Imagining Justice with the Ocean

Abstract

This work is about the law of the sea as an ecological force. It is about how the law of the sea dominates human relations with the ocean – their beings, lifeways and fluid, phenomenological systems. Despite several decades of the international law of the sea operating its environmental protections, the ocean is in crisis. Law’s inability to effectively respond can be found in ontological foundations, within and outside of law, which normalise exploitation as the default human relation with the seas. From this perspective, the ocean’s ecological crisis is a cultural matter – about relations with the ocean. The tension between considering human material needs alongside those of the ocean surfaces iteratively throughout this thesis. It worries the edges of possibility for a concept of justice that envisages ocean cohabitation. I argue for better ways of knowing and unknowing the seas to ethically imagine and respond to their livability needs. More imaginatively expansive tools are needed to navigate the ocean’s unknowable dimensions; and to know and unknow the ‘we’ that is brought into relation with the seas. By examining these issues and the conceptual tools for exploring them, this work reveals that matters of justice are soaked through with material relations. By dint of material embodiment and vulnerability, humans need to source materials from the ocean to live well. The inalienable relations of violence associated with such provisioning calls for re-imagined ethical relations with the worlds of our prey. This work then is also about being a reluctant predator and taking responsibility for the power and exceptionalism of this status. As an interdisciplinary work of cultural theory, the thesis assembles feminist posthumanist and new materialist approaches, drawing on theorists including Stacy Alaimo, Lorraine Code, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Melody Jue, Astrida Neimanis, Val Plumwood, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Kathryn Yusoff; and the feminist legal theoretical work of Martha Fineman and Anna Grear. The work is transdisciplinary as well, through its empirical and heuristic engagement with international law, marine scientific research, and art practices. Drawing on this rich assembly of theoretical resources and thinking with the seas, I begin to shape the contours of an ecologically modelled, materially relational concept of ocean justice.