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This lecture argues that temporal strategies, arguments, and contestations are fundamental dimensions of the current struggle for climate reparations. Demands for reparatory climate justice seek to challenge international law’s temporal abstractions and its progressive linear temporality, while redefining the boundaries of established legal doctrines. These efforts invite to take seriously international law’s temporal foundations and their distributive outcomes. This lecture will, first, examine how the doctrine of reparation in the law of state responsibility attempts to manage, and often suppress, the unequal temporal experiences of living in ecologically compromised words. Thereafter, it will consider the written and oral submissions of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDC) before the International Court of Justice in the context of the advisory proceedings on climate change to explore how reparations are becoming the entry point to imagine futures outside international law’s teleology. This lecture thus aims to contribute to a thriving debate, in and beyond international law, on law’s ambivalent role in temporal ordering, by reflecting on the possibilities of legal transformation through thinking differently about time.
Dr Eliana Cusato is an Associate Professor of International Law at Tilburg Law School. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Law, and a Lecturer in the School of Law at Essex University. Eliana’s research examines how international law, in theory and practice, deals with the interrelation of global inequalities, violence, and ecological destruction. Her work draws upon a variety of intellectual traditions, including decolonial and feminist studies. She is the author of The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law published in 2021 with Cambridge University Press. Eliana obtained her Ph.D. in Law from the National University of Singapore. She is a member of the editorial board of the Leiden Journal of International Law (International Legal Theory section). In 2020, she was awarded the ERC-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie research grant.
There is a sandwich lunch at 12.30 pm in the Old Library at the Centre. All lecture attendees welcome.
Chair: Dr Lovleen Bhullar
The Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
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