Law in the Anthropocene

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Doris Schweitzer
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548004032

The legal struggles surrounding the crises of the Anthropocene are being conducted intensively. This is demonstrated by the debates on the biodiversity and climate crisis and on CO2 reduction obligations, as well as by the efforts to regulate ecocide, geoengineering, and the disputes over the rights of nature and animals. The network "Law in the Anthropocene" (“Recht im Anthropozän”/RiA) examines from an interdisciplinary perspective the extent to which the Anthropocene challenges the fundamental categories of materiality, subjectivity and responsibility and thus transforms the law at the same time. From a legal perspective, law is primarily understood as an instrument for mitigating the ecological problems associated with the Anthropocene. In contrast to this, RiA assumes that the relationship between law and the Anthropocene is far more complex and multi-layered. Law is in other words not only a tool to solve the ecological crises but is also deeply entangled in the creation of the Anthropocene. RiA understands the Anthropocene as an intrinsically ambivalent concept: The Anthropocene denotes not only the numerous existential ecological crises, but it also raises the question of how law is and can be involved in shaping the social and natural conditions on planet earth. On the one hand, the Anthropocene is changing the law itself and challenging its basic premises. On the other hand, the Anthropocene is also shaped and problematized by law: In the struggle for law, certain aspects of the Anthropocene are addressed - while others are left out. The law thus simultaneously shapes society's understanding and ways of dealing with the Anthropocene. These tensions and shifts between law and the Anthropocene are at the heart of RiA. RiA will explore them with a focus on the cross-disciplinary categories of subjectivity, materiality, and responsibility: Parallel to the dispute in the social sciences as to who counts as a "social actor", law responds to the challenge of the Anthropocene by renegotiating who or what counts as a legal subject. Furthermore, while sociology and anthropology are discussing the significance of materiality and at the same time are renegotiating the allocation of responsibility, law is struggling with conceptualizing the relationship between social entities and their material environment and how responsibility is distributed accordingly. These issues require an interdisciplinary perspective with a view to the interplay of plural legal systems in the global space. This is why the network brings together researchers from the fields of law, sociology, and anthropology to investigate the law in the anthropocene on a theoretical and empirical level using jointly developed interdisciplinary heuristics.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Johan Horst