Critical Legal Conference 2025
Critical Legal Conference 2025
Our Call for Papers is now open! The streams for #ExeterCLC are:
Freeze ‘n’ Seize: Polar law, extraction and resistance
Carl Schmitt’s Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony: Critical Reflections
Where’s the air? Rethinking Legal Geographies Beyond Land and Sea
The Revolutionary Constitution of Community on Land, Sea and Beyond
“Hope from the margins: Reframing the law through decolonial possibilities”
Treasures Found on Land, Treasures Lost at Sea: From Mining Regulations to Laws of Salvage
The Rule of Law, Colonialism, and Legal Silence: Rethinking Exception Across Land and Sea
Mutual dependencies, violence and vulnerabilities: Imagining International Law across terrains
Future Tense: Legal Imagination in Times of Acceleration
‘The border crossed us’: Border Crossings and the Law
Surviving on Fragile Ground: Stateless Rohingyas, Collapsing Ecologies and Environmental Justice
Please read the full description below. If you would like to participate – send short abstract of your proposed paper to the stream organisers (as mentioned under their stream heading).
Graduate students who seek a fee waiver must send their details as mentioned here, by the 1st of July 2025.
This is an in-person conference and we encourage you to register for the conference as soon as possible.
For any questions and inquiries, please write to us at: info-clc2025@exeter.ac.uk
Stream Descriptions
Convenors: Connal Parsley, Conor Heaney, and Margaret Davies (remote participation)
Contact: c.parsley@kent.ac.uk, c.heaney@kent.ac.uk, margaret.davies@flinders.edu.au
This stream invites critical legal scholars to explore the emerging notion of ‘econormativity’. The contemporary rise in interdisciplinary ecological thinking (see, eg, Hörl 2017) provides a new imperative to rethink the nature of normativity, meaning and value, and to reconsider how political and legal institutions approach their role in the ordering and guidance of political communities. Conventional Western understandings have often seen normativity as consisting of rules or principles of entirely human origin, guiding or evaluating the behaviour of humans in their interactions with each other and the world. The non-human or more-than-human world appears here only as an object—never as a participant with agency in the formation of normativity and its effects. By contrast, from an ‘econormative’ perspective, normativity is something inherently ecological: it is made through complex relations between co-evolving entities—encompassing material, technical, social, processual and aspects of life, and guiding their evolution.
We welcome paper proposals on any aspect of econormativity. Papers might address key thinkers or theoretical approaches; histories of ecological thought; conceptual resources for thinking across the bio-, techno-, and geo- in relation to ecology and/or normativity; the agency of non-human and more-than-human factors; critical histories of normativity and rationales for the turn to an ecological conception; experimental approaches to emerging concepts or theories; explorations of contemporary settings where new senses of normativity are emerging; and contemporary legal practices that challenge existing accounts of normativity and its relation to legality – among other possibilities.
We are particularly interested in papers addressing technology and the technosocial. From the point of view of technosocial systems, technologies are inherently normative since they are inextricable from broader social systems and their practices, behaviours and meanings (Kudina and van Poel 2024). Attention has recently been given to the interaction of technical and social aspects in such systems, their basic building blocks, and the disruptive potential of so-called Artificial Intelligence. Researchers have begun exploring the diverse modalities of the normativity of technology and of specific technosocial systems and processes (Hui 2023, Campolo and Schwerzmann 2023). While it is possible to underline differences between machinic, data-driven, code-based normativity on the one hand and legal normativity understood as ‘human’ and linguistic on the other, an econormative approach encourages us to interrogate the plural, overlapping and potentially incommensurable layers or registers of normativity in technosocial systems. We welcome submissions exploring those registers, the politico-legal dynamics of their interrelation, and their connection with value and evaluation in an evolving technical milieu (Gilbert Simondon).
This stream shares the conference theme’s ambition to ‘unravel how laws of the land and sea shape our political, social and environmental realities’. It adds to conversations initiated at workshops in Melbourne and Hong Kong through Connal Parsley’s UKRI-funded project The Future of Good Decisions, in partnership with Melbourne Law School, the ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong. Stream participants will also be invited to submit a proposal to contribute to an edited publication arising from this broader conversation.
Conveners: Romain Chuffart, Apostolos Tsiouvalas, Mana Tugend
Contact: romain@unak.is; apostolos.tsiouvalas@uit.no
Freeze. Seize. Do not move and be stable. The legal wants to fix where the earth moves. And the earth moves, the terrain evolves, sea becomes land, land becomes sea, and territory struggles to keep up. In our stream, we think about the Arctic as a case study for fluid, ever-shifting space that eludes the rigid delineations of international law and sovereignty/ies. In attempting to harness the Arctic’s shifting cryosphere, and volumetric oceans, the legal mind cannot but exoticise its movements and unwittingly standardise the region as a commodifiable frontier. As the Arctic’s intrinsic fluxes converge through an ever-more spiralling climate crisis, we propose to think along and against a three-partite typology of law-extraction-resistance:
/Law/ In 2008, the (now infamous) US Geological Survey report painted the Arctic as a treasure trove of hydrocarbons for petro-capitalist wet dreams. While debunked and qualified more than a few times, this report set the stage for renewed resource-driven aspirations in the region. From oil and gas to mineral deposits, natural resource governance in the Arctic raises questions about the role of law in shaping and enabling the development of the Arctic as a resource frontier and the commodification of climate change to accommodate capitalist imperatives. /Law/ normalises the [com]modification of the Arctic – whether terrestrial, liquid, terraqueous, or liminal – turning it into exploitable land and commodities, with expendable materialities.
/Extraction/ modifies as much as it [com]modifies. It positions the Arctic environment as a contested site where aspirations for autonomy confront the enduring legacies of capitalism and imperialism. Drawing on political economy and ecology critiques, as well as anti- and decolonial theory. Freeze’n’ Seize thinks along how Arctic infrastructural projects as well as potential environmental restoration tools facilitate extractive cycles of the different materialities of land and sea. Examples can also be found in developing technologies, legal and industrial, such as climate intervention that are arguably marketed opportunities for profit rather than addressing root causes of ecological and social vulnerability.
/Resistance/ How do we resist Arctic [com]modification? If power always functions in a relational manner with points of resistance being an intrinsic component of power relations,1 /resistance/ is omnipresent in Arctic extractive imaginaries. Resisting forces emerge from both living and non-living, solid and wet materialities. In that sense, the cryosphere itself (i.e., glaciers, ice shelves, sea ice, ice caps, and permafrost), which is neither sea nor land yet it is both, acts as a natural barrier to exploitation. Simultaneously, modes of living in the Arctic environment often appear incompatible (both spatio-legally and onto-epistemologically) with the applicable international law in the Arctic and its associated extractive logics. These human and non-human resistance movements can be placed in conversation with other resistance movements against extractivism and exploitation globally.
Convenor: Julia J.A. Shaw
Contact: jshaw@dmu.ac.uk
Innovations in information technology have removed physical, land and sea barriers to communication; effectively colonising the global landscape. New attachments have been forged by, and within, the pervasive and all-consuming replacement techno-culture even as the traditional territories of social interaction are dislocated, reducing human exchange to a residue. While a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains a prerequisite of interaction with virtual systems, recent developments in AI mean the virtual world is in the process of transforming the real world or, at least, subordinating it as slave to the machine world. One of the defining characteristics of modernity is the widespread displacement of the object world value of human activity and consciousness by emergent technologies. This has created an imbalance of power between humans and the posthuman, and consequently the epoch of the machine is both modern miracle and monster. Once controllable and controlled as our companion species, the techno-monster now determines the narrative which constructs and controls us.
Transitioning from physical to digital spaces, diasporic interpretations can help with navigating the multiple geographies of identify and difference in an era of techno-social disruption. As transnational and intercultural communities, diasporas have been either voluntarily or involuntarily displaced from an original homeland, regroup themselves and maintain their heritage in a new land. While diaspora, from the Greek word meaning to ‘scatter’, was formerly related to the exile of Jews from their historical homeland and redolent of enforced dispersion and suppression in the host country, the concept of diaspora can be understood not only as an ethnicity but also as a framework for the study of a particular process of community formation; as a new form of coexistence via the Web (Butler 2001: 192, 194). The physical experience of uprooting and resettling can be likened to the dissembling and reformation of social and legal identities when mediated by the distinctive structures and cultural processes of the digital space.
The resettlement of digital diasporas within new online imagined communities has nevertheless some positive connotations, for example, cultural de-territorialisation provides an opportunity for disparate mobile groups such as immigrants, refugees and travellers to create new identities out of multiple possible existences. Since such mobilities are fundamental to the reorganisation of space and time because of their capacity to re-order both, the online environment is a supreme exemplar of a change agent. In this way e-diasporas can provide a techno-social locus for new modes of expression and ways of thinking about oneself and others in the world; comprising a socially rather than geographically constructed ethnoscape, meaning the continuity and discontinuity of cultural practices between different spaces is given greater emphasis than their differences and disruptive properties.
The stream invites contributions which creatively explore the possibility of justice, social justice and even law in this era of disruptive technologies and tech transcendence, as an irreversible momentum propels us closer to the realisation of a posthuman future.
Convenors: Julia Chryssostalis and Jaco Barnard-Naudé
Contact: aj.barnard-naude@uct.ac.za
The stream is to provide a critical space for scholarly reflection on Schmitt’s 1942 short book by a number of invited participants who are working on and in postcolonial and decolonial jurisdictions. Our aim is to make the question of the Anthropocene and the legacy of spatial injustice perpetrated by colonialism in these jurisdictions the most prominent themes of the invited paper reflections which we aim to bring to publication with an edited collection for which we have already received the green light from Routledge. Our ancillary aim, therefore, is to bring the scholars who we are inviting to contribute to the edited collection together in Exeter for the three days of the conference to give them the opportunity to discuss their thoughts on their individual contributions for the collection in a critical deliberative space of peers. We are, in addition, open to paper proposals for the stream beyond our list of invited participants.
Convenors: Angela Smith and Regina Jefferies
Contact: angela.smith1@unsw.edu.au; r.jefferies@unsw.edu.au
Air is a critical element in the dynamic interplay between the terrestrial and the maritime in shaping and contesting legal regimes. Like land and sea, air is subject to competing claims and layered governance. Air is not only a medium of movement but a material and symbolic force interacting with legal regimes. To deepen our understanding of law’s entanglements with land and sea, we must take air seriously as a third element of legal geography. From the enclosure and partitioning of the skies to contestations over extraterrestrial resource extraction, legal systems have long sought to control the aerial domain.
Legal geographies of migration have primarily focused on land and sea, while air—as both a physical element and legal construct—remains undertheorised. Yet movement, displacement, and border enforcement occur in and through the air, governed by legal regimes around airspace, aviation, and atmosphere. Air is a contested space—where sovereignty, jurisdiction, and environmental governance intersect in ways that shape human and planetary futures. Extending legal inquiry into air helps us understand how law operates across elements, and how it is shaped by their material, affective, and symbolic dimensions.
Bringing air into critical legal thought on territory expands how we understand law’s reach and limits. We welcome contributions that interrogate air as both a site of legal governance and a force that unsettles legal orders. This stream invites papers engaging with air in its legal, political, and material dimensions, including:
• Migration, bordering and mobility via air travel, surveillance, and aerial removals
• How international aviation law intersects with the law of the sea and territorial sovereignty
• Search and rescue (SAR) zones, flight information regions (FIR), and aerial border enforcement
• Legal responses to air’s materiality—its fluidity, volatility, and transboundary nature
• Outer space governance, including space mining and extraterrestrial law
• Air pollution, atmospheric regulation, and climate justice
• Bushfires, smoke hazards, and air as a medium of crisis
• Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on air, atmosphere, and sovereignty
• Aerial/atmospheric imaginaries and critical theory
Convenors: Marcus De Matos, Carys Hughes, and Simon Thorpe (primary contact)
Contact: S.Thorpe@westminster.ac.uk
Modern conceptions of territory are inseparable from the tradition of liberal constitutionalism, the organising principle of European nation-states that came to define the territorialisation of the modern world. Revolutionary politics has long existed in opposition to constitutionalism, dominated on the one hand by instrumentalist conceptions of revolution that reject constitutionalism as an expression of bourgeois individualism, or by anarchist conceptions of revolution that reject constitutionalism as a form of hierarchical power-over. More recently, however, we see growing interest in prefigurative revolutionary strategies that acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly, a constitutional dimension to the immanent construction of other possible worlds. The radical democracy of the future must be constituted, and so it makes sense to read constitutionally the present-day prefiguration of that future society in social movements, parties, social centres and other constituent collectivities. The ideological vacuum of the current hegemonic interregnum only enhances the urgency of envisioning constitutional futures that might anchor the strategic directionality of radical-democratic struggle.
Meanwhile, reactionary ideologies like anarcho-capitalism and the ‘dark enlightenment’ are seeking to flee the democratic constraints of liberal constitutionalism and constitute their own communities on their own terms. Libertarian market-based legal systems that allow the flourishing of a supposed meritocracy are seeking the alter-territoriality of ‘seasteading’ or SpaceX company towns on Mars, or the extra-territoriality of the ‘network state’, where wealth can even more freely be converted into power. The emergence of oligarchic power out of the shadows and onto the frontlines of law and politics makes these reactionary constitutions only more deserving of study. Are there also constructive lessons that progressive revolutionary constitutionalisms might learn from these projects of autonomy and trustless blockchain governance? Whether on land, sea or beyond, the constitution of the future is more contested, more immediate and more necessary than ever.
The stream seeks papers addressing the various concerns of revolutionary constitutionalism, including:
Convenors: Kyriaki (Korina) Pavlidou, Jessica Elias, Clair Quentin, and Conor Heaney
Contact: kyriaki.pavlidou.11@alumni.ucl.ac.uk; je405@kent.ac.uk; c.quentin@lboro.ac.uk; c.heaney@kent.ac.uk
Dominant modes of thought presuppose things, made out of matter, bounded in space, persisting through time in their composition and arrangement, and complying (or failing to comply) with a set of putative norms that govern the categories to which things belong. Those modes of thought are substance-ontological, and substance ontology is friendly to capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, and other forms of domination and oppression. It underpins the commodity form, homo economicus, essentialised notions of race and sex, disabling conceptions of the body, and comparable exclusionary norms of all kinds.
This stream foregrounds alternative modes of thought which, grouped under the heading ‘process ontologies’, view things as abstractions from processes. To take for example the land and the sea – the two ‘things’ whose interrelation forms the inspiration for the theme of this conference – these ‘things’ may be better understood not as things at all but as abstractions from entangled geological, tectonic, hydrological, social-ecological, political, technological etc. processes. It is in view of the amenability of such (as it were) ‘natural’ phenomena to a process-ontological outlook that the natural sciences provide process ontologies with perhaps their most readily appreciable application. No more so is this the case, moreover, than in the science of that paradigmatically processual phenomenon, life itself. And indeed philosophy of biology is the discipline of one of today’s foremost exponents of process ontology, the University of Exeter’s own John Dupré.
The purpose of this stream is to share the uses that may be made of processual thinking/practice by critical legal scholars.
How might concepts of flux, of becoming, of process, be of use in understanding the juridical? How have process thinkers historically conceived of law within a broader process metaphysics and how can we situate these contributions within the history of legal thought? What phenomena emerge when law interacts with physical, chemical, geological, biological, reproductive, and dissipative processes? What theoretical tools may be drawn from the natural sciences, insofar as those sciences seek to understand a universe in constant motion, for use in critical legal scholarship? What does the impossibility of stasis – bearing in mind such inevitable features of existence as mortality and ever-increasing entropy – mean for the kinds of fixity and determinacy that law seemingly calls for? If, as process ontology suggests, there is no such thing as a thing, what might that mean for legal scholarship and for human social organisation more generally? Can (or should) process ontology be translated into a language legible to our political and legal institutions or are these institutions indelibly attached to substantialist notions? If we as legal scholars, like life itself, are to resist substance ontology, what does that mean for the legal form, legal relations, legal persons? Is the juridical an island of substance ontology in an ocean of flux, and if so what may be found by scholarly beachcombers on its shores?
Convenors: Irene Sacchetti and David Mckeown
Contact: david.mckeown.2019@bristol.ac.uk; irene.sacchetti2022@my.ntu.ac.uk
Amid intensifying symptoms of planetary ruination and ecological grief, we hold space for hope- not as a passive sentiment, but as an active refusal to surrender to despair or the inevitability of socio-ecological collapse. Across the globe, communities are resisting dominant legal orders rooted in extractivism, coloniality, and anthropocentrism. From these margins, new legal imaginaries are emerging — rooted in care, resistance, and decoloniality. It is from this place — where devastation meets radical possibility — that we ask: what might it mean to reframe law’s understanding of the boundaries between land and sea, human and more-than-human? Are other legal frameworks not only possible, but already in practice? If so, what do they look like, where do they flourish, and what futures might they bring into being?
This stream invites contributions that engage with the process of reframing, from a power-sensitive perspective, inspired by the work of activists and those engaged in decolonial resistance. Emphasising site specific contexts, we are especially interested in work contributing to theory, methodology, and praxis in this area. In doing so, we strive to demonstrate the plurality of legal worlds that exist within our planet and the need for a legal activation of the pluriverse – a world in which many worlds fit.
Central to this stream is an interest in the legal acts, solidarities, and imaginaries of those working at the margins and beyond the reach of hegemonic legal paradigms. We approach law as a contested terrain — one that can be repurposed, resisted, and reimagined through radical care and solidarities and efforts toward decolonising earthly relations.
As Bell Hooks reminds us, “marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation … it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” We invite contributions that explore law’s counter-hegemonic and emancipatory potential. Through this approach, law becomes not merely a site of governance and domination, but a space of contestation, transformation, and possibility.
In keeping with the spirit of the CLC, we welcome traditional academic papers, but we also strongly encourage creative, experimental, and exploratory formats.
Convenor: Mirosław M. Sadowski
Contact: miroslaw.sadowski@strath.ac.uk
The concept of ‘treasure’ has long captivated human imagination, encompassing not only glittering artifacts but also fossil fuels, ancient fossils, and cultural heritage buried on land, submerged beneath seas, or even deposited on celestial bodies like the Moon and Mars. From the estimated 3,000,000 shipwrecks awaiting salvage to mineral deposits fuelling global economies, treasures embody complex intersections of value, power, and history. Yet, in an era marked by environmental crises, decolonial movements, and ethical debates over heritage, the question arises: should these treasures be excavated, salvaged – or maybe left undisturbed? Law plays a pivotal role in shaping these dilemmas, governing mining rights, salvage operations, and the trade of cultural objects, yet it often fails to address deeper questions of justice, memory, and sustainability. This stream invites critical legal scholars, practitioners, and interdisciplinary researchers to interrogate the meanings of ‘treasure’ in the 21st century and law’s role in constructing, contesting, or deconstructing these meanings.
Drawing on the CLC 2025 theme, ‘Surf ‘n’ Turf: Critical Laws of the Land and Sea’, this stream explores how legal frameworks mediate relationships between people, states, corporations, and treasures, whether terrestrial, maritime, or extraterrestrial. We challenge participants to critically examine the colonial legacies embedded in laws of salvage and mining, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the environmental consequences of extraction. As environmentalists advocate for moratoriums on new fossil fuel projects and archaeologists champion non-invasive methods for studying heritage sites, this stream asks: How does law enable or constrain ethical approaches to treasure? Can legal imagination foster alternative futures where treasures are preserved rather than exploited?
We welcome submissions engaging with, but not limited to, the following questions:
· Legal regimes governing treasure found on land, including state claims and private rights.
· Maritime salvage laws, their deficiencies, and tensions within the law of the sea.
· Regulations on the sale and repatriation of cultural objects and fossils, including decolonial perspectives.
· Illicit trade in cultural artifacts and legal responses to looting and trafficking.
· Mining laws and their implications for environmental justice and indigenous rights.
· Extraterrestrial resource extraction and emerging legal frameworks for celestial heritage.
· Case studies illuminating conflicts over treasure, from shipwrecks to sacred sites.
· Theoretical explorations of treasure as a legal, cultural, or ecological concept.
This stream encourages diverse methodologies, including CLT, socio-legal studies, law and humanities, and interdisciplinary approaches, also drawing on archaeology, anthropology, or environmental studies. By fostering dialogue on law’s role in shaping the past, present, and future of treasure, we aim to reimagine legal frameworks that prioritize ethical stewardship over extraction and commodification, aligning with the CLC’s commitment to critical, inclusive, and transformative scholarship.
Convenors: Maria Federica Moscati, Sean Mulcahy
Contact: m.f.moscati@sussex.ac.uk; s.mulcahy@latrobe.edu.au
This stream, ‘Dance/Law’, seeks to generate new accounts of law and jurisprudence through the field of dance.
Dance/Law takes its cues from Sean Mulcahy’s ‘Dances with Laws’, which identifies styles of legal dance and choreographs the beginnings of an embodied jurisprudence of dance; is inflected by Lucy Finchett-Maddock’s concept of art/law in which the ‘/’ signals ‘entropic movement of change and uncertainty’; builds on the dancing pedagogy of Maria Federica Moscati in which dance is deployed to explore legal ideas; and is inspired by dancers and choreographers who explore the intersections of dance and law in practice. These and other scholar-practitioners pose potential possibilities for dance in relation to law and jurisprudence.
Now that it has taken its name and the semblance of a shape and manifesto, this stream invites contributors to consider what is meant by dance/law as jurisprudence; how it translates into practice-led methods of legal research and teaching; and how it plays out materially, metaphorically, and methodologically. This mode of interdisciplinary, practice-led jurisprudence marks this stream as a new turn in critical legal scholarship and charts new paths for future moves in research and practice on dance/law. This stream opens a space for the burgeoning new scholarship in the field of dance/law to consider how law is danced in a range of different genres and modes as a form and practice of jurisprudence.
In response to the conference theme, this stream explores dance/law on land and sea, drawing upon Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ concept of ‘hydrojustice’, Olivia Barr’s work connecting movement to land, and dance and choreographic work like Moss Te Ururangi Patterson’s ‘Home, Land, and Sea’, created for the Royal New Zealand Ballet and the New Zealand Dance Company that embraces dance’s relation to – and obligation towards – land and sea. Interlinked to this are themes of fluidity and rigidity that play out in both sea and land and dance and law. At a time of precarity for the creative arts globally, this stream brings us back to dance to explore what it can offer for our understanding of law – on land and sea.
Possible areas of engagement could include, but are not limited to:
· dance-based adaptations of law that denounce violation of land and sea
· the dancing and moving body in law, and legal choreography
· dance-based legal research and pedagogy and other arts-based methodologies of legal research and pedagogy
· dance as legal dispute resolution
· dance and legal activism to protect land and sea
· dance and/as the staging of law as critique
· feminist and queer studies and dance/law
· dance, law, and the non-human
· speculative movements in dance and law
· migration and movement across legal borders of land and sea
We particularly welcome creative responses from scholars and practitioners, including but not limited to dance, visual art, creative writing, choreographic and musical scores, and reflective writing – as standalone pieces or embedded in a presentation. The stream will also include a dance practice session.
Convenor: Kiwako Murata
Contact: murata.kiwako.58v@st.kyoto-u.ac.jp
This stream explores how the Rule of Law often presented as a neutral ideal of justice and legal order may also function as a mechanism of spatial control and institutionalized violence. Drawing on critical legal studies (CLS), particularly its focus on the ideological and structural functions of law in sustaining power relations, this stream interrogates how legality is not merely protective but productive: constructing governable spaces, legitimizing exceptions, and excluding alternative narratives.
In line with the CLC 2025 theme, “Surf ʻnʼ Turf: Critical Laws of the Land and Sea,” we attend to the legal construction of land and sea as not just natural spaces but juridical terrains of governance and resistance. A key concern is how courts, through formal legal reasoning, may reproduce colonial hierarchies and suppress dissent not only through what they adjudicate, but also through what they systematically exclude. Our focus will be on institutional silence: the ways in which certain claims, voices, or histories are rendered non-justiciable. Rather than assuming a universal pattern, this stream examines specific legal contexts, such as recent Japanese court decisions involving land reclamation in Okinawa (e.g., the Henoko base relocation disputes), where abstract notions like “public welfare” and “administrative discretion” have been used to justify state interests while neglecting the colonial history and agency of Okinawan communities. These cases raise broader questions: How does law delineate governable space? How are exceptions normalized through legal form? And how might the rule of law be reimagined not as a neutral shield, but as a contested site of memory, power, and possible justice?
We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions that engage with:
This stream seeks to provide a platform for critically engaging with law as both a boundary-drawing and boundary-crossing apparatus. We invite participants to rethink legality in ways that acknowledge not only past violence, but also future possibilities of justice, memory, and shared inhabitation.
Convenors: Sara Del Monico, Mathilde Morel, and Thomas Baycock.
Contact: t.baycock@exeter.ac.uk; mm1497@exeter.ac.uk; s.dal-monico@exeter.ac.uk
The ecological crisis, comprised of drastic climatic change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation, requires urgent legal responses. Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem harm sit at the intersection of these environmental issues, affected by key drivers including climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, overexploitation, and pollution, underpinned by anthropocentric activity. Marine spaces present unique sets of challenges owing to their scale, accessibility, and the often-transient nature of their users and inhabitants. Whilst several legal instruments targeting protection, conservation, and restoration of marine ecosystems have already been established, gaps remain. Duties to restore ecosystems and biodiversity have been brought forward across several international and regional conventions. The 2021-2030 United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, accompanied by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) targets, present an opportunity for states to promote the development of substantive and qualitative legal obligations to commit to restorative activities. Of particular relevance are the targets to protect and restore 30% of terrestrial and marine spaces and ecosystems by 2030 using area-based management tools (ABMT). The Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), presents further opportunity to reconsider approaches to ecosystems and biodiversity in ocean space, and whilst the agreement fills important legal gaps, it also leaves several issues unaddressed. Of particular concern is the continued interpretation of marine biological diversity as a resource, and failure to acknowledge its loss as a common concern of humankind. Challenges also remain in sovereign areas, including the territorial and exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of coastal states, who continue to manage their own natural resources, but do not always do so effectively. These challenges partly emanate from disconnected approaches to the application of law, which reflect intangible, contrived, interpretations of space, defined by sovereignty and jurisdiction, as opposed to more natural approaches that reflect nature. Loveday Hodson argued that the high seas and the “borderless” oceans are a space in which sovereignty should be flexible, contingent and layered, not fixed and rigid. The rigid binarism and othering perpetuated by both national, regional, and international law, however, is persistent. It prevents effective use of ocean space, and presents a barrier to protection, enabling unsustainable uses of space and resources. There is thus an urgent need to critically evaluate and assess the role of international, regional and national marine laws concerned with ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss. The stream welcomes abstracts offering critical perspectives related, but not limited to, the current legal regimes for protection of marine biodiversity and ecosystem restoration, including those reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), including its recent BBNJ agreement, the management and use of ocean space, as well as the consideration of notions of sovereignty and jurisdiction at sea. The stream will be led by and the call for papers will prioritise early-career researchers. The stream will be opened by reflections from the chairs and feature contributions from five panelists with time for discussion to follow.
Convenors: Sudhir Verma and Saniya Khanna
Contact: sudhir.research@gmail.com; saniya.khanna2@gmail.com
Historically, international law, in its imperial and colonial origins, capitalized on the territorialisation of nature: zoning seas through land-based sovereignty, and transforming maritime routes into conduits for conquest, commerce, and extractive expansion. The sea was imagined as fluid, free, and boundless—yet paradoxically governed through logics derived from land (e.g., UNCLOS, exclusive economic zones). Conversely, land was conceived as measurable, ownable, and enclosed—yet often reorganized in the service of maritime ambition. These initial binaries—land versus sea, freedom versus control—shaped the foundational architecture of international law, creating regimes of governance that were spatially divided but ideologically interdependent. This legal geography of compartmentalization has had enduring consequences. Depending on geopolitical and historical context, legal regimes governing land and sea have prioritized one domain over the other, resulting in fragmented regulatory frameworks. These frameworks have influenced extractive practices (e.g., deep-sea mining, land enclosure), sovereignty claims (e.g., archipelagic baselines, artificial islands), and environmental protection efforts that often reinforce rather than disrupt colonial hierarchies. Scholars have pointed to the ways in which international legal institutions have facilitated legal violence, enabled global inequalities, and naturalized a hierarchy of control under the guise of global governance. Yet, in the twenty first century, these divisions are increasingly untenable. Land and sea are no longer separate verticals of law and governance; they exist in ecological entanglement, algorithmic connectivity, and mutual vulnerability. For instance, the survival of terrestrial life is predicated on the ocean’s function as a carbon sink for land-based emissions. Simultaneously, coastal land bears the brunt of sea-level rise and ocean-borne waste. Digital infrastructures such as submarine cables and ocean surveillance satellites—managed by terrestrial data centres—now mediate ocean governance through what some have called algorithmic extractivism. These interdependencies force a reckoning: how might we unsettle the binary imaginaries inherited from imperial international law and instead foster new modes of thinking—where land and sea are not antithetical but co-constitutive? What would it mean to reimagine international law across terrains? Inspired by the ecologically and culturally rich Sundarbans delta—a site of shifting borders, saline intrusion, and climate displacement—this stream invites scholars, philosophers, legal geographers, and interdisciplinary thinkers to interrogate the historic and contemporary entanglements between land and sea as co-constructed terrains of extraction, control, and contested care. It asks:
• Does this new-found, albeit coerced, reciprocity between land and sea reinforce colonial logics of enclosure and control in the name of “sustainability”?
• Or does it produce new legal and political conflicts—between states, indigenous communities, and transnational institutions—as differing communities prioritize and relate to land and sea differently?
• Or might it offer a generative space for a renewed legal imaginary, grounded in sensitivity, humility, and care?
We especially welcome contributions that engage with:
This stream is an invitation to rethink the grammar of international law. It challenges us to go beyond fixing fragmented regimes toward crafting an entirely different legal language—one that moves from jurisdiction to justice, from ownership to obligation, from subordination to mutuality.
Convenor: Ksenia Lavrenteva
Contact: kl633@exeter.ac.uk
“Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you’re right, it’s a child’s question, just as it should be.”
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
This stream invites critical engagement with the role of legal thought in the face of accelerating technological, ecological, and political change. As crises multiply and intensify — from AI and automation to climate collapse and democratic erosion — law often appears reactive, slow, and burdened by the past. Legal systems struggle not only to keep pace with unfolding transformations, but also to articulate meaningful futures. We suffer from a crisis of imagination as much as a crisis of regulation.
This stream begins from the recognition of what has been called a “pace problem,” where law trails behind the velocity of change. Yet it also contends with a deeper malaise: the exhaustion of utopias, the prevalence of “post-” frameworks (post-human, post-colonial, post-modern) that leave us suspended in a conceptual afterlife, always looking backward or sideways, rarely forward. In this space of temporal and conceptual inertia, what does it mean to think about legal futures?
We invite participants to step outside the conventional boundaries of academic method and embrace speculative and creative approaches that envision how law might evolve or be reimagined in radically altered conditions. We ask: what kinds of legalities could emerge in futures shaped by ecological collapse, machine intelligence, planetary governance, or rewilded sovereignties? What visions of justice might come into focus if we dare to think law otherwise?
Inspired by the Surf ‘n’ Turf theme and its attention to fluid, contested terrains, this stream seeks to explore not only how law might govern emergent worlds, but how law itself might mutate, dissolve, or be reinvented. Contributions might include:
We especially welcome interdisciplinary approaches and submissions that push the limits of academic convention. Whether textual, visual, sonic, or otherwise, let us imagine law anew before it is too late.
Convenors: Illan rua Wall, Ruben Wissing, Katre Luhamaa and David Diallo.
Contact: illan.wall@universityofgalway.ie
In a time of massive global reordering, when political, cultural and social structures are in flux, there is an ever deepening imperative to engage critically with law. At the same time critical law schools, centres, academics and students are under political attack or being decimated by financial cuts. This presents the growing danger that the pipeline from curious undergraduate through novel doctoral research and into critical academia is being, or has been interrupted. This stream therefore seeks to gather together critical lecturers and students to begin to develop a new pedagogic platform.
We therefore invite participants at the CLC to bring some of their pedagogic practices or materials to the conference. This could include:
During the CLC, we will ask you to present and discuss your ideas in an informal way, perhaps sampling the type of exercise or the teaching materials. The aim here is to support new experimental approaches to the classroom, to foster different approaches to established critical teaching, or to give colleagues an opportunity to refresh existing teaching materials.
To join this stream, instead of an abstract, please send a short description of the material you’d like to discuss (max 500 word).
Following the CLC we will work with contributors to publish materials on the new platform, and to try to ensure that these impact on how subjects are taught in law schools and beyond. Setting up this platform has been supported by ENLIGHT funding, split between Universities in Ghent, Galway, Tartu and Bordeaux.
Convenors: Tony Ward, Katharine M Cockin
Contact: tony.ward@northumbria.ac.uk; k.m.cockin@essex.ac.uk
The sea has been a setting for literature from influential epic narratives The Odyssey to novels by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway. Some have explicit legal themes, most famously Melville’s Billy Budd. Contemporary novelists, such as Nnedi Okorafor in Lagoon (2014) and Rivers Solomon, The Deep (2019), address the sea as site of devastation, in terms of environmental disaster and genocide, by creative storytelling that embraces a collective voice of opposition and rebirth. This stream invites papers on law, literature, and seas. Questions will be raised about how the novel and other literary genres have: normalised the sea as a setting for quest and conquest; reinforced the sea traveller as heroic role model; overlooked the sea itself as a potential protagonist. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:
· Sea as a setting for quest and conquest
· Fishy tales and hyperbolic storytelling
· Sea travellers as heroic characters
· Sea navigation, compasses, chronometers, and mapping the story
· Pirates, stowaways, mutineers: crimes at sea
· Food and power at sea: ship’s biscuits, rum rations, wartime weaponised food blockades.
Convenor: Emma Patchett
Contact: emma.patchett@northumbria.ac.uk
This stream will consider the issue of land and sea ‘border crossings’ from a diverse, inter-disciplinary range of critical perspectives.
In the UK, the political and media narrative is overly focused on small boat crossings to the extent that ‘stopping small boats’ became part of Kier Starmer’s successful election campaign . The UK government has recently announced that they will invest £150 million over the next two years in border security through the creation of a new Border Security Command. Although small boat arrivals make up a third of asylum claims, the UK has adopted the language of past Australian governments (and others) in presenting small boat arrivals as a dangerous threat which requires significant control measures and legislative action in reponse. The government has suggested that there will be no path to citizenship for crossing the border by irregular means. The impact of measures of securitization, criminalisation not only undermines the legal right to seek asylum but also fundamentally changes the nature of border crossing, manifesting a ‘threshold space’ governed by sanctions and securitization (Mountz 2020), creating “human rights protection gaps” constructed through punitive legal frameworks (UN 2024). European member states have also increasingly implemented the reintroduction of temporary border control measures within the internal land borders of the Schengen area under the Schengen Borders Code, on the grounds of securitising the border as a result of a rise in irregular migration and the ‘increasing impact of cross-border crime’. There is therefore an increasing need to engage in critical scholarship which seeks to explore the ways in which the conceptualisation of border crossings reflects – and interacts with- the legal framework on irregular migration.
The stream is seeking to invite papers which consider how legal regimes shape—and are shaped by—practices of movement, displacement, and border enforcement, and in particular how the concept of ‘border crossings’ reflects a complex and fluctuating interpretation of the border itself. This stream seeks to problematise the concept of ‘border crossing’, by generating discussions of how it might be defined otherwise , either from distinctively theoretical, critical, and/or counter-hegemonic spatio-temporal perspectives or from innovative interdisciplinary ethnographic research. Papers for this stream might consider, for example:
Surviving on Fragile Ground: Stateless Rohingyas, Collapsing Ecologies and Environmental Justice
Convenor: Mahashweta Chakraborty
Contact: mahashweta.2008@gmail.com
Each day, while lands undergo erosion and global sea levels rise, the laws that govern the lands and seas remain static, clinging to structures that deepen both human displacements and environmental degradation. The movement of peoples across the territories of the land and sea not only challenge existing conventional legal frameworks but also exposes and intensifies the ecological vulnerabilities. When the Rohingya exodus took place on August 2017, a deluge of human population flooded the neighbouring country of Bangladesh, with the refugees taking shelter in some of the most ecologically sensitive and biologically vulnerable areas of Bangladesh’s Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary, Himchari National Park and Inani Protected areas. The Rohingyas, most often find themselves resettled in ecologically fragile coastal zones, floodplains, degraded forest lands or in case of Cox Bazar region of Bangladesh, in a critical forest-based ecosystem that is home to numerous endangered wildlife and vegetation. By 2019, Bangladesh was hosting 4.7% of the world’s refugees in the makeshift camps with facilities and services being stretched beyond limits and 8000 acres of its forestland already lost to campsites. The country has since been reeling under the pressures of climate change, loss of habitats, pollution and water shortages, extinction of threatened wild forest species, leaving the already ecologically fragile region in the brink of an environmental disaster. In such strained situations, instead of providing protection, dominant legal frameworks often perpetuate more harm. Bangladesh and India, for instance are non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which denies the refugees a formal legal status in the host countries. In absence of such policies and structures, their mobility is highly regulated and restricted, confining them in places that amplify exclusion and detention, scaling up the vulnerability of the Rohingyas multiple times. This stream encourages participants to critically examine how law produces and sustains environmental injustice for displaced communities (with a focus on the Rohingyas) and to explore alternative frameworks for fostering ecologically resilient communities that are adaptive to climate change.
Contributions are welcome from scholars, human rights practitioners, activists, ecologists and Rohingya community members that critically ask –
This stream through an engagement of participants across interdisciplinary studies interrogates the legal and policy frameworks that shape vulnerabilities for people and nature and seeks to critically reflect and recognize the entangled rights of people and ecosystems.
General Stream
We encourage you to apply to the streams mentioned above but we also consider panels, papers and roundtables outside of these themes and descriptions. Send us your abstract and proposals to info-clc2025@exeter.ac.uk.