From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re‐Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic Regime
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12426 |
| Author | Daniel Matthews |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
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Modern Law Review
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2230.12426
From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages:
Re-Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the
New Climatic Regime
Daniel Matthews∗
In a widely read study, Saskia Sassen uses the ter ritory,authority, rights (TAR)framework in order to
analyse the transformation of social life in the Westfrom ‘medieval’ to ‘global’ assemblages. In the
context of rapid, planetary climatic change – with many claiming that we haveentered a new and
climatically uncertain epoch known as the Anthropocene – does the TAR framework provide
the relevant conceptual resources required to understand the ‘Anthropocenic’ assemblages of
the present? This article examines the limitations of Sassen’s TAR framework, arguing that
alterative theoretical resources are required in order to grasp the changing dynamics of social
life in the context of the new climatic regime.
Mass extinctions, the melting of ice caps, rapid acidification of the oceans, and
extreme weather events all signal the g ravity of the contemporar y climate crisis.
So great has the human impact on the earth’s natural systems become that many
suggest that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene (from
anthropos ‘human’ and kainos ‘recent’). This postulated ‘human age’ speaks to the
dominant role that human activity – in the form of production, consumption
and habitation practices – now has within the planetary climate system. The
vast scale of human activity is now thought to rival the ‘great forces of nature
in its imprint and functioning of the earth system’1and the trace of these
activities will be readable within the earth’s deep history for millennia to come.
Whilst this new epoch is yet to be formally recognised within the official
fora of stratigraphic and geological science, the contention that human action
has taken on a planetary significance, able to shape the earth’s biogeochemical
systems and processes, has stirred widespread debate across the natural sciences,
social sciences and humanities, testifying to the fact that the newly volatile
climatic system heralded by the Anthropocene thesis presents human civilisation
with unprecedented challenges. And yet, in the context of legal and political
∗Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Hong Kong. This article arises out of ‘The Aesthetics
of Sovereignty in the Age of the Anthropocene’ research project, funded by the Research Grants
Council of Hong Kong, General Research Fund (Early Career Scheme). An early version of this
paper was presented at the Glasgow Legal Theory Seminar Series in April 2018, thanks to all those
involved for the invitation and discussion. Particular thanks to Lilian Moncr ieff, Lindsay Farmer and
Marco Goldoni for their encouragement and advice. Thanks also to Scott Veitch and Alex Schwartz
who both provided much needed feedback on subsequent drafts. Any errors are, of course,my own.
1 W. Steffen et al, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’ (2011) 369 Philo-
sophical Transactions of the Royal Society 842.
C2019 The Author.The Moder n Law Review C2019 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2019) 82(4) MLR 665–691
Published by JohnWiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 101 Station Landing, Medford, MA 02155, USA
From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages
theory, these challenges are only beg inning to be addressed.2As accounts of
the changing nature of legal and political forms in the prevailing conditions
of globalisation continue to proliferate, commensurate energy has not been
dedicated to the challenges augured by the ‘dark side’ of globalisation: the
reality of a dramatically changing planet.
In recent years vast literatures have formed that assess alterations to social life
under the conditions of neoliberal globalisation. This scholarship has generally
focused on changing governmental competencies, tracking the various powers
that have been ceded to a range of non-state actors. Studies have traced the
plurality of jurisdictions that have become more or less unmoored from state
law; the rise of supranational structures that ‘pool’ state sovereignty; and
the increasing significance of private powerin the administration of once public
services like education, health, prisons and security.3Though offering an anal-
ysis of purportedly new developments in law and politics, these debates rely on
a conceptual framing that continues to bear the distinctive hallmarks of modern
political thought. Neil Walker makes this point explicit in his survey of ‘global
law’,4arguing that postnational constitutionalism (with its emphasis on the
constitutive, social and cultural forcesthat produce legitimacy) and postnational
public law (with its emphasis on the forms of constituted regulatory schemes in
new ‘state-like’ sub- and supra-national institutions) both remain committed
to an expressly modernist horizon. These globalist schemes champion
individual autonomy and equality whilst seeking to limit any encroachment
on such freedom and equality through general norms and objective standards.5
The enduring force of this modern heritage goes fur ther still. As Walker
comments:
2 There are, of course, exceptions. Within politics and political theory see (indicatively): J. Purdy,
After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018);
E. Johnson and H. Morehouse (eds), ‘After the Anthropocene: Politics and Geog raphic Inquiry
for a New Epoch’ (2014) 38 Progress in Human Geography 439; E. L. Povinelli, Geontologies: A
Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); W. E. Connolly, Facing
the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017); within international law and legal theory see (indicatively): D. Vidas et al,‘Whatis
the Anthropocene – and why is it relevant to international law?’ (2016) 25 Yearbook of Interna-
tional Environmental Law 3; D. Vidas, ‘The Anthropocene and the International Law of the Sea’
(2011) 369 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 909; A. Grear, ‘Deconstructing Anthropos:
A Critical Legal Reflection on “Anthropocentric” Law and Anthropocene “Humanity”’ (2015)
Law and Critique 225; L. J. Kotz´
e(ed),Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene (Ox-
ford: Hart, 2017); M. Davies, Unlimited Law: Materialism, Pluralism and Legal Theory (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2017).
3 On these themes, see (indicatively): S.Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996); Y. Dezalay and B. G. Garth, Dealing in Virtue:
International Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order (Chicago, Ill: Chicago
University Press, 1996); N.Walker (ed), Sovereignty in Transition: Essays in European Law (London:
Hart, 2003); W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2014);
W. B r o w n , Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, NY: Zone Books,
2017).
4 N. Walker, ‘Postnational Constitutionalism and Postnational Public Law: A Tale of Two Neolo-
gisms’ (2012) 3 Transnational Legal Theory 61; N. Walker, Intimations of Global Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
5 Walker, ‘Postnational Constitutionalism’ ibid, 84.
666 C2019 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2019 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2019) 82(4) MLR 665–691
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