The International Law Working Group is delighted to host Lys Kulamadayil to present her book.
The open access book ‘The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law' critically examines the role international law plays in post-colonial countries, which primarily rely on the exploitation of their natural resources for economic and human development.
Since the 1990s, expressions such as the 'resource curse' and the 'paradox of plenty' have been associated with unequal patterns of power and wealth distribution in post-colonial and neo-colonial countries. They have also been applied to the ecological and social costs of natural resources exploitation, and the planetary costs of mineral resources-based production and consumption patterns.
Taking various resource-curse and paradox-of-plenty theories as a starting point, the book illustrates how the law's role in resource-cursed countries is at once constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive. It does so by engaging with various fields of public international law. The book: revisits how rights and principles such as sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination were applied in decolonisation processes; studies the proliferation of international treaties protecting foreign property rights; and zooms in on various contract models used in the mineral resources sector to evaluate the distributional choices of cost and revenue. This will be important reading for scholars in the fields of international law and international development.
About the Author:
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.
Prior to joining the Geneva Graduate Institute, she was a Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University and conducted research as an SNSF early-postdoc mobility scholar at the Amsterdam Center for International Law and served in the humanitarian affairs division of the German Federal Foreign Office. After completing her legal training in Germany, she obtained an LLM from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from the Geneva Graduate Institute.
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