Daniel Matthews on Reframing Sovereignty For The Anthropocene (Transnational Legal Theory)

"Reframing Sovereignty For The Anthropocene" 

Daniel Matthews

Transnational Legal Theory

Published Online: 2021-5-20

Abstract: Writing on sovereignty has failed to address the challenges associated with planetary climatic change. As debates about the nature of sovereignty return to the fore, there remains little attention paid to how our newly unstable environmental conditions might call for sovereignty to be imagined anew. Drawing on Neil Walker’s account of the ‘sovereignty frame’–as a means of understanding the enduring relevance of sovereignty for contemporary law and politics – this article understands sovereignty as an aesthetic device which constitutively inures political subjects to the ecological forces and relations central to the climate crisis and the broader challenges associated with the Anthropocene. In taking up the task of reframing sovereignty in a way that properly attends to these issues, this article introduces how sovereignty’s spaces, subjects and modes of governance might be reimagined in light of the Anthropocene thesis and the various disruptions it heralds for social life.

Dr Daniel Matthews Featured in "The Sovereign State Feels the Heat" (HKU Bulletin)

"The Sovereign State Feels the Heat"
HKU Bulletin

Volume 22 No. 1

Published in November 2020

However you look at it, the modern state is ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change.

Dr Daniel Matthews of the Faculty of Law is an admirer of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who defined sovereignty as it is commonly understood: escaping nature under the security and protection of the state through a social contract. Hobbes was writing 400 years ago and today, the cracks are showing.

     “Hobbes was extraordinarily creative in rethinking how we define political authority,” Dr Matthews said. “But even though sovereignty is back big time, with Brexit and the rise of populism being examples, I see that as a real dead end for dealing with the challenges of climate change. 

    “Climate change does not respect state borders and many of its effects are non-anthropocentric, impacting on a range of non-human forces and relations described by geology and ecology. Modern politics is really bad at being sensitive to these forces.” 

     Dr Matthews has been tracking these shortfalls as a scholar of the history and theory of sovereignty and sees problems in all three components that define sovereignty: territorial, populational and institutional.

... 

     Getting people to see the world differently, both in the visual and contemplative sense, will not be easy. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a glimpse of the challenges. “We’ve seen a reassertion of national borders, concentration of power in the hands of the executive, greater emphasis on who gets the privilege of citizenship and who doesn’t. I fear we will see repeats of this in future climatic crises,” he said. 

     Dr Matthews hearkens back to Hobbes, who was also exploring how politics could be reorganised in a changing world. “This idea that we have to deny our attachments to the natural world in order to create a distinct political sphere is precisely what needs to be reversed. But the way things are going at the moment doesn’t make me massively hopeful,” he said.
     “Radical changes need to take place. It can’t be business as usual. Exactly how these changes will be instituted, no one knows. In my own work, I’m hoping to point out the limitations of the existing coordinates that define modern sovereignty and encourage critical and creative thinking about the changing nature of political authority in the context of climatic transformation.”
      The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. Click here to read the full text. 

Daniel Matthews' From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re-Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic Regime (MLR)

"From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re-Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic Regime"

Daniel Matthews

Modern Law Review 

July 2019, Vol 82, Issue 4, pp 665-691

Abstract: In a widely read study, Saskia Sassen uses the territory, authority, rights (TAR) framework in order to analyse the transformation of social life in the West from ‘medieval’ to ‘global’ assemblages. In the context of rapid, planetary climatic change – with many claiming that we have entered a new and climatically uncertain epoch known as the Anthropocene – does the TAR framework provide the relevant conceptual resources required to understand the ‘Anthropocenic’ assemblages of the present? This article examines the limitations of Sassen’s TAR framework, arguing that alterative theoretical resources are required in order to grasp the changing dynamics of social life in the context of the new climatic regime.  Click here to download the paper from SSRN.

Fry and Amesheva on the Relationship Between International Climate Change and International Health Laws (Fletcher Forum)

"Cleaved International Law: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship Between International Climate Change Law and International Health Law"

James D Fry and Inna Amesheva (PhD candidate)
The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs
Winter 2016, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp 73-98

Abstract: Climate change is intertwined with global human health, and the corresponding branches of law simultaneously conflict with and complement each other. The authors take a comparative approach to the dynamic relationship between international climate change law and international health law, demonstrating their interaction as applied to integrated challenges such as climate change alleviation and the 2015 Paris Agreement.  Click here to download the article.

Jolene Lin Comments on First Successful Climate Negligence Case

"The First Successful Climate Negligence Case: A Comment on Urgenda Foundation v. The State of the Netherlands"

Jolene Lin
Climate Law
(2015), Volume 5, Issue 1 (forthcoming)

Abstract: On 24 June 2015, the Hague District Court issued the long-awaited judgment in the case of Urgenda Foundation v the State of the Netherlands. The decision has been heralded as a historical landmark ruling, and rightly so. The Urgenda decision marks the first time ever that a court has ordered a government of the day to curb a State’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Globally, it is also the first case in which the tort of negligence has been successfully used to hold a State liable for its failure to adequately mitigate climate change. This case commentary begins by briefly setting out some background on climate litigation. It then sets out the facts of the case and analyses key aspects of the decision. It concludes with some remarks about the significance of the decision.  Click here to download the case comment.