RESOURCE STRUGGLES & INTERNATIONAL LAW UNDER OCCUPATION
Online Lecture Series – Semester 2, 2025
Convened by Julia Dehm (La Trobe), Sahiba Maqbool (La Trobe) and Caitlin Murphy (Melbourne)
This online lecture series seeks to foster interdisciplinary and historically-inflected discussions about how international law both shapes, and is shaped by, struggles over natural resources. In Semester 2, the lecture series will focus on resources struggles in the context of occupation around the world. We will collectively explore how struggles over resource plunder and exploitation shape the dynamics of occupation, and how peoples under occupation are contesting extraction and asserting ownership and sovereignty over resources as part of a broader resistance movements. Speakers will examine resource struggles under occupation in Greenland, West Papua, Palestine, Kashmir, Bougainville and Western Sahara to consider the different forms of political contestation they produce and how resource struggles might be mobilised to enliven political possibilities for self-determination and decolonisation.
Professor Christine Schwöbel Patel (Warwick), ‘From Gaza to Greenland: Green Frontiers and the Laws of Extraction’
22 September, 6pm AEST/9am BST
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/y8fp5v7HQCWrDAJDoFDS_g
Dr Sophie Chao (Sydney), ‘Rethinking Struggles over “Resources” through the lens of Multispecies Justice: Insights from Indigenous communities in the West Papuan Plantation Nexus’
30 September, 11am AEST/6pm PDT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/o6WTujcVQYS7q2Rg_BeD1w
Professor Michael Lynk (Western Ontario), ‘Palestine, Occupation and the Plunder of Natural Resources’
6 October, 6pm ET/ 7 October, 9am AEDT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/iZgT1yYOQ5a8KAGreMa52A
Dr Omer Aijazi (Manchester), ‘Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir’
13 October, 6pm AEST/9am BST
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/xqfuemxjSK-0XD5VOXKaYw
Professor Kristian Laslett (Ulster), ‘Australia’s Hidden War in the Pacific: Resources Struggles in Bougainville’
27 October, 10am AEDT/5pm PT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/TnwP1999Tba5QGhdLrRrQA
Dr Randi Irwin (Newcastle), ‘Selling the Future State: Making Property for Sahrawi Sovereignty in Western Sahara’
10 November, 1pm AEDT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/t6M0XaOlRT2Eaj17SsOoiQ
Dr Hadeel Abu Hussein (Oxford), ‘Resources Under Occupation: Resources, Land, Palestine and TWAIL’
Details TBC
Supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award DE240100131 and the International and Comparative Law Cluster, La Trobe Law School.
Prof Christine Schwöbel Patel, ‘From Greenland to Gaza: Green Frontiers and the Laws of Extraction’
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/y8fp5v7HQCWrDAJDoFDS_g
Two hotspots in contemporary colonial fantasies are also frontiers in the green energy race: Gaza and Greenland. Israel’s post-destruction vision for Gaza—ambitiously dubbed ‘Gaza 2035’—plans an electric vehicle hub in the north, following the forced expulsion and erasure of Palestinian life. Meanwhile, amid US President Trump’s push to claim Greenland, mining giants are racing to tap critical minerals essential for EVs, solar panels, and other green tech. Gaza and Greenland stand at the edge of one of the 21st century’s most violent extractive industries. This is not just imperialist fantasy; it’s a brutal legacy of extraction, exploitation, and dispossession, driven by what I call ‘the laws of extraction.’ In my talk, I will break down three key phases of extraction and the laws that enable them: Frontier Law, Extractivist Colony Law, and Sacrifice Zone Law.
Professor Christine Schwöbel-Patel
Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick
In her research and teaching, Professor Schwöbel-Patel adopts a critical position on contemporary issues of public international law, whether that is global constitutionalism, international criminal law, or climate justice. Her current project aims to uncover the role of law in extractivism and the creation of new energy sacrifice zones in the green transition. Christine’s critique is informed by a political economy, post-colonial, feminist, and aesthetics lens. With this, she reveals the international legal power dynamics and their entanglement with material conditions that influence biases of race, class, and gender. Professor Schwöbel-Patel has published over 40 peer-reviewed publications, as well as two monographs (Marketing Global Justice, Cambridge University Press 2021 and Global Constitutionalism in International Legal Perspective, Martinus Nijhoff 2011), and two edited collections (Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, Counterpress 2024) and Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law, Routledge 2014). Her forthcoming book Green Frontiers: The Laws of Extraction in the Green Transition is under contract with Verso.
Dr Sophie Chao, ‘Rethinking struggles over “resources” through the lens of multispecies justice: Insights from Indigenous communities in the West Papuan plantation nexus’
30 September, 11am AEST/6pm PT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/o6WTujcVQYS7q2Rg_BeD1w
This talk draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and advocacy engagements conducted in the Indonesian-occupied region of West Papua to examine the grassroots philosophies, protocols, and practices undergirding Indigenous struggles for justice in the face of large-scale deforestation and industrial oil palm plantation expansion. Specifically, it centers how Indigenous understandings and pursuits of multispecies justice draw into question the framing of matter as inert or passive “resource,” inviting us instead to reimagine non-human entities themselves as rightful subjects of justice, as objects of harm, and potentially also as agents of violence. The talk considers how multispecies justice manifests on the Papuan plantation frontier through a particular focus on the introduced cash crop of oil palm, the native species displaced or otherwise threatened by plantation proliferation, and the indexicalities between human and non-human forms of violence and vulnerability that shape Papuan forms of resistance, situating local discourses and debates around these questions within Papuans’ broader pursuit of self-determination and sovereignty as Indigenous Peoples living in the teeth of racial colonial capitalism.
Dr Sophie Chao
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Sydney
Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022) and Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022), all published by Duke University Press. She previously worked for the Indigenous rights organization, Forest Peoples Programme. Sophie is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia.
Professor Michael Lynk, ‘Palestine, Occupation and the Plunder of Natural Resources’
6 October 6pm ET/ 7 October 9am AEDT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/iZgT1yYOQ5a8KAGreMa52A
The confiscation of water, minerals, quarry materials, gas deposits and, most importantly, land in the occupied Palestinian territories has been well documented and condemned. The rules of occupation and the significant restrictions which they place on the occupying power, including the prohibition against pillage and the plunder of the natural resources in the territory under occupation, have been routinely violated by Israel with no meaningful measures of accountability or sanctions. In this seminar, we hear from Professor Michael Lynk, former Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967, on Palestine, occupation and the plunder of natural resources.
Professor Michael Lynk
Professor Emeritus of Law, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
Michael Lynk is Professor Emeritus of Law, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. He joined the Faculty in 1999, and has taught courses in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. He has written widely on the issues of Canadian labour law and human rights law. In March 2016, Professor Lynk was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as the 7th Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967. During his six years as Special Rapporteur, he regularly addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva and the 3rd Committee of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Professor Lynk’s scholarship and his UN reports have been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, the international Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations General Assembly.
Dr Omer Aijazi (Manchester), ‘Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir’
13 October, 6pm AEST/9am BST
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/xqfuemxjSK-0XD5VOXKaYw
Dr Omer Aijazi
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Disaster Studies, University of Manchester
Professor Kristian Laslett (Ulster), ‘Australia’s Hidden War in the Pacific: Resources Struggles in Bougainville’
27 October, 10am AEDT/5pm PT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/TnwP1999Tba5QGhdLrRrQA
On Bougainville geology, geopolitics, and markets aligned, giving birth to a large copper and gold mine in the 1970s, against the express wishes of the Crown Prince Range’s owners. The mine’s operation presaged a period of significant social change and environmental destruction on Bougainville, that erupted in a social movement to close the Rio Tinto mine. When this turned into arm struggle, the Hawke-Keating government funded, armed, and co-led one of the most violent counter-insurgency campaigns in the Pacific, that took up to 20,000 lives on Bougainville. Australia discretely exited the conflict as the rebel army obtained the upper hand in 1991/92, and then later fashioned itself as a peacemaker and partner in the reconstruction process. However, it has in the background lobbied against legal efforts by victims of the mine and war to obtain justice over the past 20 years. Meanwhile new struggles begin on Bougainville over the role of resources in its future. This lecture will document Australia’s secret war and its aftermath, through a decolonial lens.
Professor Kristian Lasslett
Professor of Criminology, Ulster University
Kristian Lasslett is Professor of Criminology in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at Ulster University. His research focuses on elite networks, corruption, and resources, using ethnographic and investigative methods. He examines how malign activity is enacted and concealed through network structure, corporate vehicles, and jurisdictional arbitrage. His work has regional depth in Central Asia and the Pacific, alongside analysis of global offshore centres. He is joint editor-in-chief of State Crime and Producer of the Documentaries Ophir and the Colonial Syndrome.
Dr Randi Irwin (Newcastle) ‘Selling the future state: making property for Sahrawi sovereignty in Western Sahara’
10 November 1pm AEDT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/t6M0XaOlRT2Eaj17SsOoiQ
Sahrawi refugees and the Sahrawi state-in-exile have sought to assert their claims to Western Sahara, Africa’s last colony, while exiled in refugee camps in Algeria. Through an examination of the Sahrawi state’s use of deferred natural resource contracts, this seminar explores Sahrawi political action prior to and in anticipation of the referendum on self-determination. I suggest that Sahrawi-led natural resource contracts operate as a technical financial device that constructs property and enables political action in the anticipation of sovereignty. Through these contracts, the state works to simultaneously produce both itself and its sovereignty. This seminar explores the new political and economic forms generated by these contracts, which subsequently create a political terrain by which otherwise inaccessible, seemingly off-limits, resources become productive spaces of opportunity for the development and exercise of sovereignty in the present.
Dr Randi Irwin
Lecturer School of Humanities, Creative Ind and Social Sci (Sociology and Anthropology)
Dr Randi Irwin received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology in May 2019 from The New School for Social Research in New York. She is an environmental and legal anthropologist working with the Sahrawi refugee community in North Africa and she draws on this research to inform her teaching in anthropology, social change, and development at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At its core, her research attends to the intersections of resource extraction, land rights, and the intersections of protest and law. Her primary research, which was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), was conducted with Sahrawi refugees and the Sahrawi state-in-exile. This work has focused on Sahrawi-led political and legal challenges to natural resource exploitation in Western Sahara as part of a broader strategy to bring about the territory’s decolonisation as it remains the last colony in Africa. Her research is the first to focus on Sahrawi-led natural resource contracts as a mode of projecting a future, decolonised Western Sahara and puts forth a research practice focused on economic strategies that build a near-future with different territorial and political configurations.
Dr Hadeel Abu Hussein, ‘Embedded Oppression: Land & Planning Policies against Palestinians Under Israel Law’
11 November 6pm ET/12 November 10am AEDT
Register: https://latrobe.zoom.us/meeting/register/6QeTuDZmSv-D4mrxR0wsrQ
This paper explores the legal strategies employed by states to assert sovereignty over land in settler colonial contexts, focusing on discriminatory land regimes and policies that entrench settler dominance. These legal frameworks are designed to control land and property, leading to mass demolitions and forced evictions. Furthermore, they restrict access to land and resources for marginalized groups, with inadequate planning schemes contributing to the systemic exclusion of ethnic communities. Through planning laws, the state enforces spatial segregation, a dynamic that aligns with the broader objectives of settler colonialism. The settler colonial land regime fuels displacement by exploiting the absence of registered land ownership, creating legal uncertainty and heightening the risk of dispossession. The erosion of property rights, combined with economic and political marginalization, serves to maintain the existing social hierarchies and reinforce a segregated spatial order. This entrenches injustices and perpetuates further displacement, while also maintaining the socio-political dominance of the settler class. In the case of East Jerusalem, these dynamics are manifest in the ongoing struggle for control and sovereignty between Palestinians and Israel. This struggle brings into focus critical questions of international law and politics, particularly regarding the applicability of human rights law and international humanitarian law in occupied territories As such, the legal apparatus of the state, through planning restrictions and the denial of building permits, operates as a tool for land appropriation, furthering settlements expansion. These actions can be understood as part of a broader strategy of deepening apartheid-like conditions, whereby the displacement of native populations serves the objective of enhancing spatial control and reinforcing settler sovereignty. This case not only exemplifies the challenges of enforcing international law in occupied territories but also underscores the role of legal geography in understanding how law is spatially deployed to maintain power in settler colonial regimes.
Dr Hadeel Abu Hussein
Dr Hadeel Abu Hussein holds a PhD in Law from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research is exploring the evolution of land law within ethnic states and international law how states are constructing land regime to exercise the exclusion of the minority groups, engaging with the insights of legal geography theory. She has been a Bonavero Fellow with Oxford Law Faculty, and Senior Research Fellow with the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law. She is the author of The Struggle for Land Under Israeli Law: An Architecture of Exclusion (Routledge 2022).