International Law and Posthuman Theory

By Emily Jones and Matilda Arvidsson

By Anthony Rosa courtesy of Unsplash

Given the vast environmental devastation being caused by climate change, the increasing use of artificial intelligence by international legal actors and the need for international law to face up to its colonial past, international law needs to change. But in regulating and preserving a stable global order in which states act as its main subjects, the traditional sources of international law – international legal statutes, customary international law, historical precedents, and general principles of law – create a framework that slows down its capacity to act on contemporary challenges and to imagine futures yet to come.

In our recently published edited collection, International Law and Posthuman Theory, we maintain that posthuman theory can be used to better address the challenges faced by contemporary international law. Following the work of Rosi Braidotti (who is also the author of the book’s preface), posthuman theory is a body of thought that seeks to dismantle hierarchies between humans, such as gender, race and class, while also seeking to dismantle the hierarchical positioning of the human over the nonhuman, including nonhuman animals and ecosystems. Covering a wide array of contemporary topics – including environmental law, the law of the sea, colonialism, human rights, conflict, and the impact of science and technology – it is the first book to bring new and emerging research on posthuman theory and international law together into one volume.

As the editors of this collection, we are pleased to showcase our work and that of our authors on the Planet Politics Institute Blog. Many of the chapters in the collection speak directly to environmental issues, most notably those in the section of the book titled ‘The Environment and the Nonhuman.’ What we found interesting, when reflecting on the works, is how each of them, in some way, are concerned with the environment – be that through discussions of land, property and ownership, or through a focus on the links between “old” and “new” materialism or on racial capitalism. Interestingly, it seems that using a critical posthuman lens ensures that the environment, whether framed as nature itself or more broadly as matter, remains at the forefront of thought even when analysing topics that do not, on the face of it, seem to have much to do with environmental questions. This, for us, is one of the strengths of posthuman theory, in that it allows for a bringing together of multiple vectors of oppression and multiple issues of critical concern, allowing for links to be drawn between coloniality, capitalism, and gender and the impact of those structures on the environment, legally, conceptually, and practically.

The blog series showcases four of the book’s chapters. Vanja Hamzić explores the intricate relationship between the making of the human, with all its inclusions and exclusions, and the making of nature. Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp provides a critical posthuman analysis of human rights and the environment, with a focus on the Dutch Urgenda case of 2019. Using a focus on intensive animal farming Maneesha Deckha examines how the rule of law is too little applied to animal rights, and Gina Heathcote discusses her posthuman feminist analysis of the law of the sea. Each of these chapters engage with questions of the environment and planet politics in radically different ways, challenging what it means to think and do planet politics in the contemporary world.

Emily Jones is a NUAcT Fellow based in Newcastle Law School, UK, and the author of Feminist Theory and International Law: Posthuman Perspectives (Routledge 2023).

Matilda Arvidsson is an Associate Professor (docent) in international law, and an assistant Senior Lecturer in jurisprudence at the University of Gothenburg. She is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on AI, Law and Society (2025) and the series editor of the AI, Law and Society book series at Routledge.

This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0