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Oceanic Interconnection

Louisa Dassow

Oceanic Interconnection: A Posthuman Feminist Analysis of the BBNJ Agreement


Applying a posthuman feminist methodology to the BBNJ Agreement to analyse legal subject construction in the context of social, environmental and more-than human or multispecies justice.


People


Researcher

  • Louisa Dassow

Supervisors

  • Emily Jones

  • Gina Heathcote

  • Henry Jones


Background


The BBNJ Agreement, signed only in June 2023, represents a new high-water mark for international cooperation in ocean governance and the protection of the marine environment. However while responding to the intense degradation of our oceanic systems, the BBNJ Agreement remains embedded in a system of international law that has failed to prevent, and is often responsible for, such environmental harms. Expanding on critical scholarship on international law which has exposed the law as being environmentally extractive and centring human elite (often white, European, male human) interests over others, this project will assess how the BBNJ Agreement both upholds and challenges that narrative. It is particularly novel because, as an implementing Agreement of UNCLOS, the text represents a enw convergence between the law of the sea and international environmental law. This project, by bringing in a critical posthuman feminist perspective, expands critical international environmental legal and feminist insights with the often separately considered law of the sea paradigm. Integrating a posthuman feminist outlook into understandings of the BBNJ, at this crucial early stage, has the potential to shift the trajectory of its implementation towards a model of equitable multispecies justice that can be shared with the research community and beyond.


Outcomes


Publications:

  • (Book Chapter) ‘A posthuman feminist approach to the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement’ in Rowena Maguire and Katherine Keane (eds), Research Handbook on Feminist Approaches to Environmental Law (Edward Elgar Publishing 2025/2026) (forthcoming)

Presentations:

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