Tracey Skillington

Climate change and the human rights challenge: extending justice beyond the borders of the nation state

This paper critically explores how a nation state perspective continues to shape the manner in which ideas of ‘entitlement’ and ‘right’ are framed in international policy debate on the security implications of climate change. In a world where natural resource reserves are steadily declining and inequalities between regions are widening, finding a peaceful compromise between the competing interests of global actors and the needs of vulnerable communities is a major challenge for the future. What dominates current international negotiations is not the question of duties to global others but rather the entitlements of sovereign states and private capital to exhaust precious resources reserves for private gain. This paper explores how climate justice coalitions, small state alliances and international human rights organisations challenge the ethical and, indeed, legal basis of this reasoning in their efforts to reframe ‘unintended’ acts of ecological destruction as a deliberate violation of human rights.

Constructing Difference: Discourse Coalitions on Biotechnology in the Press

Over the last 30 years, growing consciousness of the fact that regimes of nature are not eternal and unalterable has energised the idea of ‘nature as victim’ in human ethical and political consciousness. The depth of public reaction to biotechnological innovation shows society’s increasing interest in this discourse. The once confident foundations of scientific-technical rationality are now questioned by a public whose increasing power to impose ethical standards on technical solutions has led to a gradual shifting of ethical rule-making capacities from the traditional institutionalised public narratives of government, business, education and science into the public sphere of modern society, where ideas and perspectives are subject to critical construction rather than inheritance (see Dreyer, this volume).1 The employment of multiple and extended rationalities in assessing risk leads to opposing public constructions of biotechnological issues. These constructions are filtered through the dramaturgy of public display (Lowe and Morrison, 1984, pp. 75–90). The politics of biotechnology derives momentum from what Munch (1991, p. 62) describes as an inflation in the value of words, which provokes governments into making ethical and legal commitments that are often not adhered to, and compels industry to adjust its desire for innovative freedom to suit a more constraining symbolic environment (see Dreyer, this volume).

Theorizing the Anthropocene

A broad consensus prevails today among science communities that we have entered an era known as ‘the Anthropocene’. For the first time, the outer limit or tipping point in Nature’s capacities to adapt to the destruction of its essential resources is in sight (e.g., grave depletion of the Earth’s biodiversity and loss of a ‘safe’ nitrogen cycle) (see Rockström et al., 2009). Over the past two centuries in particular, humanity has dramatically altered the Earth’s atmosphere and natural landscape, becoming in the process a formidable geological force of change in its own right. The fact that humankind today is the most significant source of change in planetary terms requires a reflective moment. We are now in the rather daunting position of determining how this tectonic shift will shape the future of this planet and its populations. This position raises serious moral questions as to how ideas of justice should be redefined in response to rapidly changing ecological circumstances (e.g., grave loss of land and other essential resources on the part of many communities) as well as what kind of ‘Anthropocene futures’ (Berkhout, 2014: 1) we are shaping for generations to come. As Strydom notes in his article ‘Cognitive fluidity and climate change’, humanity is not only tasked with the challenge of mastering an objectivist knowledge of nature’s outer limits but also of complementing scientific understanding of the biological, chemical and physical substance of life with a more reflexive hermeneutic reconstruction of how humanity has arrived at this point of destruction in its historical development. If this moment of crisis is to be transformative, then such reflection must also be critical and disclosing of those underlining aspects of modern social life that contribute detrimentally to human ecological destruction. Just as the cognitive capacities of the human mind steadily acquired greater ‘fluidity’ during prehistoric times, allowing the substitution of largely mobile hunting–gathering for more sedentary farming forms of human existence and the large-scale acquisition

Cosmopolitan Justice and Global Climate Change: Toward Perpetual Peace or War in a Resource-Challenged World?:

Can inclinations towards democratic peace be maintained within the international community when competition between states for diminishing natural resource reserves and the threat of military conflict grows ever more intense? Implicit in recent policy discourse on the security implications of climate change is the notion that war, in certain circumstances, is a legitimate response to threat and given the inevitability of shortages amongst many climate-vulnerable states in the future, highly likely. This paper assesses the ‘uncomfortable paradox’ (Beck 2008: 131) that emerges alongside the institutionalisation of a liberal democratic regime that in principle supports global peace under conditions of resource scarcity but in practice, offers legitimation occasionally to its opposite – war. From a critical normative cosmopolitan perspective, the notion that natural resource conflict can be considered ‘just’ or even ‘inevitable’ is objectionable. Ultimately, it is a regressive form of liberalism that allows a war mentality to condition how universal principles of freedom, justice and self-determination are applied to issues of resource distribution in this age of climate adversity when global cooperation is a prerequisite for humanitys long-term survival.

Demythologising a Neo-Liberal Model of Healthcare Reform: A Politics of Rights, Recognition, and Human Suffering

As a moral-political witness to contemporary human suffering, the activist campaigning on various healthcare issues makes a vital contribution to the social expansion of a human rights consciousness. Particular incidents of citizen neglect are highlighted for their exemplary significance to a more general critique of economic and administrative processes of re-structuration, including international initiatives to marketise health. This actor attempts to invert a state politics of rationalised indifference by shifting the focus from the issue of procedure to that of patient harm. With a collective consciousness of suffering at the epicentre of their campaign, protest coalitions construct policies aimed at restricting public funding for essential services, for instance, as representative of an ‘embodied injustice’ against the sick and the vulnerable, and as an act of moral disrespect against the population at large. As this paper argues, discontent leads to a rediscovery of the practical significance of universal norms of social justice or equality, and of the need to actively partake in the project of democracy. The specific direction and orientation of this actors struggle for recognition within Irish society is centrally shaped by established traditions of reasoning and responding to social conflict. When combined with new macroeconomic priorities, such traditions not only restrict the realisation of autonomy and difference, but continue to reinforce a culture of profound non-accountability. The theoretical conception of justice and recognition applied to this study of social conflict on health will follow that tradition of thought established in particular by Axel Honneth (2003, 2007) in critical response to Nancy Fraser (2003).

On the Rights of the Peoples of Disappearing States

Many of the elements that have traditionally supported state-level normative self-organization, most notably territory, are being actively undermined today by rising sea levels, flooding, desertification, and other climate change effects. As more and more states are reclassified as ‘disappearing’, that is, states losing their territories to the natural environment through no specific fault of their own, a question arises as to how displaced communities will be assisted in their desire (and right) to continue to practice principles of self-determination and self-government. Because this question is of growing practical significance, the assumption that a unified or largely unchanging model of the liberal democratic state (Osterdahl 2003) can continue to be viable into the future has to be reconsidered. Indeed, a more likely scenario is that a series of alternative ontological models of sovereign community will be explored in response to deepening problems of land scarcity, as well as a higher incidence of natural disaster (see Norwegian Refugee Council 2009). But how might collective agreement be reached on the legitimacy of a range of new models of statehood when territory can no longer be assumed to be a fixed component of state identity? This chapter considers how a democratic reform of statehood might proceed in the years ahead under deteriorating climate conditions and resettlement agreements for displaced communities agreed upon. Preserving peaceful sovereign relations as the Anthropocene age progresses, arguably, requires a radical extension of established traditions of democratic compromise, human rights solidarity, and cosmopolitan justice.

Sociology in the 21st Century: Reminiscence and Redefinition

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sociology, the editorial board decided to produce four e-special issues reflecting the contributions of the journal across the decades. Each of the four e-specials focuses on a different theme: ‘1967–1979 Sociology and Social Class’ edited by Ryan and Maxwell; ‘Self-Identity and Its Discontents: Sociology in the 1990s’ edited by Skinner, May and Rollock; ‘Sociology in the 1980s: The Rise of Gender (and Intersectionality)’ edited by Roth and Dashper; and ‘Sociology in the 21st Century: Redefinition and Reminiscence’ edited by Jawad, Dolan and Skillington. The purpose of this e-special was to assess new developments in the research agenda of sociology as reflected through publications in Sociology during the period 2000–13. Two articles that featured in the journal before this time interval were also included on account of their seminal importance to new directions in sociological thinking. One theme, in particular, seemed to capture the essence of sociology’s new spirit of

Climate justice without freedom Assessing legal and political responses to climate change and forced migration

Storm surges, flooding, heatwaves, and prolonged drought, as ever more regular features of life under deteriorating climate conditions, are unmistakably violent. Their effects on the lives of vulnerable human populations and ecosystems across the world are widely known to be devastating. Yet a legal order that denies the victims of such ecological persecution safe haven, no matter how great its use of force (e.g., detention, arrest, forced return) cannot, by definition, be violent. The power of law, used to protect states’ rights to exclude from their jurisdictions growing numbers displaced involuntarily by global climate harms, in being a source of ‘legitimate right’, is never the same as violence. This article challenges the ongoing validity of this assumption. It points to some of the ways in which legal instruments are used today to deny those displaced by climatic conditions sufficient normative status to guarantee their safety. What is needed instead is a new critical normative understanding of the evolving relationship between climate change, violence, justice, and law, one that re-assesses the democratic justificatory grounds for the current positions of non-responsibility for the climate displaced whilst re-affirming such people’s legal and political status as equal co-members of the politically constituted international community of humanity.

Modernity’s Organic Economy of Governmentality

The science of biotechnology today is a powerful force; it pervades every aspects of social life, either directly or indirectly. As an institutionally supported reality, it is hailed as one of the major animating forces of late modernity. The increasing invasion of science into food and flesh means that long-life tomatoes, bananas and super soybeans that resist germs, even if mutant, epitomise the food of tomorrow, while tobacco containing a gene for thinning blood and bananas equipped with a gene that manufactures a vaccine against hepatitis B represent the future face of medicine. We are glimpsing at a future where government and privately funded science have a growing capacity to produce cross-specific brain transplants from one species to another, make non-human animals produce human sperm through the transfer of sperm precursor cells from the large mammal into the testes of its smaller relative, prime pigs for routine use as donors for human organ transplants (xenotransplantation), goats for the medicines in their milk (molecular pharming), and build factories for the purpose of growing human skin. As newly discovered genetic altering procedures are proposed for commercial application, they are individually assessed for safety by such bodies as the Advisory Committee for Releases into the Environment, and the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes before authorisation is granted for commercial release. In such a context, we are told, there is no cause for concern. Any expression of public anxiety about novel developments is discounted by those who threaten us not to try to shackle science’s autonomy or the ‘human yearning to find things out’ on the grounds that ‘research that must go on’.1 Frequently aroused to a passionate defence of esotericism, scientists find themselves actively having to defend the continued separation of expert systems from the everyday life they can so dramatically alter, and by extension members of the public at large, the latter of which Habermas (1974, p. 282) once described as the ‘inmates of closed institutions’.

Conclusion: Towards a Transnational Order of Climate Justice

Transnationally felt, deteriorating global climate conditions have the effect of making individual sovereign states appear too small to resolve the growing range of problems they present to humanity at large. The era of the Anthropocene has ushered in a series of geological and social transformations that do not apply exclusively to any one corner of the globe but represent a level of threat that every state is required to internalize. Although clearly limited in its own isolated capacities to halt the intensity of a globally relevant environmental destruction, the contemporary sovereign state, nevertheless, continues to be an important enabler of transformative potentials even as it also proves a major hindrance to efforts to address climate change problems. States acting consistently in self-interest have shown themselves to be a serious obstacle to the formation of more co-operative arrangements on issues such as resource sharing, accommodating displaced persons, or devising a collective plan of co-operative action to reduce rates of global warming, as we have seen throughout this book. That said, the modern democratic state still remains a main site of democratic governance (Habermas 2008: 447) and for that reason must play a prominent role in the future implementation of solutions to these problems. Although much of the analysis presented in this book assesses the various hindrances created by a state-bound outlook on deepening ecological challenges, it also has tried to draw attention to the significant potentialities created for a reform of this perspective by states’ legal endorsement of the universal validity of basic democratic principles.