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- Convenors:
-
Antonio Maria Pusceddu
(Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA-ISCTE))
David Loher (University of Bern)
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- Discussant:
-
Laura Affolter
(Hamburg Institute for Social Research)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E487
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This LawNet panel discusses how law organises the allocation of responsibilities to transnational corporations and their representatives in the context of industrial disasters and environmental hazards across different legal forums in late capitalism.
Long Abstract:
One of the main features of law is the allocation of responsibilities. However, with regard to corporate liability and in cases of mass suffering in the context of industrial disasters and environmental hazards, we can regularly observe the breakdown of the established rules of allocation of responsibilities, often interpreted as a distinct feature of modernity.
Law—to the major extent still nationally organised—struggles to keep up with transnationally organised corporations. This means that comparatively immobile law meets highly mobile transnational corporations, which results in the dispersion of responsibilities. At the same time, people and social movements mobilise this uneven legal landscape as a resource for strategic litigation to hold transnational corporations or their representatives liable for alleged wrongdoings, shifting trials to different national or international legal forums.
This LawNet panel invites contributions on litigation cases in the context of industrial disasters and environmental hazards, studying how law organises the allocation of responsibilities across different legal forums in late capitalism, as well as how litigation cases provide a forum for social definitions of industrial disasters and environmental hazards. It asks how different legal norms privilege certain notions of responsibilities, while they silence others. In particular, we are interested in contributions, which discuss how the translation of an industrial disaster or an environmental hazard into a legal issue shape the environmental crisis. Finally, it invites contributions that explore definitions of responsibility at the intersection of social, legal and political spheres.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
By analysing different mining conflicts in Peru, the paper illustrates the difficulties that exist in holding transnational corporations liable for environmental damages at a local level. The paper compares lawsuits over environmental damages with lawsuits over human rights violations.
Paper long abstract:
Peru is one of those countries that have experienced severe social conflicts in recent years as a result of industrial mining projects involving transnational companies. In many cases, these conflicts have been triggered by the corporations' high consumption of natural resources such as land or water, but more importantly by the contamination of these very resources. Simultaneously to the expansion of social conflicts, there has also been an increase in court cases in which local communities try to hold transnational companies legally responsible for the damages caused by the latter. In many cases, this has led to a juridification of the social conflicts.
Based on ethnographic research in Peru, the paper examines different legal possibilities for holding transnational mining companies liable for environmental damages. Aspects of strategic litigation play an equally important role in these lawsuits as networking with international advocacy networks and the search for alternative legal options outside the Peruvian jurisdiction do. The paper compares cases of, for example, water pollution, mercury spills or other environmental damages with cases of corporate-related human rights violations. In doing so, the paper explores the specific difficulties in attributing responsibility for environmental hazards to business actors.
Paper short abstract:
My paper explores the ways collective resistance against the gold mining in a forest of North Greece and the re-appropriation of the forests as a potential negotiating tool reshapes crucial questions of emancipatory politics that inform the notions of citizenship and the public realm.
Paper long abstract:
In the wake of crisis-driven market reforms and increasing local concerns over environmental conditions in Greece, mines have become political borders through which systems of power redistribute sociopolitical tensions at local, national and international levels. Taking mines as 'thresholds' of knowledge, memory, and power in this work I ask: how are political subjectivities and national identities negotiated and contested around gold mining in Northern Greece? Specifically, how are local sociopolitical terrains reconfigured by mining activities in the midst of "sovereign debt crisis"? How do local activists and their networks operate with, within and against this terrain to create political possibility?
In 2012, in the shadow of the ongoing "sovereign debt crisis" the Canadian mining company El Dorado, which owns 99% of the Greek company Hellas Gold, began razing the ancient forest of Skouries in Chalkidiki, in North Greece to extract gold. Large demonstrations and violent clashes followed, with the miners and the police usually being on one side and the anti-mining groups on the other, turning the forest of Skouries into a battlefield. Beyond ongoing local conflict, the mining activity has also provoked friction at the level of the state and the European Union in the form of legal battles. While anti-mining supporters celebrate the delay of the mining activities, the European Commission warns that repelling foreign investors is against the memorandum of the austerity measures that the government has signed. The mine has produced a "Crisis-scape" and forms of political responsiveness never before seen in Greece.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is a review of contemporary Russian coal-mining companies’ attempts to apply CSR standards, which can make it possible to start a new practice of environmental hazards prevention.
Paper long abstract:
This paper contains a review of contemporary Russian coal-mining companies’ attempts to apply CSR standards, which can make it possible to start a dialogue with local communities of Indigenous peoples and other locals and to start a practice of environmental hazards prevention (co-management). The highly important precedent is being created at this time in Russian coal mining regions and especially in the Kuznetsk Coal Basin (co-called Kuzbass). Coal-mining companies faced a lot of cases of local communities’ resistance are trying to elaborate new technologies of corporate management directed to improve corporations-locals interactions and to prevent in this way any conflicts over the coal mining negative consequences such as local communities' lands grabbing, technogenic pollution and destruction of the environment. In 2016 the biggest coal-mining companies of Kuzbass have accepted significant guidance documents concerning main principles of corporate policies towards local communities and environment. All of these measures sound as a significant milestone on the way of Russian extractivism liberalisation according to world-wide experience. But on the other hand, real practices of coal-mining companies’ operation in Kuzbass don’t comply with the declared principles and indicates the systematic violation of local communities’ rights and environment pollution. The cases of locals’ land grabbing and forced displacement as the result of coal mining are not uncommon for Kuzbass in particular and for Russia in general. This paper discusses the real goals of Russian coal-mining companies’ CSR policies by comparing them with the world-wide corresponding practices.