RESOURCE STRUGGLES & INTERNATIONAL LAW
This project will examine how international law both shapes, and is shaped by, struggles over natural resources in periods of global transformation. It aims generate new knowledge about how international law is used by different actors to assert their authority and power over resources and to secure access to natural resources. Expected outcomes include empirical analyses of three key periods of global transformation in the twentieth century and a socio-legal analysis of how international law is shaping struggles over natural resources during the current transition to a net zero world. This should provide significant benefits by assisting countries to better navigate the current legal, geopolitical and economic transformations.
LECTURE SERIES: RESOURCE STRUGGLE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
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. More details coming soon!
READING GROUP: MAKING & UNMAKING NATURAL RESOURCES
The reading group “Making and Unmaking Natural Resources” is convened by Dr Julia Dehm and Anna Saunders (ANU) and will meet forthnightly on Tuesdays at 10am AEDT.
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.
PROJECT CONVENOR
Julia Dehm
Associate Professor, La Trobe University
Julia Dehm is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Law, La Trobe University Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor) and Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (edited with Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.
MAILING LIST
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC). Dr Dehm is the recipient of an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE240100131) funded by the Australian Government.
Image by Caitlin Murphy