MAKING & UNMAKING NATURAL RESOURCES READING GROUP

Convened by Julia Dehm (La Trobe) and Anna Saunders (ANU)

Description

The susceptibility of natural resources to extraction has often been treated in legal scholarship as either an inherent physical attribute, or as a product of market demand or technological advance. In this reading group, we begin from the premise that natural resources are not given, but rather the product of social, economic, cultural and legal work. We seek to understand the mutually constitutive relationship between international law and natural resources. We attend to how international law is enrolled in the mechanisms through which nature is transformed into ‘resources’, and how struggles for the use, control and distribution of resources have shaped the development of international legal concepts and doctrines. We explore the distinctive forms and practices that have been involved in these processes as well as strategies of legal contestation over resource extraction and distribution — and their possibilities and limits — in the contemporary world.

Our reading over the course of the year will be broadly oriented toward three aims. First, analysing the various processes, techniques and relations through which ‘natural resources’ have been constructed. Second, reflecting on how forms of international law, and concepts of sovereignty, space and subjecthood, have evolved together with, or been influenced by, extractive practices. Third, exploring legal strategies for contesting the ownership or distribution of resources, as well as more radical strategies for unmaking natural resources or for making them otherwise. Throughout, we will collectively reflect on the potential of these lines of inquiry for our own research projects, and discuss new directions for scholarship on international law and resource struggles.

Schedule

Australian Eastern Daylight time: 10am Tuesdays fortnightly from 11 March 2025, via Zoom (with winter break)

Convenor contact details:

Julia Dehm (j.dehm [at] latrobe [dot] edu [dot] au)

Anna Saunders (anna.saunders [at] anu [dot] edu [dot] au)

Program (pdf)

Central European Time: 16:00-18:00 Wednesdays forthnightly from 12 March 2025, hybrid

Convenor contact details:

Miriam Heipertz (m.heipertz [at] uva [dot] nl)

Amy Crean (a.m.crean [at] uva [dot] nl

Program (pdf)

Introductory session: Imagining

We will open with a discussion of how the topic of the reading group intersects with participants’ research.

Elizabeth Emma Ferry and Mandana E Limber, ‘Timely Assets’ in Elizabeth Emma Ferry and Mandana E Limber (eds), Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and their Temporalities (University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

Julia Dehm, ‘Natural Resources’ in K De Feyter, G E Türkelli and S de Moerloose (eds), Encyclopaedia of Law and Development (Edward Elgar, 2021) 221.

Those joining may also be interested in looking at one of the following texts from prominent international law scholars addressed to the question of natural resources:

Rosalyn Higgins, Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It (OUP 1995) ch 8, ‘Natural Resources and International Norms’.

Ian Brownlie, ‘Legal Status of Natural Resources in International Law (Some Aspects)’ (1979) 162 Recueil des cours 245.

Oscar Schachter, Sharing the World’s Resources (Columbia University Press 1997).

Michael Bothe, ‘Environment, Development, Resources’ (2005) 318 Recueil des cours 333.

Part I: Making Natural Resources

Grabbing

Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘Ocean Floor Grab: International Law and the Making of an Extractive Imaginary’ (2019) 30(2) European Journal of International Law 573.

Matthew Shutzer, ‘Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870–1975’ (2021) 63(2) Comparative Studies in History and Society 400.

Contracting

Dayna N Scott, ‘Extraction Contracting: The Struggle for Control of Indigenous Lands’ (2020) 119(2) South Atlantic Quarterly 269-99.

Hannah Appel, The Licit Life of Capitalism: Oil In Equatorial Guinea (Duke University Press, 2019), ch 3, ‘The Contract’.

Financing

Isabel Feichtner, ‘Law of Natural Resource Extraction and Money as Key to Understanding Global Political Economy and Potential for Its Transformation’ in Poul F. Kjaer (ed) The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020) 152.

Caleb Wellum, ‘Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) ch 5, ‘”Markets Born of Shocks”: NYMEX Oil Futures, Financialization, and Neoliberal Narratives’.

Further Reading:

Adam Hanieh, ‘The Commodities Fetish? Financialisation and Finance Capital in the US Oil Industry’ (2021) 29 Historical Materialism 70.

Jessica Dempsey et al, Exporting Extinction: How the International Financial System Constrains Biodiverse Futures (Biodiversity Capital Research Collective, 2024).

Valuing

Liliana Doganova, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books 2024) ch V, ‘Discounting and the State-Investor Relationship: From Owning to Valuing Chilean Copper’.

Oliver Hailes, ‘Valuation of Compensation in Fossil Fuel Phase-Out Disputes’ in Anja Ipp and Annette Magnusson (eds), Investment Arbitration and Climate Change (Kluwer Law International 2024) 139.

Securing

Lorenzo Cotula, ‘”Critical Minerals”: International Economic Law in a Global Resource Rush’ (2023) 15(2) Trade, Law and Development 19.

Thea Riofrancos, ‘The Security–Sustainability Nexus: Lithium Onshoring in the Global North’ (2023) 23(1) Global Environmental Politics 20.

Further Reading:

Itty Abraham, ‘Rare Earths: The Cold War in the Annals of Travancore’ in Gabrielle Hecht (ed) Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (MIT Press, 2011).

Part II: Resources Making International Law

State-making

Naosuke Mukoyama, Fuelling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States (Cambridge University Press, 2025) ‘Introduction’.

Jeremy Walker and Matthew Johnson ‘On Mineral Sovereignty: Towards a Political Theory of Geological Power’ (2018) 45 Energy Research & Social Science 56.

Further Reading:

Gavin Bridge, ‘Resource Geographies II: The Resource-State Nexus’ (2013) Progress in Human Geography 1.

[WINTER BREAK]

Territory

Andreas Friedolin Lingg, ‘Creating Space: Capitalism, Mining, and the Evolution of Central European Economic Thought’ (2023) 55(4) History of Political Economy 715.

Gavin Bridge, ‘Territory, Now in 3D!’ (2013) 34 Political Geography 55.

Further Reading:

Stuart Elden, ‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power’ (2013) 34 Political Geography 35.

Bruce Braun, ‘Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada’ (2000) 7(1) Ecumene 7.

Market

Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Verso, 2020), ch 1, ‘Openings: The Mine as Transnational Infrastructure’.

Adam Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso, 2024), ch 1 ‘Approaching Oil’.

Part III: Unmaking Natural Resources?

Cartelisation

Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC In the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2019), ch 2 ‘OPEC’.

Christopher RW Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch 8 ‘The OPEC Syndrome’.

Embargo

Ibrahim Shihata, ‘Destination Embargo of Arab Oil: Its Legality under International Law’ (1974) 68 American Journal of International Law 591.

Umair Ghori, ‘An Epic Mess: “Exhaustible Natural Resources” and the Future of Export Restraints after the China—Rare Earths Decision’ (2015) 16(2) Melbourne Journal of International Law 398.

Waste and Circularity

Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke University Press, 2023), Introduction ‘The Racial Contract Is Technopolitical’.

Olivier Barsalou and Michael Hennessy Picard, ‘International Environmental Law In an Era of Globalized Waste’ (2018) 17 Chinese Journal of International Law 887.

Stranding

Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024) chapter 4 ‘The Political Economy of Asset Stranding (or, Blood and Gore Come to Wall Street)’.

Andreas Folkers, ‘Calculative Futures between Climate and Finance: A Tragedy of Multiple Horizons’ (2024) Sociological Review (online).

Kin-Making

Zoe Todd, ‘Fossil Fuels and Fossil Kin: An Environmental Kin Study of Weaponised Fossil Kin and Alberta’s So-Called “Energy Resources Heritage”’ (2022) Antipode (online).

Emily Jones, Cristian van Eijk and Gina Heathcote, ‘The Common Heritage of Kin-Kind’ in Matilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones (eds) International Law and Posthuman Theory (Routledge, 2024) 105.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award DE240100131

Image by Caitlin Murphy