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Paper short abstract

The paper explores moments of post-disaster ‘green’ transition in the Indonesian Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Attention is directed to the plural legal configuration that informs transition ranging from transnational legal templates to normativity produced in more-than-human assemblages.

Paper long abstract

The paper explores moments of post-disaster transition in the Indonesian Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Such phases of transition are considered to usually follow on disastrous eruptions of volcano Mount Merapi. According to local wisdom and spiritual knowledge, at irregular intervals the volcano demands a reset, the rebalancing of relations that have fallen into disarray. Such worldview addresses eruption as a cyclical event allowing for the reordering of relations that have gone off course and initializing a new phase in the relations within more-than-human (MTH) assemblages. Since colonial times, however, domestic and international political and legal institutions seize the opportunity of such post-disaster situations to replace established patterns of agrarian and extractive practices, leading to the remodeling of the preceding socio-economic, ecological and legal situation. The beneficiaries of such post-disaster management aver its embedding in global processes of green transition, which lead to linear progress and ‘growth’ while countering the challenges of the anthropocene, such as climate change.

The techno-legal framing of this linear model of transition, however, so the paper’s argument, serves above all the demands of global extractivism. The dominant legal framework is set in line with extractive practices leading from a post-eruptive re-balancing of more-than-human justice in local understanding to intensified corporate economic exploitation of which local people are excluded.

The paper draws attention to the plural legal configuration that informs transition. It asks what normativity is produced in situations of transition initiated by natural forces and what more-than-human normativity does contribute to the pluriversality of the law.