Will you be at ICON•S in Dublin? Come join our interest group on Monday, June 29, 11:30-13:00: Planetary Thinking and the Law: Earth, Space, and Place, organized with Laura Mai, Gabriele Wadlig, Yirong Sun, Timo Zandstra.

We look forward to sharing our work, hearing about yours, and discussing the potentials and pitfalls of “planetary thinking” for shared futures.

*Planetary Thinking and the Law: Earth, Space, and Place*

Planetary thinking is now salient to legal thought, to many areas of agentic lawyering and mobilization, and to what many others are now expecting lawyers to consider and contribute to. Earth systems, planetary boundaries, tipping points, what has commonly been referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’, more-than-human rights, inter-generational, remedial, and multi-species justice, and reparations are all among the active agendas which, in one way or another, reference the planetary. Beyond the Earth, the increasing use of Earth orbits for observation systems and connectivity satellites, together with geopolitical, scientific, and commercial interests in other planetary bodies, such as visions for lunar and Martian settlements and search for extraterrestrial life, unsettle Earth-space ordering motifs. Theoretical perspectives (and increasingly legal and political claims) variously focus on practices of datafication, aggregation, map-making, and modelling as modes of representing, enacting, and ordering the planetary, raising questions of epistemic justice and recognition, as well as the power relations underlying systems of supply and demand. Temporizing concepts such as ‘resilience’, ‘anticipation’, ‘repair’, and ‘transformation’ operate as forms of localization or emergent scaled interventions with the shifting or disavowal of legal responsibility – a law continuously deferred. Meanwhile, studies of infrastructures, platforms, and planning extend to material registers, revealing deliberate and tolerated planetary interventions (geo-engineering being one example, accumulating and redistributing waste and toxic residues another) as well as their encounters with the unplanned and unintended – often with thin and insufficient governance structures.

Analytically, these developments unsettle structuring concepts which have, traditionally, sustained legal orders (think of ‘global’, ‘inter- and transnational’, and ‘local’ , the territorial legal grammar, and implicit assumptions of agency to govern and control). In a critical register, scholars across law, geography, media, post-colonial, and environmental studies have normatively interrogated the politics of historical and ongoing domination, exploitation, extraction, and violence, as they manifest both in the articulation of ‘the planetary’ and in proposed interventions into the planetary. This Interest Group aims to draw together diverse developments across these areas, as a forum for exchange, learning, and perhaps new common projects. All are welcome!!