Climate Justice, Racial Justice, and International Law

Catalog description

The climate crisis is in the news on a regular basis, as wildfires, melting glaciers, mega-storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and rising sea levels wreak havoc all over the world. While the climate crisis has often been depicted as a technical problem requiring technical solutions, this course will examine the emerging body of legal scholarship, reports by UN human rights experts, and case studies on the relationship among climate change, racial injustice, and international law. It will analyze the ways that international law contributes to these intersecting injustices and how international law can be used as a tool of transformation and resistance. Caused primarily by the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's most affluent inhabitants, climate change is an injustice because its impacts are experienced most acutely by those who contributed least to the problem and have the fewest resources to protect themselves from harm. These include Indigenous peoples, the small island states, racial and ethnic minorities, poor people, and those who reside in climate-vulnerable geographic regions, including tropical, coastal, and agriculture-dependent low-income countries. While most analyses of climate injustice focus on the impacts of climate change, this course will take a deeper dive into the origins of the fossil fuel-based global economy, and the harms it inflicts on states and peoples racialized as inferior throughout its life cycle historically and currently. For example, the Industrial Revolution, which launched the age of fossil fuels, was made possible by colonialism, slavery, and the international law doctrines that justified and facilitated these practices. In the post-colonial period, international law gave primacy to the rights of foreign investors engaged in natural resource exploitation, at the expense of the states and local communities in which these projects were located. These doctrines enabled European and settler colonial states to control the world's petroleum reserves in collusion with autocratic petro-states and transnational corporations. They also produced corporate impunity for human rights and environmental violations. Today, the extraction, processing, and combustion of fossil fuels has created "sacrifice zones" all over the world in territories belonging to peoples and nations that were colonially designated as inferior.