| ID | 152729 |
| Title Proper | Personhood and the rights of nature |
| Other Title Information | the new subjects of contemporary earth politics |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Youatt, Rafi |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | This article evaluates the emergence of rights for nature in global politics, focusing particularly on questions surrounding the politics and ontology of collective personhood in Ecuador and New Zealand. Rather than assuming international space to be largely populated by state persons who in turn grant personhood to nature, these cases suggest that it is more productive to start by asking what kinds of collective persons populate world spaces, and in what ways they are made political. Augmenting conceptions of Westphalian personification rooted largely in human symbolic practices, the article advocates for an understanding of persons as figures that are sometimes produced by relations between human and nonhuman actors. It then suggests that the rights of nature are, paradoxically, not a politics over whether a singular nature should be a rights holder but, rather, are partial challenges to the universality of secular law and the sovereign state. As such, they raise important questions about the politics of translation and the commensurability of multiple conceptions of collective personhood. |
| `In' analytical Note |
International Political Sociology Vol. 11, No.1; Mar 2017: p.39-54. |
| Journal Source | International Political Sociology 2017-03 11, 1 |
| Key Words | Global Politics ; Rights of Nature ; Contemporary Earth Politics ; Human and Nonhuman Actors |