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Re-storying laws for the Anthropocene : rights, obligations and an ethics of encounter
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Birrell, Kathleen and Matthews, Daniel (2020) Re-storying laws for the Anthropocene : rights, obligations and an ethics of encounter. Law and Critique, 31 (3). pp. 275-292. doi:10.1007/s10978-020-09274-8 ISSN 0957-8536.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09274-8
Abstract
The Anthropocene prompts renewed critical reflection on some of the central tenets of modern thought including narratives of ‘progress’, the privileging of the nation state, and the universalist rendering of the human. In this context it is striking that ‘rights’, a quintessentially modern mode of articulating normativity, are often presumed to have an enduring relevance in the contemporary moment, exemplified in renewed recourse to rights in their attribution to parts of the nonhuman world. Our intervention contemplates ways in which the apparent disorientations of the Anthropocene might allow for a generative reorientation of some of these presuppositions. We critically consider the institutional and discursive limitations of rights and the ambivalence of rights language, and argue that the monism that rights so often implies limits the capacity to foster generative encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal traditions. We develop a critical discourse of obligation, understood here to both precede and exceed the rights-duty correlate so central to modern law. An attentiveness to the priority of obligation, we argue, might allow us to foreground an ethics of encounter between traditions, to examine the limits of modernity’s legal and political imaginary, and to pursue a ‘radical re-storying’ of laws for the Anthropocene.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Law and Critique | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Springer Nature | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0957-8536 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | November 2020 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 31 | ||||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 275-292 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10978-020-09274-8 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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