RESOURCE STRUGGLES & INTERNATIONAL LAW LECTURE SERIES
The lecture series ”Resource Struggles and International Law” convened by Dr Julia Dehm and Caitlin Murphy (MLS), seeks to foster interdisciplinary and historical discussions about how international law both shapes, and is shaped by, struggles over natural resources. It explores how international law is used by different actors to assert their authority and power over resources and to secure access to natural resources both in areas beyond national jurisdiction and within the territory of nation states, as well as how such efforts are contested and resisted. Our hope is that by better understanding how international law has enabled and promoted resource extraction we can better navigate the current transition to a low carbon world and collectively build futures that are socially and ecologically just.
Dr Cait Storr (Melb) , ‘ Extraction as Security: The Third Wave of Critical Minerals’
Dr George Forji Amin (Bolton), ‘ International Law and the History of Resource Extraction in Africa’
Prof Sigrid Boysen (Helmut Schmidt), ‘Postcolonial Constellation: Natural Resources and Modern International Law’
Dr Lys Kulamadayil (IHEID) , ‘ The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law’
Dr Fergus Green (UCL), ‘ Fossil Fuel Litigation: International Progress on Legal and Factual Questions ’
Register (in-person): https://events.humanitix.com/fossil-fuel-litigation-international-progress-on-legal-and-factual-questions
Register (online): https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/1C5CeBE6TGG13-EUgl_U2Q
Prof Umut Özsu (Carleton), ‘ Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960 – 82’
Dr Cait Storr (Melb) , ‘ Extraction as Security: The Third Wave of Critical Minerals’
For the third time in a century, the concept of critical minerals has become a central theme in international trade and security discourse. Critical minerals discourse first arose as a theme in US defence and foreign policy debates in the 1930s and 1940s. It returned to prominence again in the mid-1970s through to mid-1980s, in the wake of the 1970s oil crises. In the post-pandemic era, the concept of minerals criticality has become ubiquitous in debates concerning the global energy transition on the one hand, and increasing geopolitical instability on the other. This paper examines the evolution of the concept of critical minerals over these three periods. It does so in order to identify, first, the contexts in which critical minerals discourse has emerged as a vehicle for debate about the objectives of industrial and foreign policy; and secondly, the functions – and interests – that critical minerals discourse has tended to serve.
Dr Cait Storr
Senior Lecturer, Melbourne Law School
Dr Cait Storr is a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School. She researches the law, history and politics of property, territory and jurisdiction, with a focus on struggles for control over natural resources. She has published on the history of international administration, the concept of territory in international law, imperialism in the Pacific, decolonisation, environmental law, and on property and concepts of the commons. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Melbourne Law School Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis and the University of Melbourne Chancellor’s Prize (2018), and is published as a monograph, International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Cait’s research is informed by her professional experience working in government and private legal practice. She is a qualified legal practitioner, with experience at a major law firm in resource projects, environment and planning, and corporate governance, and has worked as a legal consultant for the United Nations Development Program.
Dr George Forji Amin (Bolton), ‘ International Law and the History of Resource Extraction in Africa’
International Law and the History of Resource Extraction in Africa: Capital Accumulation and Underdevelopment, 1450-1918 (Routledge, 2023) examines how European-driven doctrines of trade, property, and international law legitimized the exploitation of African resources, leading to patterns of underdevelopment that persist today. Dr Forgi Amin’s analysis places the colonial period within the framework of capitalism’s global expansion, highlighting the legal structures that allowed foreign powers to establish control over African lands and resources from the 15th century onward. Through doctrines that sanctioned European intervention, African nations were systematically dispossessed of land and resources, creating an economic dependency that, according to the author, set the foundation for lasting underdevelopment. Informed by TWAIL and Marxist scholarship, the book argues that colonialism and the legal justifications provided by international law facilitated a one-sided flow of wealth and resources from Africa to Europe. By studying this early period, the author seeks to explain how these economic and legal dynamics shaped the continent’s political economy well into the modern era. Additionally, the book argues that these historical practices laid the groundwork for modern forms of neocolonial control, where global institutions and trade agreements continue to limit the economic sovereignty of African nations. This perspective aligns with critiques from dependency theory and world-systems theory, which view historical capitalist expansion as a root cause of continued underdevelopment in formerly colonized regions.
Dr George Forji Amin
Lecturer, School of Law, University of Bolton
Dr. George Forji Amin is a Lecturer in Law at the School of Law – University of Bolton. His research primarily focuses on Public International Law, International Economic Law, Political Economy, Legal History, Economic History, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), and African Studies. He graduated from the University of Helsinki (Finland) with a PhD in Public International Law, a MPhil (Licentiate in Law) in Public International Law, as well a Master of Laws (LL.M) in Public International Law – with Distinction. He is also a holder of a Postgraduate Diploma (Maîtrise en Droit) with specialisation in Common Law, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Law (Licence en Droit) – both obtained from the University of Dschang (Cameroon) & Best Student Award. He has taught at several universities including: The University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, Liverpool John Moores University, and University of Helsinki.
Prof Sigrid Boysen (Helmut Schmidt), ‘Postcolonial Constellation: Natural Resources and Modern International Law’
Most people look for the justification for international environmental law in the placelessness of its subject matter: the ecological question cannot be dealt with by sovereign states alone. The regulatory problems evident in climate protection law, for example, can only be solved through more legalization and constitutionalization. But international environmental law is by no means placeless; it has a very specific geography. It is not an overcoming of international law, but rather the embodiment of the central global political shift in the 20th century – the dissolution of classical imperialism. Instead we need to reconstruct the terms and institutes of today’s international environmental law genealogically. What once served to stabilize trade policy uncertainties after the end of colonial rule still divides the earth today into industrialized zones and their external nature.
Prof Sigrid Boysen
Professor of International and European Law, Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg
Sigrid Boysen is a Professor of International and European Law at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and currently (2023/24) Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute (Law Department). She serves as judge at the Hamburg State Constitutional Court, as editor-in-chief of the international law review “Archiv des Völkerrechts” and on the board of the Institute for European Integration, Europa-Kolleg Hamburg. She has held positions as Associate Professor at Free University Berlin and Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University (2014) and Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (2021-2022). Her research focuses on international law, with a particular focus on the theory of international law, international economic and resources law and constitutional law. Her current research project “International Law and its Environments” aims at rethinking the foundations of international and EU environmental law.
Dr Lys Kulamadayil (IHEID) , ‘ The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law’
This book argues that international law impacts on the resource curse, but that this impact can be unexpected and (at times) unpredictable. It illustrates how the law’s role in resource-cursed countries is at once constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive. The author draws on different fields of public international law to show how law can be both implicated in, and responsive to, the resource curse.
Dr Lys Kulamadayil
National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow, IHEID
Dr Lys Kulamadayil is an international law scholar and a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow, serving as principal investigator of the project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law. Her research interests span extractivism, mineral resource governance, the legal regulation of food and ecosystems, human rights, economic law, legal theory and philosophy, as well as international law’s role in social hierarchies, particularly with regard to racism and ableism. She has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including the London Review of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the Journal of the History of International Law. She is also the author of the monograph The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law.
Dr Fergus Green (UCL), ‘ Fossil Fuel Litigation: International Progress on Legal and Factual Questions ’
This is a hybrid event, held online and at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybrook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building, level 2).
Register (in-person): https://events.humanitix.com/fossil-fuel-litigation-international-progress-on-legal-and-factual-questions
Register (online): https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/1C5CeBE6TGG13-EUgl_U2Q
Fossil fuel companies around the world are producing ever more fossil fuels and investing billions into new extraction projects, locking in future fossil fuel production volumes grossly inconsistent with achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. New fossil fuel production projects have long faced litigation on planning, environmental and administrative law grounds. Increasingly, novel legal theories are being employed in strategic suits against fossil fuel companies – the recent decision of the Court of Appeal of the Hague in Shell v Milieudefensie being an important example. In this seminar, Dr Fergus Green will provide an overview of the landscape of fossil fuel litigation, explore key legal and factual questions that commonly arise in such litigation, and discuss recent developments in the UK, Europe and under international law.
Dr Fergus Green
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London
Dr Fergus Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London. He works on questions at the intersection of political economy, political theory, public policy and law concerning the drivers of and responses to climate change, including projects on fossil fuel governance, just transitions, and popular decarbonisation. He has published in a wide range of academic journals, including Science, the American Political Science Review, Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Nature Climate Change, and the Melbourne Journal of International Law. He is a three-time chapter co-author of UNEP’s fossil fuel Production Gap Report and co-created the Redline database to support litigation against fossil fuel projects. He has also been a consultant to the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, and an expert advisor to Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) in the appeal stage of its landmark corporate climate case against Shell. Before entering academia, Fergus worked as a lawyer in Australia specialising in climate change, energy, environmental and water law, and subsequently as a Policy Analyst & Research Advisor to Professor Nicholas Stern at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
Prof Umut Özsu (Carleton), ‘ Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960 – 82’
After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of ‘new states’ in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, Umut Özsu recounts the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century’s last major wave of decolonization. Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly’s landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, the book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from ‘First World’ and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the ‘Third World’ and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.
Professor Umut Özsu
Professor of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University
Umut Özsu is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. His research interests lie mainly in public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (OUP, 2015) and Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (CUP, 2023).