Nonhuman Justice

People

Researcher

• Dr Emily Jones

About

In the context of the environmental emergency, including climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, and the loss of biodiversity, it has become clear that the anthropocentric perspectives that have long dominated all disciplines have failed. For example, environmental law has been widely critiqued for being anthropocentric, transforming nature and nonhuman animals into an object or resource. This has led multiple researchers to argue that environmental law, despite seemingly being there to protect the environment, is part of the problem, helping to sustain the unsustainable practices that have brought us to the point of environmental crisis. New, interdisciplinary, post-anthropocentric approaches are needed.

The Nonhuman Justice project will address this lacuna, drawing together the sciences, the arts and humanities and the social sciences to seek new laws, policies and ways of thinking about the environment and nonhuman animals. On the one hand, the project engages existing post-anthropocentric movements, such as the recognition of the rights of nature, the turn towards the more than human, the posthuman and multi-species justice in the social sciences and the humanities, the recognition of animal sentience, or Indigenous led environmental management. However, noting that many of these projects remain early in implementation, meaning that how they will apply, in practice, has largely yet to be worked out, the Nonhuman Justice project will goes a step further, asking the difficult questions about nonhuman justice as applied examining, for example, the limitations of human representation and the structural limits of Western modelled legal systems.

Relevant Publications

• Emily Jones, ‘No Future for Future Generations: Who Is International Environmental Law for?’ Journal of Human Rights and the Environment (2025) 16(1) 4.

• Goda Klumbytė, Emily Jones and Rosi Braidotti, (eds.), Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices, (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).

• Emily Jones, ‘Challenging International Environmental Law’s Heteronormativity and Anthropocentrism: Towards Queer Kinship,’ in Tamsin Paige and Claerwen O’Hara (eds), Queer Engagements with International Law, (Routledge, 2025).

• Emily Jones, Simone Bignall and Rosi Braidotti, ‘Outer Space Law: Posthumanism/Feminism/Anarchism/Decolonisation,’ in Goda Klumbytė, Emily Jones and Rosi Braidotti, (eds.), Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices, (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).

• Matilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones, (eds.), International Law and Posthuman Theory, (Routledge, 2024).

• Emily Jones, Cristian van Eijk and Gina Heathcote, ‘The Common Heritage of Kin-Kind,’ in Matilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones (eds.), International Law and Posthuman Theory, (Routledge, 2024).

• Emily Jones, ‘Can the Rights of Nature Transforms how Rights are Conceptualized in International Law?’ in César Rodríguez-Garavito (ed.), More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Early Flourishing, (NYU MOTH Project, 2024).

• Eliana Cusato and Emily Jones, ‘The Imbroglio of Ecocide: A Political Economic Analysis,’ Leiden Journal of International Law, (2024) 37(1) 42.

• Emily Jones, Feminist Theory and International Law: Posthuman Perspectives, (Routledge, 2023).

• Jérémie Gilbert, Elizabeth Macpherson, Emily Jones and Julia Dehm, ‘The Rights of Nature as a Legal Response to the Global Environmental Crisis? A Critical review of international law’s ‘greening’ agenda,’ Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (2023) 52.

• Rosi Braidotti, Emily Jones and Goda Klumbytė (eds.), More Posthuman Glossary, (Bloomsbury, 2022).

• Emily Jones, ‘Posthuman Feminism and Global Constitutionalism: Environmental Reflections,’ Global Constitutionalism (2022) 12(3) 1.

• Emily Jones, ‘Posthuman International Law and the Rights of Nature,’ Journal of Human Rights and the Environment (2021) 12 (0) 76.