The Postcölonial Constellation. Natural Resources in Modem International Law

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sigrid Boysen
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432237610

The struggle for the distribution and control of natural resources lies at the heart of the development of international law and international environmental law in the last decades. Here, the basic narrative commonly tells a story of progress: a new body of law that - in the face of global environmental problems - transcends the limits of national jurisdictions and represents the international community's interest in the protection and preservation of the world’s resources. Despite evident regulatory problems that affect all areas of international environmental law and climate change law in particular, this seemingly cosmopolitan ideology has proven remarkably resilient. The study sets out to show that this implicit theory of legitimation underlying international environmental law is fundamentally flawed in relation to both genealogy and substance. The intertwinement of international environmental and general international law follows a different structural logic. Rather than a self-transcendence of the nation-state, it has to be seen as manifestation of the central shift in world politics during the 20th century: the end of classical imperialism.Originally emerged as a means to mitigate the economic-political uncertainties following the dissolution of colonial rule and to secure the North’s demand of natural resources of the South, international environmental law is characterized by fundamental ambivalences. Its specific normativity is simultaneously shaped by imperial roots and anti-imperialist claims, by emancipatory promises and an instrumental-economic rationality. These ambivalences also shape its key paradigms, such as "growth" or "development", which implement an institutional and normative separation of political and economic equality. This separation not only formally shapes the international legal order and its institutions, but is deeply inscribed.in the legal distribution of natural resources. In this perspective, the traditional opposition between international environmental law (as an expression of the international community’s interest in the protection of the global environment) and international economic law (as an expression of an authoritarian liberalism of free trade) is misleading. Both regimes share the same rationale that finds its paradigmatic expression in a steadily increasing commodification of natural resources. The book analyses the central role the law of natural resources has played in establishing the great regulatory paradigms of international law since the period of decolonization. The disillusioning state of today's international environmental and economic law mirrors the normative disillusionment of postcolonial international law itself.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants