Events

in conversation with the Multi-Species Collective
ONLINE SEMINAR, 11 Feb 2026

What Can International Climate Law Learn From Plankton and Penguins?
On the Im/Possibilities of Registering More-than-Human Temporalities

How might international climate law begin to register more-than-human temporalities – those distant pasts, deep futures, and multispecies rhythms that shape planetary processes? While geological archives and affective encounters offer fleeting access to these unfamiliar and strange temporal scales, legal frameworks continue to privilege human-centred notions of time. In the context of international climate law, symbolic references to ecosystems and invocations of ‘Mother Earth’ have not unsettled tacitly inscribed anthropocentric assumptions.

Drawing on two narratives – of plankton sedimentation and a penguin colony – this talk shows how human and other-than-human temporalities are ‘entangled’ and why legal responses to climate change must begin to register these temporal relations. It argues that because human perception and embodied experience of time is unavoidably anthropocentric, the project of recognising more-than-human temporalities does not consist of transcending the anthropocentric horizon but acknowledges its limitations. From this starting point, the task becomes one of engaging these limits as openings to develop ways for legal norms and processes to knot together human and other-than-human times.

Online participation is possible. A registration link will be made available on this site ahead of the seminar.

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

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.