Bern, 10-12.02.2025
Call for Abstracts
We invite paper/abstract submissions for the panels of the second conference of the Swiss Network for Law and Society (SNLS) “Law and/in the Anthropocene”, that will take place in Bern from 10th to 12th February 2025. In the document “call for abstracts”, you’ll find the panel descriptions. Please send your abstracts of up to 250 words directly to the panel convenors at the email address provided below each panel by September 30th 2024.
You’ll find the PDF file of the call for abstracts here.
The conference will host 16 panels across 4 themes:
- Dilemmas of juridification and democratic politics in the Anthropocene
- Rules-based governance in the Anthropocene
- Critical Perspectives on (New) Rights-Bearing Subjects in the Anthropocene
- The Normative and the Empirical in Socio-Legal Research
(You’ll find description of these 4 themes in the “Call for Panels” section, hereafter).
Panel 1: Rethinking Responsibility: Criminal Law’s Response to the Anthropocene
Panel 2: judicialization of Climate Politics in the Anthropocene
Panel 3: A Restorative City in Switzerland: Bridging Democratic Dialogue and Social Cohesion in the Anthropocene
Panel 4: L’accès à l’information environnementale: un pilier pour l’action citoyenne?
Panel 5: Carbon pricing across borders
Panel 6: Private finance and sustainability transitions: What role for law and legal innovations?
Panel 7: From statuses and precedents to contracts and agreements: environmental conflicts in alternative dispute resolution mechanisms
Panel 8: The Law and Politics of Environmental and Climate Lobbying
Panel 9: What climate futures are envisioned by legal and regulatory efforts?
Panel 10: The right of nature as a posthuman care turn in law: feminist perspectives
Panel 11: Territories of Life: Collectivity and Land as (New) Rights-Bearing Subject in the Anthropocene. The Contemporary Challenge of Another Way of Owning
Panel 12: Naviguer les défis de la recherche socio-juridique sur des terrains difficiles: Questionnements méthodologiques, analytiques et épistémologiques
Panel 13: Institutional Archives and Counter-Archives of the Transnational: Perspectives from the anthropology of law and socio-legal studies
Panel 14: An interdisciplinary approach to social and legal pluralities
Panel 15: Conducting law and society research in Switzerland: epistemologies, methods, approaches and contributions
Panel 16: Gaps, Overlaps and Paradoxes between Laws and Realities of Child-Parents Relations
Call for Panels
You’ll find the PDF File of the Call for panels here.
The Swiss Network for Law & Society (SNLS) aims to create a space for networking, discussion and cross-disciplinary collaboration between scholars researching law from an empirical perspective. The second conference of the SNLS will take place from the 10th to 12th February 2025 and will provide an opportunity to explore the trajectories of legal developments and responses vis-a-vis the challenges posed by the era that is referred to as the Anthropocene. Such challenges include climate change and global heating, the loss of biodiversity, climate migration and refugees, public health, human rights, and, more broadly, the ’sustainability’ of capitalism. Many of the responses to these challenges are of a socio-legal kind, including legal propertization and privatization, gendered or racialised divisions of labor, new migration regimes, new financial instruments, the constitution of new subjects of rights and the exclusion of others from being rights holders. This is what this conference seeks to examine.
From the climate crisis to the loss of biodiversity, law in its different manifestations (constitutional, civil, criminal, human rights, international) is being mobilized within and across different jurisdictions through policy making, litigating, and the creation of new legal subjects. Indeed, the tools of law are some of the few politically legitimate means that societies currently have at their disposal to address socio-ecological challenges posed in the Anthropocene.
In this context, we observe the juridification and judicialization of the above mentioned issues as a growing trend in addressing the intersecting challenges of the Anthropocene. Legal practitioners, NGOs and social movements continue to demand new legal statutes and bodies to adjudicate the infringement of old and new forms of rights and protections for a growing number of legal subjects, including non- humans. In other arenas, industries that account for a major role in climate change develop their own legal frameworks through soft law, contract law, and private actors’ attempts to contribute to national and international lawmaking. States, too, are introducing new legislation that seeks to ‘green’ capitalism, from carbon pricing to environmental standards to be applied across supply chains.
In this increasingly complex and fragmented legal landscape, socio-legal research thus requires innovative and transdisciplinary methodologies and theoretical approaches to bridge empirical- analytical and normative approaches. This conference invites conversations across disciplines in social sciences and humanities to discuss the relationship between law and the Anthropocene. We invite all interested researchers to submit panel proposals, regardless of their disciplinary background: law, sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, geography, psychology, history, social work, etc. We ask for panel proposals that fit into one of the themes below. Proposals for panels must indicate what theme they are part of and include a panel title, a panel abstract of max 500 words, and a contact email address. Panel proposals can be in English, French or German. All panel proposals must be sent before 1.6.2024 to the following address: conference2025@lawandsociety.ch. Fully or partially formed panels with 3-5 paper abstracts, as well as panel proposals without any paper abstracts are welcome. We will circulate the accepted panels with a call for paper abstracts in July 2024. Please note that abstracts for papers will then need to be submitted directly to panel organizers by 30 September 2024. If you have any questions, please contact conference2025@lawandsociety.ch.
Conference venue: University of Bern, UniS
Conference dates: 10-12.02.2025
Conference host and organizing team: Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
- Dr. Laura Affolter
- Lucie Benoit
- Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein
- Dr. Matthieu Bolay
- Prof. Julia Eckert
- Paule Pastré
- Dr. Kiri Santer
Conference Themes
1) Dilemmas of juridification and democratic politics in the Anthropocene
When political conflicts enter the legal system through lawsuits and litigation, dilemmas arise within democratic processes. Through the juridification of politics, the electoral process and established forms of democratic representation can be circumvented through the courts. At the same time, the courts can act as a counterpower to the other branches of democratic government and allow citizens and social movements to hold more powerful actors or their representatives accountable through legal mobilization, cause lawyering, strategic litigation, etc. The dilemmas of juridification and democratic politics are particularly relevant in the field of environmental conflicts, policy making and politics: with the intensification and growing urgencies of multiple and overlapping socio-ecological crises in the Anthropocene (e.g. climate, biodiversity, water, soil, air), they will arguably only become more pronounced.
This theme invites panel proposals that critically engage with processes of and struggles over juridification in the Anthropocene in order to examine what dilemmas these processes and struggles posit vis-a-vis democratic politics. More specifically, we encourage panels to examine the complex relationship between juridification and democratic politics against the background of intensifying socio- ecological crises: For instance, how do democratic principles become challenged, reinforced, or transformed through juridification, and how does democratic politics limit or promote juridification? What issues arise from juridification of political conflicts and how do different actors address them? How may juridification support or inhibit legal mobilization by social movements? How may juridification promote or prevent the criminalization of environmental activism? Panels that address these or related questions are invited to draw on various traditions in legal and political theory, including
– but not limited to – law, legal anthropology and geography, political ecology, law and political economy.
2) Rules-based governance in the Anthropocene
Law’s powerful role in private wealth creation and the production of inequalities through the codification of capital has been discussed at length across disciplines. The rules enabling capital accumulation are however changing in the era of the climate crisis. With the long-running privatisation of the state, we have witnessed the rise of new legal and regulatory actors and the emergence of increasingly fragmented legal constellations, partly outside the purview of states. In turn, alongside the surge of regulatory activities by states aiming to make capitalism sustainable, the climate governance regime is becoming increasingly complex. Following these observations, we identify two axes that need further investigation: on the one hand, the development and implementation of rules that address climate change by greening capitalism and, on the other, the conflicts that new and existing rules may raise. This stream thus explores processes of lawmaking, law enforcement, and legal adjudication, including by private actors, and their potential in addressing the climate crisis. It welcomes panels which address the proliferation of these new – and often conflicting – legal constellations, from states’ regulation of emissions and trade to private-led regimes of compliance, or the role of arbitral tribunals in settling environment-related disputes. In studying how various state and non-state actors are together involved in law and rule making, law enforcement and adjudication, panels are also invited to consider the role that legal and regulatory intermediaries play in upholding, creating and enforcing (new) anthropocentric rules for capitalism. Doing so suggests paying attention to power relations and conflict in the translation of private and state-led regulation into concrete practices. For instance, how are “public” and “private” interests constructed, assembled, and hierarchized in hybrid modes of regulation? It can also highlight distributive effects of new and evolving laws and regulations that seek to intervene on the economy in a bid to address the climate crisis.
3) Critical Perspectives on (New) Rights-Bearing Subjects in the Anthropocene
New subjects of rights are emerging in response to the planetary crisis: the environment, non-human animals and nature. None of these ideas – environmental constitutionalism, animal rights and rights of nature – are completely new, but they are rapidly gaining traction. Today, provisions that recognise ‘the environment’ as a subject for protection exist in the majority of national constitutions. Moreover, fundamental animal rights have been recognised by courts in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and India, for example. And there are many initiatives across the world aiming to make ‘nature’ as such or so- called ‘natural entities’ like rivers, glaciers, forests or lagoons, to name but a few, holders of subjective rights. This theme calls for panels that engage with these trends, their histories and factors giving rise to their current momentum. It particularly invites panel contributions that, by bringing different disciplinary perspectives and approaches together, look beyond the promises of these legal novelties at their practical implementation, challenges, limits and political effects. Panels that critically engage with the relationship between rights (as entitlements) and obligations as well as the empowering and silencing effects of rights and rights talk – also through comparisons with rights creations and adaptations in other legal domains – would be very welcome, as would critical discussions of the the risks and opportunities of a posthuman turn in law.
4) The Normative and the Empirical in Socio-legal Research
This theme invites panels that gather contributions on the specific challenges of bringing together empirical-analytical and normative approaches in socio-legal research. In particular it encourages cross- disciplinary panels that engage with transdisciplinary methodological and ethical questions, as well as reflections on disciplinary positionalities, blindspots and priorities. This could include discussions on how we study legal materials such as legal and judicial archives or law in action. Or what methodologies are suitable to grasp changes in legal consciousness? How do legal scholars relate to an empirical perspective in legal scholarship and how might this affect the conception of law in legal scholarship?