Workshop & book project

Amazon of Rights: Global Ecojurisprudence in Times of Urgency

an interdisciplinary workshop & book project

Amazon of Rights: Global Eco-Jurisprudence in Times of Urgency charts in a novel way contemporary debates about eco-centric normativity – including rights of nature, multi-species and multi-being justice, wild law and earth law – within the larger context of the global environmental crisis and the central role of the Amazons in the survival of the planets. Forward looking, critical, empirical, and explicitly interdisciplinary, the contributions to this volume dismantle set assumptions about the way the Amazon has been imagined and constructed in law and global politics since colonial times to today’s internationalised disputes about the securitisation and appropriation of its riches.   

The Amazonian ecosystem is of planetary relevance, housing the largest remaining tropical rainforest on Earth, along with the largest river and riverine system, and an unparallel diversity of life. Deeply intertwined with the Andes mountain range, and the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, the Amazons is threaten, however, by juxtaposed extractivist practices, anchored in a plethora of modalities of representation which themselves support a constellation of public and private normative regimes. These regimes often enable continuing forms of exploitation while challenging occasionally, as in the case of dedicated environmental frameworks, the relentless destruction of the Amazon. At the same time, other eco-centric normativities, rooted themselves on the Amazon, and for a long time sidelined, persist. These eco-centric normativities go from the laws of the river, to the norms of the more-than-human animals and the human communities that exist in the rainforest. Leading and emerging voices both from the Global South and the Global North, brought together for the first time in this volume, outline new paths to grasp these multiple recognised and unrecognised normative regimes generated by, and constantly criss-crossing, human and more-than-human life in the Amazons.   

Amazon of Rights: Global Eco-Jurisprudence in Times of Urgency is conceptualised and designed with a wide interdisciplinary audience in mind. It speaks directly to growing concerns in relation to the future of the planet, and how to think, feel and act in this context of urgency, across the fields of law and society, international relations, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, and the arts and the humanities.  

The volume is one of the outcomes of the Amazons of Rights project, which is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. The project aims to bring awareness of the empirical reality of the different normative orders coexisting in the Amazons and the challenges they face. Employing a mix-method approach that includes comparative law, legal anthropology, and experimental visual ethnography, and through active engagement with local communities and artists, the project’s outputs include, apart from this volume, four Amazongraphies on the realities of eco-centric normativity in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru, two state of the art Amazongraphies on rights of nature developments and law and visuality, as well as a documentary feature film.   

The Amazon of Rights: Global Eco-Jurisprudence in Times of Urgency volume makes three specific contributions to contemporary literature. Firstly, it brings to the surface the multiple normative regimes permanently interacting in the Amazon, and the value of new as well as ancestral human and more-than-human eco-centric frameworks both for the future of the Amazon and of the planet. The Amazon’s planetary relevance means that whatever happens there in eco-jurisprudential terms influences the rest of the planet. Likewise, whatever happens elsewhere has consequences for the Amazons, including its forests, rivers, and all entities dwelling within.   

Secondly, the volume invites readers to appreciate the immense value of the Amazon for the future of law and its interpretation. This involves an appreciation of multilevel (and multi-cosmological) regimes of governance over humans and more-than-humans and their interactions. These regimes include new expressions of eco-centric normativity within and beyond official state law, including community and more-than-human normative frameworks which are invoked by actors in the four jurisdictions traversed by the Amazon river. Being attentive to these different scales and normative expressions, and their encounters and mobilisation in ground level legal battles, brings into question what kinds of laws and sense of justice are relevant within the context of a possible global eco-jurisprudence in times of urgency.   

Thirdly, the edited volume encourages readers to embrace new theoretical, methodological and experiential approaches to normative entanglements, in particular as they relate to eco-centric frameworks. It explores what the Amazon reveals to us about eco-centric normativity and the future of eco-centric constitutionalism, global legal pluralism, post-human legal cultures, and legal transplants occurring in the area of rights of nature and beyond. The volume demonstrates how the methodological-theoretical aspect that sustains doctrinal analysis presented across the chapters helps to approach these new developments as entry points to re-imagine the Amazon. They invite to observe the Amazon as a juridical ecosystem in which a world of normativities already exists – normativities that in their encounters and mis-encounters are already dealing with several conundrums at the heart of today’s environmental and civilisational crisis.   

Workshop participants

  • Marie Petersmann

    Marie Petersmann is Assistant Professor at LSE Law School. Her work lies at the intersection of international law, ecology, and critical theory. Her research focuses on the material, subjective, spatial, and temporal boundaries of ecological harms and explores legal strategies for climate justice. Her project Anthropocene Legalities: Reconfiguring Legal Relations within More-than-human Worlds is funded by the Dutch NWO (2022-2025). She is the author of When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide: The Politics of Conflict Management by Regional Courts (CUP 2022). She holds a PhD in International Law from the European University Institute (Florence) and an LLM from the Graduate Institute (Geneva)

  • Lisset Coba Mejía

    Lisset Coba Mejía is a professor, coordinator of the Master's program in Gender and Development, and part of the research program on Expanded Reproduction at FLACSO, Ecuador. She is also a member of the Collective of Women Anthropologists and the feminist movement in her country. Her latest research focuses on historical and cosmogonic memory in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon.She currently works on the geopolitics of affect and anti-extractive struggles for the commons, highlighting the ecological and caregiving imprints faced by Indigenous families, especially women and girls.From an ecofeminist and anticolonial perspective, she prioritizes ethnographic, audiovisual, collaborative, and co-research methodologies.

  • Yacu Viteri Gualinga

    Yaku Viteri Gualinga is Member of the Original Kichwa People of Sarayaku and former leader, musician and singer-songwriter. He currently works as a technician with a Sarayaku project and serves as an advisor to the government of Sarayaku (Tayjasaruta).

  • Roger Merino

    Roger Merino is an Associate Professor at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru. He holds a PhD from the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, United Kingdom. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School  (2016). He's research agenda includes political ecology, environmental governance, and human rights issues. He's book “Socio-legal Struggles for Indigenous self-determination in Latin America” was published by Routledge in 2021

  • Ivan Vargas-Roncancio

    Iván D. Vargas-Roncancio is an assistant professor in the Law and Society program, Department of Social Sciences at York University, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. in Natural Resource Sciences from McGill University in 2021, following a J.D. in 2008 and an LL.M in Law and Bioscience in 2011, National University of Colombia. Research interests include Earth law, Indigenous legal cosmologies, and the anthropology of plant-human relations in Amazonia. He has published in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, the Boletín de Antropología, among others. Book: Law, Humans and Plants in the Andes-Amazon: The Lawness of Life (Routledge 2024)

  • Lieselotte Viaene

    Lieselotte is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the University Carlos III de Madrid and coordinator of the ERC research project RIVERS (2019-2024). Lieselotte is an anthropologist with a PhD in Law (Ghent University, Belgium, 2011) which has a first academic degree in Criminology. Her professional focus is in transitional justice, legal pluralism, natural resources and territory. She has been collaborating with indigenous peoples in Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia in diverse spaces. As human rights practitioner she worked at the Office of United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) in Ecuador (2010-2013) were she was responsible for the areas of collective rights and transitional justice.  Previously, she was Marie Curie Individual Fellow (2016-2018) at the Centre of Social Studies, University of Coimbra (Portugal). Her latest book is Nilma Rahilal. Pueblos Indìgenas y justicia transicional: relfexiones antropologicas (2019, Universidad de Deusto,Spain).

  • Daniel Bonilla

    Daniel Bonilla is Full Professor of Law at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He holds an LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School and a law degree from Universidad de los Andes. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, Yale Law School, Fordham Law School, Sciences Po-Paris School of Law, Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, University of Brasilia, University of Brescia, Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Among his publications are Legal Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Constitutionalism of the Global South (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  • Barbara Marcel

    Barbara Marcel is a Brazilian visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Berlin. She is a PhD candidate in Art and Design at Bauhaus Universität Weimar as a Heinrich Böll Foundation fellow and holds an MA in Art in Context from Universität der Künste Berlin. Her work investigates the intersections between artistic practice and social processes, with a focus on decolonial thought and socio-environmental justice. In 2022–23, she was a Berlin Artistic Research Grant Program Fellow. Her films and installations have been presented internationally, and her latest documentary, Suraras, premiered at the CineBH– Belo Horizonte International Film Festival in 2024.

  • Daniel Augenstein

    Daniel Augenstein works as Associate Professor I in the Department of Public Law and Governance at Tilburg Law School. He is also a senior consultant to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a strategic litigation NGO. Daniel’s research interests stretch across global, international, and European law and legal and political philosophy. A central focus of his work in recent years has been the legal and policy framework governing the relationship between international human rights protection, climate change and global business operations. Daniel has published widely on issues relating to business and human rights. He has also conducted numerous policy studies on this topic for international organisations and national governments and occasionally contributes work to NGO campaigns and cross-border litigations for corporate-related human rights violations.

  • Sigrid Boysen

    Studied law at the Universities of Göttingen, Bristol, and Hamburg, passing the First State Examination in Hamburg in 1998 and the Second State Examination in 2004. Earned a doctorate (Dr. iur.) in 2005 under Stefan Oeter at the University of Hamburg, where she worked as a research assistant from 1998 to 2004. Subsequently served as a research associate at the University of Hannover and Freie Universität Berlin from 2005 to 2011. Appointed Junior Professor of Public Law, European and International Law at Freie Universität Berlin (2011-2014) before becoming Professor of Public Law, International and European Law at Helmut Schmidt University in February 2014. Completed her Habilitation at the University of Hamburg's Faculty of Law in 2018. Held visiting positions at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School (2014), Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law & Policy (2021-2022), and as a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2023-2024). Has served as co-editor of Archiv des Völkerrechts (German Review of International Law) since 2015 (managing editor since 2019) and as a judge at the Hamburg Constitutional Court since November 2022. Mother of two children (born 2009 and 2011).

  • Wouter Werner

    Wouter Werner is professor international law at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He works on the intersection of international law, film and theatre. Some of his recent publications are: Repetition and International Law (CUP 2022), Sisyphus in Robes: International Law and the Absurd (Leiden Journal of IL), Security Council Resolutions as Autobiographical Texts (London Review of IL, forthcoming).

  • Stéphanie Nasuti

    Stéphanie Nasuti is an Associate Professor at the Center for Sustainable Development (CDS) at the University of Brasília. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography, Planning, and Urban Studies from Université Paris 3 (2010, France) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Sustainable Development of the University of Brasília, as part of the Brazilian Research Network on Global Climate Change (Rede Clima) and the CAPES National Postdoctoral Program (2011–2016).She is involved in multiple research projects in Brazil and France, focusing on: Vulnerability and adaptation of family farming to climate change, and Environmental and territorial management in traditional communities. Beyond academia, she collaborates with diverse institutions, including NGOs, international organizations, and government agencies. She has extensive fieldwork experience in rural Brazil, working with local populations and institutions, employing participatory methodologies and questionnaire-based research.