bracketed away echo chambers?
- [53:30]
A
Well, I'm trying not to overgeneralize it. Something here But I do think that thinking in silos is what law trains us to do, and not only trains us lawyers or scholars to do, but also those implementing laws or overseeing them. Right. So I don't think that a financial oversight authority is thinking of massive money laundering schemes as a cause for marginalization and inequality, but they're thinking of it as a problem for the financial markets. The same way that I sometimes get the sense of that human rights organizations are overly focused on putting everything into human rights terms, neglecting attention to other fields of law that are effectively causing what they then describe as human rights violation to begin with. So you see a lot of advocacy for the inclusion of human rights provisions in set and set agreements and whatnot. But there sometimes is less attention given to, let's say, the scrutiny of a production sharing agreement or the effects it has on, let's say, schooling for girls, which again, it seems unrelated. But then empirically we have seen correlations with resource extraction and education, for instance. So I sometimes wished that advocacy organizations focusing on education or gender based violence placed greater emphasis on understanding the structures that led to less education, past opportunities being available to those they seek empower.
- [55:50]
B
No, that's, that's absolutely right, that there is, you know, intersectionality has become such a buzzword, but you really do need sort of intersectorality. You need people speaking against the discipline, against legal fields, against siloization in whatever way they can. And just on that note, I know the book ends quite hopefully and you also speak about wanting to point to different directions of contemporary work that engage with how we can identify but also undo these hierarchical constellations, as you say, through international law. I wanted to ask you if you could speak to us about what some of these directions would look like.
- [56:33]
A
So it's really a very, very short conclusion and I think hint at different, different sensitivities in the broadest sense. So one sense or sensitivity, I should say, is that the structure of international law, the silos in which we think the separation of human rights from environment, from investment, from whatnot, permits for the operation of inherent logics. And I find, you know, proposals of Earth law or post human feminism and the brilliant work that Emily Jones has done on that, I find those concepts and those types of analysis really help helpful to break down what you have now just very eloquently described as intersectorality. And though I don't use this term, which is because I wasn't aware of it until speaking to you, that's where the future lies, right? And I'm just really pointing towards the work of other colleagues who have had the courage, courage to really put forward proposals of helping us get away from our siloed ways of thinking.
- [58:09]
B
Yeah, no, that's. I often, when I do legal writing or legal thinking, I often speak about, sort of wonder how behind we are actually as legal thinkers. There's so much the body of work outside of us is so rich and as you say, it's so radical, but oftentimes sort of, you know, branded as mad or irrelevant simply because it may not be addressing an idea in the same kind of conventional vocabulary as we are used to recognizing it. So just as you say, subaltern traditions of thinking against the law have been flourishing for ages. And it's, it's just about learning about those traditions late, but finally and figuring out how you can mainstreamize that way of thinking against disciplinary boundaries, epistemic boundaries. Maybe the last thing to ask you is what are your own future directions? What research wise, where are you headed from here?
- [59:07]
A
Yeah, so I'm currently pursuing my law by Color code project, which looks at structural racism in food and ecosystems. So I've somewhat shifted to paying closer attention to one of the, well, structuring forces that permit for world order to be the state that it is, and that is racism, which is both a cause but also certainly a technique of maintaining world order. But a separate project, though related, is the one that seeks to give a platform to voices and ideas from the global South. So I don't think that I'm necessarily very well placed as someone who's been educated in law and in Western legal traditions to propose radical new ways of thinking. However, and that's where using our privilege comes in. As someone based in the west and at a Western institution, I certainly have the privilege of creating venues for those ideas to be seen and to be heard. And some of the projects that I've been doing, including a forthcoming edited poem called Social Hierarchies and Catastrophic Times, is dedicated to this project. So this came out of a conference that I co organized with Prage Surana and Tokhiva in India in 2024, with participants being primarily from the global South. And the idea of this volume is really to give a platform for research, you know, inspired by some of the. Some of the patterns that we've identified inflicting post colonial governments. Thank you so much, Liz.
- [61:21]
B
This was such a lovely chat and the book is wonderful. It's such an incisive story. There's so much to take away and I'd only encourage our listeners to not read it only once. Keep, keep turning back to the book. But it was more, even more incisive and helpful to sort of listen to you speak about what went behind, what was behind the scenes of the book. So thank you for taking the time to chat with all of us.