Ingo Venzke, Review of Sigrid Boysen, Die postkoloniale Konstellation: Natürliche Ressourcen und das Völkerrecht der Moderne

Abstract

‘The times are urgent; let’s slow down.’ This is how Bayo Akomolafe recently summed up his keynote address at a summit of civil society organizations.1 He implored his audience to think deeper, to drive at more radical proposals for seeing and making the world differently in view of interlocking crises. The argument is well received among those who view international law as part of the problem and who resist reform proposals that, against their liking, buy into too many questionable assumptions and mistaken narratives about the law – about where the law comes from, what it has done and what it can still do. The climate crisis, in particular, has not only raised demands to develop international law but also posed uncomfortable questions about law’s role. Sigrid Boysen’s The Postcolonial Constellation: Natural Resources and Modern International Law intervenes to slow us down. She argues convincingly that international lawyers have enlisted the law in quests to curb global warming, but they have done so without having analysed law’s roots. Boysen now makes up for this lack. She focuses on international environmental law as a gateway for her analysis of international law generally. The law took its present shape – Boysen puts forth as her main thesis – because it helped powerful actors to stabilize economic relations when formal colonial rule dissolved. Environmental law, she argues, has taken over patterns of resource exploitation that existed during colonial rule and, to the present day, continues to subject environmental problems to the logic of the market in a way that locks countries in the global North and South in a tilted relationship. International law’s origins have been placed within the context of colonialism before, as Boysen knows.2 The field of international environmental law has not escaped scrutiny in this regard either, as she also knows.3 But that body of law is often claimed to be of a more recent vintage and to be wired differently. It is one of Boysen’s strongest contributions to not only correct still-prevailing beliefs about international environmental law’s origins but also showcase the problematic theoretical and practical consequences that have so far flown from those beliefs, such as the mistaken (in her view)