Frontiers as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

This episode foregrounds how frontier spaces are legally, materially, and discursively produced, which subjectivities it fosters, and which modes of capitalist production it enables and forecloses. This entails an attentiveness to the forms of refusal and resistance that the violence and extractivism of frontier spaces invite. What are the lineages and legacies of frontier thinking in histories of racial capitalism, and how are these intertwined with regimes of (international) legal ordering? How is frontier imagination currently extended to new locations and aligned with new rationalities – including those attuned to the so-called ‘green economy’? Which forms of political counter-mobilization do these frontier imaginaries invite?

The speakers:

Christine Schwöbel-Patel is Professor and co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies at Warwick Law School. She was a Leverhulme Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University (2023-2024). She is the author of Marketing Global Justice (CUP, 2021) and co-editor of Aesthetics & Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2023). Christine’s current project is on ‘Legal Pipelines of the Green Transition’, which studies the relationship between international law, the green transition, and capitalism. More than merely a metaphor, Christine uses the notion of ‘legal pipeline’ as a material and discursive infrastructure of extractive capitalism. ‘Are lawyers instrumental in spinning the web, or are they trapped by legal pipelines – by key dynamics between law and capitalism that support and legitimise the extractivist concentration of wealth?’ – Christine asks. How to ‘blow up’ and undo the legal pipelines of capital if there is to be a ‘just’ green transition is the main inquiry of this project.

Cait Storr is a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School. She is the author of International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law (CUP, 2020) and of many articles that touch upon the relationship between property, territory, and jurisdiction, with a focus on decolonial struggles for legal control over natural resources, including in domains beyond national jurisdiction. Her current research project, ‘Australia’s Critical Minerals Strategy: Implications in National and International Law’, examines the evolution of critical minerals discourse over the twentieth century, and analyses how the geopolitical objectives of the major powers in the energy transition are both entrenching and transforming colonial relations at the extractive frontier.

Event Resources:

·      Christine Schwöbel-Patel, ‘Legal Pipelines of the Green Transition’ (ongoing research project).

·      Christine Schwöbel-Patel, ‘(Undoing) Legal Pipelines?’ (ongoing research project).

·      Christine Schwöbel-Patel, ‘Real (E)State: Valuing a Nation under Imperial Rentier Capitalism’, in Isabel Feichtner and Geoff Gordon (eds), Constitutions of Value (Routledge, 2023).

·      ‘Our History Is the Future with Nick Estes’ (The Dig podcast, 2019).

·      Miranda Johnson and Cait Storr, ‘Australia as Empire’ in Peter Cane, Lisa Ford and Mark McMillan (eds.), Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

·      Cait Storr, ‘Denaturalizing the Concept of Territory in International Law’ in Julia Dehm and Usha Natarajan (eds.) Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

·      Cait Storr, ‘“Imperium in Imperio”: Sub-Imperialism and the Recognition of Australian Sovereignty in International Law’ (2018) 19(1) Melbourne Journal of International Law 335.