Events

European Law Unbound
Annual Conference 2025, Prague - 25-27 Sep

Roundtable on ‘Planetary Europe’

Organizer: Benedict Kingsbury (NYU)
Discussants: Andreas Buser (FU Berlin), Marie Petersmann (LSE), Laura Mai (Tilburg)

‘Planetary’ referents have rippled from science and cosmologies into much wider societal awareness, and have become important in European political discourse, policy, and law.  This has manifested in green deal initiatives, climate litigation, and struggles over ‘earth systems law’, ‘planetary boundaries’, and ‘just transitions’. Planetary thought brings with it the simultaneity of multiple previously-separate temporalities, along with new puzzles of scale and scaling, so that established modes of ordering and of law need to be rethought.  At the same time, Europe is galvanized by renewed concerns about war, borders, democracy, rearmament, military alliances, critical supplies, geoeconomics, and nationalisms. The ‘planetary’ dimensions of  European thought and practice are now jostling among the demands and convulsions of resurgent concerns with the national, regional, international, and global. This Roundtable discussed the possibilities and implications for law and legal ordering of, through, and with the planetary in the European context.