Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea

"BLUE LEGALITIES contends that the world's oceans have created space for multiple complex and overlapping regimes of governance--particularly as climate change and technological development are transforming the oceans and our relationship to them. Statesand corporations frequently imagine oceans simultaneously as a global commons and as a repository of profitable commodities. The editors and contributors to this collection consider multiple realms of ocean law and governance, extending beyond legislation to consider regulatory and administrative systems, scientific practices, governmental frameworks, and methods of geographical reasoning that shape legalities in the ocean"--
The contributors to Blue Legalities attend to the seas as a legally and politically conflicted space to analyze the conflicts that emerge where systems of governance interact with complex geophysical, ecological, economic, biological, and technological processes.
The ocean and its inhabitants sketch and stretch our understandings of law in unexpected ways. Inspired by the blue turn in the social sciences and humanities, Blue Legalities explores how regulatory frameworks and governmental infrastructures are made, reworked, and contested in the oceans. Its interdisciplinary contributors analyze topics that range from militarization and Maori cosmologies to island building in the South China Sea and underwater robotics. Throughout, Blue Legalities illuminates the vast and unusual challenges associated with regulating the turbulent materialities and lives of the sea. Offering much more than an analysis of legal frameworks, the chapters in this volume show how the more-than-human ocean is central to the construction of terrestrial institutions and modes of governance. By thinking with the more-than-human ocean, Blue Legalities questions what we think we know&;and what we don&;t know&;about oceans, our earthly planet, and ourselves. Contributors. Stacy Alaimo, Amy Braun, Irus Braverman, Holly Jean Buck, Jennifer L. Gaynor, Stefan Helmreich, Elizabeth R. Johnson, Stephanie Jones, Zsofia Korosy, Berit Kristoffersen, Jessica Lehman, Astrida Neimanis, Susan Reid, Alison Rieser, Katherine G. Sammler, Astrid Schrader, Kristen L. Shake, Phil Steinberg