Some Newly Emergent Geographies of Injustice: Boundaries and Borders in International Law 23 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 2016

23 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 15 (2016)
Some Newly Emergent Geographies of Injustice: Boundaries and Borders in International Law

handle is hein.journals/ijgls23 and id is 17 raw text is:

Some Newly Emergent Geographies of
Injustice: Boundaries and Borders in
International Law

UPENDRA BAXI*

ABSTRACT

This conversation examines the relationship between the boundaries
and borders in international law and the production of geographies of
injustice through the lens of the colonial epistemologies, especially of
private international law in the face of mass social disasters like the
archetypal Bhopal catastrophe. I also address the languages and logics
of coloniality and postcoloniality, as states of consciousness and social
organization, under the complex and contradictory unity of
neoliberalism.

INTRODUCTION

In this conversation, I focus on how geographies of human
rightlessnes are produced through law and jurisprudence. The
Anthropocene era now upon us challenges almost all basic premises of
human coexistence, though that constitutive notion is not free of
anxieties.' There is, however, no doubt that popular science, global
environmental policy and activism,2 and the media capture something

* Professor of Law in Development, University of Warwick. U.Baxi@warwick.ac.uk.
1. Technically, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is still working out
whether the term Anthropocene, originally proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene
Stormer, constitutes a new and autonomous geological time, or an extension of the
Holocene period of time (which lasted over eleven thousand years). See Paul J. Crutzen,
The Anthropocene, in EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: EMERGING ISSUES
AND PROBLEMS 13, 13-16 (Ehlers et al. eds., 2006); Paul J. Crutzen, Geology of Mankind,
415 NATURE 23 (2002).
2. On December 12, 2015, 195 countries arrived at the final twelve-page document of
the Paris Agreement (the fuller title being the Paris Agreement under the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change) to reduce emissions as part of the method for
reducing greenhouse gas. The members agreed to reduce their carbon output as soon as
possible and to do their best to keep global warming to well below 2 degrees C. Already,

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies Vol. 23 #1 (Winter 2016)
© Indiana University Maurer School of Law

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