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Short abstract:

Based on years of ethnographic research conducted at the UN, this paper takes a decolonial approach to ocean governance by challenging its allegiance to Western-styled technoscience—instrumentalist, expansionist, anthropocentric—as a means or rationalization to colonize the Earth.

Long abstract:

“Abolition without ecology.” That’s a phrase developed by Malcom Ferdinand to capture the modern condition according to the “double fracture,” or the artifical, arbitrary separation of environmental harm from forms of social, political, and economic injustice endured by colonized peoples. Although the abolition of slavery rightly focused on the emancipation of peoples, it left unattended the centuries of exploitation and subsequent destruction of the Earth—foundational to the very logic of life on the plantation and aboard the slave ship. How, then, might a decolonial approach to ocean governance help us understand better why ferocious assults on marine life continue unabated? This paper shares ethnographic snapshots from fieldwork conducted at the UN Ocean Conferences in 2017 (New York) and 2022 (Lisbon) and of negotiations for the treaty Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Together they expose a global power structure rooted in colonialization, not as a fixed spatial geography or historical relic but alive as a dispersed commonsense at once cultural, social, political, and economic. Instrumentalist, expansionist, anthropocentric—as if the ocean is a “resource” to be conquered and controlled or “sustainably used” by elites—technoscience finds its origins in Anglo-European ways of knowing and has become by legal fiat the master’s tool adopted by policymakers to achieve domination over the sea. At cross purposes with growing consciousness against the human as superior planetary being, technoscience remains wed to an exploitative sensibility that pervades Western-styled techno-managerialism as rationalization to colonize the Earth.