Thinking with the ‘Planetary Mine’: The Jurisprudence of Global Commerce in the New Climatic Regime

Part of a symposium on Legal Genealogies of Global Commerce

The jurisprudence of global commerce has, traditionally, structured itself with reference to the political and economic logic of globalisation. Within this paradigm, it is global markets, inter-governmental regimes, and transnational networks of communication, logistics, and finance that function as primary reference points. In the ‘new climatic regime’, or the contested ‘Anthropocene’, however, the ‘globe of globalisation’ has also become the ‘globe of global warming’. Here, it is emissions accumulating in the atmosphere, and their interaction with the Earth’s bio-geo-chemical systems, that unsettle the conditions which make life on this planet possible. What might it mean for a jurisprudence of global law to engage with planetarity? And which sensibilities does the planet instil in, and evacuate from, jurisprudential analysis?

This paper takes the notion of the ‘planetary mine’ as its entry point to think through these questions. Developed by political geographers Mazen Labban and Martín Arboleda, it conceptually describes the globally interconnected nature of capitalist resource extraction. From this perspective, the planetary mine emerges as an assemblage of economic, political, technological, as well as geological and ecological processes.

The paper begins by tracing how modern conceptions of the planet emerged during the course of the 20thcentury. Using this historical account to develop a diagnosis of the present, the paper identifies three challenges which the planet poses to the jurisprudence of global commerce: temporal and spatial dislocations, the interrelatedness-and-otherness of humans in relation to their ecological contexts, and possibilities of forming political collectives.