Land, Law, and Hierarchies of extraction and exploitation

We have the unique opportunity to welcome several exceptional international human rights experts working on the relationship of international law to capitalism, displacement, dispossession, environmental and climate justice, feminism, housing, labor, occupation and racism in different regions such as Latin America, Palestine, India and Puerto Rico. We invite activists, educators, community organizers, artists, cultural workers and civil society representatives to discuss the relationship between the exploitation of people and nature and the role of law. 

Socio-ecological fabrics within human communities, and in their interactions with more-than-human communities, are at a breaking point. Capitalism’s insatiable appetite for its own growth and expansion has led to the dramatic deterioration of relations of kinship between humankind and the web of life, which have dissolved into relations of extraction and exploitation, premised not only on hierarchical relations between humans and nature, but also between humans along, racial, gendered, classist, castist, religious, ageist, and ableist lines. Whereas it is conventional wisdom that capitalism requires legal rules that uphold classist structures when it comes to relations of labour and production, the configuration between socio-ecological hierarchies, law, and capitalism is not nearly as well understood. These dynamics are what we wish to explore in this exchange between academics, grassroots activists, and civil society actors.  

In a world café format, we invite reflections on the operation of law in processes of displacement and replacement of Indigenous communities and lands’ original stewards, and that investigates the transformation of small-scale and subsistence farming into industrial food production. The purpose of this format is to facilitate a genuine exchange between lived knowledge and scholarly legal knowledge in the hopes that this will strengthen activist efforts of both communities. Hopefully, this encounter can also serve as a moment of alliance building. 

Participants are: Christine Schwöbel‑Patel, Zeina Jallad, Neve Gordon, T.S.F. (Tim) Lindgren, Dimitri Van Den Meersche, Usha Ramanathan, Mónica A. Jiménez and Lys Kulamadayil.