Skip to content

Workshop

Exploring exploitation

The law and politics of human-nature relations and multispecies encounters

Add to calendar 2024-03-08 09:30 2024-03-08 17:00 Europe/Rome Exploring exploitation Emeroteca Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD
Print

Scheduled dates

Mar 08 2024

09:30 - 17:00 CET

Emeroteca, Badia Fiesolana

Organised by

This MWP Multidisciplinary Research Workshop brings together historians and legal scholars who, while focusing on different dimensions of exploitation and exploitative structures, share common concerns regarding the future of life on a planet facing a plethora of political, environmental, and social crises.
Exploitation, broadly understood as the act of profitably and unfairly using someone or something, has long been central to the study of international law. This is primarily true with respect to the exploitation of humans by other humans. However, amidst a rapidly unfolding ecological crisis, practices as diverse as cattle farming and deep seabed mining are exacerbating ongoing ecological and humanitarian catastrophes, bringing the exploitative relationships between humans and non-human nature into sharper focus. As we witness the collapse of ecosystems, the effects of climate change, the mass extinction of species, and other, equally gruesome phenomena of everyday life in 2024, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to these more-than-human relationships. The escalating pressures on our planet reveal previously invisible and invisibilised interdependencies between human and non-human relationships. Exploitative structures of various kinds not only provide the backdrop against which these ‘multispecies encounters’ unfold but are at their very core. At the same time, the exploitation of nature and ‘natural resources’ continues to be justified as part of an agenda of ‘economic development’, with limited exploration of the intersections between both phenomena. In this respect, unifying narratives such as "We the human species" as well as conflicts in and between international environmental law and human rights law tend to miss the point that the Anthropocene is characterised by a synchronicity of exploitation of nature by humans and of humans by other humans. The resulting conflicts are preconfigured by extractivist relationships and racialised distinctions between different groups.

Attachments

Related events