International Law and Posthuman Theory

Assembling a series of voices from across the field, this book demonstrates how posthuman theory can be employed to better understand and tackle some of the challenges faced by contemporary international law.

With the vast environmental devastation being caused by climate change, the increasing use of artificial intelligence by international legal actors and the need for international law to face up to its colonial past, international law needs to change. But in regulating and preserving a stable global order in which states act as its main subjects, the traditional sources of international law ? international legal statutes, customary international law, historical precedents and general principles of law ? create a framework that slows down its capacity to act on contemporary challenges, and to imagine futures yet to come. In response, this collection maintains that posthuman theory can be used to better address the challenges faced by contemporary international law. Covering a wide array of contemporary topics ? including environmental law, the law of the sea, colonialism, human rights, conflict and the impact of science and technology ? it is the first book to bring new and emerging research on posthuman theory and international law together into one volume.

This book?s posthuman engagement with central international legal debates, prefaced by the leading scholar in the field of posthuman theory, provides a perfect resource for students and scholars in international law, as well as critical and socio-legal theorists and others with interests in posthuman thought, technology, colonialism and ecology.

Chapters 9 and 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

List of Contributors ix

Preface by Rosi Braidotti xii

Introduction to International Law and Posthuman

Theory 1

Emily Jones and Matilda Arvidsson

PART 1

Methodological and Theoretical Frontiers 29

1 Posthuman Feminism as a Theoretical and Methodological Approach to International Law 31

Matilda Arvidsson

2 Flat Ontology and Differentiation: In Defense of Bennett’s Vital Materialism, and Some Thoughts Toward Decolonial New Materialisms for International Law 60

Anna Grear

3 Aesthetics, New Materialism and Legal Matter: The ‘Art’ of Anglo-American Colonialism 83

Delaney Mitchell

4 The Common Heritage of Kin-Kind 105

Emily Jones, Cristian van Eijk and Gina Heathcote

PART 2

Political Economy, History and Colonialism 137

5 A Monument to E.G. Wakefield: New and Historical Materialist Dialogues for a Posthuman International Law 139

Jessie Hohmann and Christine Schwobel-Patel

6 Neither National nor International: A Posthumanist Retelling of Tax Sovereignty 161

Hedvig Larka

7 After Homo Narrans: Botany, International Law and Senegambia in Early Racial Capitalist Worldmaking 180

Vanja Hamzić

PART 3

The Environment and the Nonhuman 201

8 Terraqueous Feminisms and the International Law of the Sea 203

Gina Heathcote

9 Becoming Common – Ecological Resistance, Refusal, Reparation 222

Marie Petersmann

10 The War on Drugs as the War on the Nonhuman 244

Kojo Koram and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

11 Supplanting Anthropocentric Legalities: Can the Rule of Law Tolerate Intensive Animal Agriculture? 258

Maneesha Deckha

12 Will Human Rights Save the Anthropos from the Anthropocene? Rights-Based Environmental Protection Strategies and Posthuman Theory 279

Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp

Index 305

Matilda Arvidsson is Associate Professor in International Law and Assistant Senior Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Emily Jones is an NUAcT Fellow based at Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University, UK.