Law legitimizes private corporate power and its role in environmental degradation and human rights abuses. It sustains deeply unequal governance patterns and institutional structures which reinforce exclusions along gender, race and other identity markers, suppressing various forms of knowledge and a myriad of counter-hegemonic/transformative practices. It defines the kind of life that can be (legally) recognized and protected.  

And yet, legal structures can also tame private actors and end impunity for egregious violence towards the human and the non-human world, and they can adopt capacious understandings of ecological and social justice attentive to how past wrongs continue in the present.  

This conference will gather scholars, policymakers and activists reflecting on some of the following questions:   

• How can law–local, national, transnational—foster just sustainabilities and underpin a sustainable globalization? 
• How can, and how do various legal actors–from corporations, states to grassroot movements and communities–mobilize law to address the many ecological and social crises globalized societies face? 
• What kind of institutional mechanisms, processes, knowledge production and (legal) technologies can ground transformative practices within planetary limits? 

Keynotes: Professor Radha D’Souza, Ece Temelkuran 

The conference is organised by Ivana Isailovic and Ingo Venzke.

Call for abstracts

We invite scholars to submit a page including an abstract (500 words) and something about themselves for individual presentations on themes including the following: 

• The role of public and private actors in the green transition 
• Governance mechanisms and practices for sustainable globalization  
• Intersectional approaches and sustainable globalization 
• Social reproduction & the politics of care(lesness) within the law 
• Sustainable globalized markets: legal institutions, actors, norms 
• Legal epistemologies and methodologies 

When sending us your abstracts please let us know the theme(s) you would like to contribute to. We especially welcome contributions from early career scholars, and scholars from underrepresented backgrounds. Please send your abstracts by February 15th to sgel-fdr@uva.nl. Participants will be contacted before the end of March.  A limited number of scholarships are available for scholars --especially early career scholars -- whose institutions are unable to cover the expenses related to their stay in Amsterdam.