On 8 April 2024, the workshop ‘Law and the Inhuman’ took place at Tilburg Law School (TLS), in the Netherlands, convened by Marie Petersmann, Julia Dehm, Kathleen Birrell and Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The workshop gathered ten speakers from different disciplines, who were invited to speak to different sub-themes or categories of the ‘inhuman’ and their relation to law or legal ordering. The workshop was generously supported by the ‘Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene’ research project held at TLS, the Dutch National Sector Plan on ‘Transformative Effects of Globalization on Law’, as well as a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) ‘Early Career Partnership’ grant. 

The impetus for this workshop was the generative intellectual engagements that seek to expand our understandings of non-human agency, more-than-human flourishing, and humans’ situated entanglements and symbiotic forms of becoming-with non-humans. We were wary, though, of prematurely moving ‘beyond’ the human, without first interrogating the liberal category of the ‘human’ and the exclusions or negations that constitute it. 

The legal category of the ‘person’ emerged from the complicated relationship between legal artifice, metaphysical entity and biological substrate, and thus between status and life. On the one hand, we can think of the ‘person’ as a legal technology. Following Ed Mussawir and Connal Parsley, this approach attends to the jurisprudential art or crafting of personhood, as evidenced in the granting of legal personhood to artificial entities, the corporation, ships, and now rivers and other parts of the ‘natural’ world. On the other hand, the human ‘person’ is assumed to have a more biological basis. 

The liberal category of the ‘human’ is conventionally defined in binary terms, with humans presumed to have attributes that distinguish them/us from the non-human – such as agency, intentionality, or language. Additionally, even though the ‘human’ or ‘humanity’ is understood as a universal category – the human species as a biological whole – it has been fragmented by hierarchical and exclusionary divisions. Ontological tensions over its inclusions and exclusions have animated feminist, antiracist, and class-based struggles, as well as contestations over ableist constructions of who is deemed fully ‘human’. Moreover, the Cartesian subject is understood as internally divided, between the rational, cognitive ‘self’ that exists in a relation of self-ownership and self-mastery over the ‘animalistic’, emotional and impulsive body. We can think too about ongoing political contestations regarding the temporal limitations of life: the status of the foetus as the not-yet human, or of organs and corpses as no-longer human.  

Our point of departure for this workshop was a troubling of these constructions of the ‘human’ – questioning its presumed distinctiveness, boundedness, self-mastery, and hierarchies – by thinking in more fluid, liminal, and hybrid ways. We engage the ‘inhuman’ as a modality of negotiation, and a way of thinking in relation to, against and beyond the ‘human’. Indeed, the prefix ‘-in’ literally means both ‘not, opposite of, without’, but also ‘into, in, on, and upon’. For Elizabeth Grosz, the ‘inhuman’ provides a heuristic for thinking ‘before, within and after’ the ‘human’. Similarly, drawing an analogy between how Roberto Esposito thinks of the relation between the ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’, we could understand the inhuman as what ‘lies outside the horizon of the [human], not in a place that is unrelated to it’, but rather as situated ‘on the lines of resistance … which cut across its territory’ (Third Person, p. 14). 

This questioning also draws on the ‘inhumanities’, an analytic developed by Kathryn Yusoff to address the material confluences of race and environment in the epistemic construction of the ‘humanities’ and social sciences. The ‘inhumanities’ interrogate the racialized subjectivity of the liberal category of the ‘human’ that has shaped geology and left its imprint on the geostrata of the Earth through colonial and settler colonial extractivism. This idea also emerges from the intellectual heritage of Grosz – who draws on Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, among others – to query: if the humanities, as a discipline, centres the ‘human’, what would be a mode of knowledge production that is able to think beyond and against this figure? Following this prompt, we explore the inhumanities as a response to and a refusal of the humanities, to begin to imagine a ‘self-overcoming’ that is required for collective life and politics.

Interrogating the category of the ‘human’ in a world that remains hierarchically organized, and asking who registers and counts as human and inhuman before the law, requires nuanced, ethical engagement, attentiveness and care. As we write, the horrific suffering and starvation in Gaza unfolds. More than 75 years into the ‘ongoing Nakba’, its intensifying annihilating violence is being exposed and contested through the traditional register of ‘international law’. Recently, the ICJ issued additional provisional measures to order the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and seven of the sixteen ICJ judges explicitly called for Israel to suspend its military operations in Gaza. In a landmark advisory opinion, the ICJ recognized the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor applied for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders (one of whom, Ismail Haniyeh, has since been killed by an Israeli airstrike in Teheran in July 2024).

Speaking to the inhumanity we explored in the workshop, the violence we see unfolding in Palestine results from a process of dehumanization of Palestinians, considered sub– or in-human. Israeli officials have long described Gazans as ‘hayot-adam’, a term that, Irus Braverman tells us, translates to ‘animal-humans’ and is used colloquially in Hebrew to refer to ‘beasts’ or ‘savages’. In Yoav Gallant’s quest to ‘fight human animals’, we hear an echo of Judith Butler’s reference to ‘ungrievable life’ – a life that does not register as valuable and hence worth protecting, a life that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, and has never counted as human life at all. The violence of dehumanization demands attention to the role that law plays in figuring and enabling the protection of certain humans, and the abandonment of Others deemed sub– or in-human. Against this backdrop, the current situation in Gaza emphasizes the need to engage the various modalities of the ‘inhuman’ that we questioned throughout the workshop.

But the inhumane violence we witness in Palestine extends also towards non-humans. Braverman powerfully shows how non-humans are enlisted in the project of settler-colonialism, cautioning us to be attentive to the ‘deep ecological foundations of settler colonialism and, vice versa, the deep colonial foundations of ecological thought’. Satellite analyses have revealed how more than half of Gaza’s trees have been razed, and how the onslaught on Gaza’s ecosystems has made the area unliveable. Its soil and groundwater are contaminated by munitions and toxins, the sea choked with sewage and waste, and the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter. These concerns testify to the destruction of Palestinians’ territory by Israeli forces as a way to annihilate their liveability on their ancestral lands, and begs important questions on more-than-human livelihoods in the aftermath of a ceasefire.

Additionally, thinking about the current military operations in Gaza requires us to consider the ‘inhuman’ technological and military infrastructures that tacitly operates as the human. Recently, the independent Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine reported that Israel is deploying an artificial intelligence system called ‘Lavender’ – a database that identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas. Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines. These technologies operate with a logic of decision-making that troubles legal principles and practices of precaution and accountability, where ‘the human in the loop’ is no longer discernible. Here, the ‘inhuman’ acts as the human. 

Thinking with, against and beyond the human in the contemporary moment is both difficult and fraught, but also unavoidable and necessary. As legal theorists, we are prompted to explore how the notion of the ‘inhuman’ urges us to rethink legal concepts like harms, subjecthood, rights, reparations, and loss; and reveal more expansive ideas of responsibility, refusal, healing/care, de- and re-worlding. That is, how might engaging the ‘inhuman’ compel a rethinking of legal concepts and/or a development of (pre-)figurative or speculative politics and legalities?

For the purpose of the discussions, we conceived four different – yet inevitably entangled and overlapping – modalities in which the ‘inhuman’ acts as a powerful heuristic with which to apprehend the forces that both compose and decompose the ‘human’. These four articulations of the ‘inhuman’ are the following:

1)  First, the inhuman in the human, which engages with the displacement of the ‘human’ by broader relational constellations of non-human entities, from the planetary to the microbial, that is: the inhuman that constitutes the human as creative and resistant agency in the human. This first roundtable was moderated by Kathleen Birrell, in conversation with Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch.

2)   Second, the inhuman as the human, which explores the reconfiguration of the ‘human’ as a hybrid or cyborgian form of being in a context of plural cosmotechnics, that is: the technological and infrastructural inhuman that tacitly operates as the human. This second roundtable was moderated by Afshin Akhtar-Khavari, in conversation with Matilda Arvidsson and Connal Parsley.

3)  Third, the inhuman as capital, where the inhuman refers to supposedly subjectless matter ripe for appropriation, extraction and exploitation, that is: the inhuman as commodified or ‘natural resources’ made fungible in material and financial flows as capital. This third roundtable was moderated by Julia Dehm, in conversation with Angela Last and Adam Bobbette.

4) Finally, the inhuman as refusal, which explores how the inhuman is re-appropriated by those once denied as humans, who today refuse to be recognised as such to resist a re-inscription of the liberal figure as a free, self-possessed and autonomous human, that is: the inhuman that emerges from the suspension of liberal recognition and subjectivity as refusal. This last roundtable was moderated by Marie Petersmann, in conversation with Sarah Riley Case and Juliana M. Streva.

The day ended with concluding remarks offered by Sophie Chao, reflecting on these four modalities of the ‘inhuman’ and its relations to law – how law makes, enables and sustains the inhuman, how the inhuman is needed for the ‘human’ to make sense, and how rethinking the ‘human’ with (and against) the ‘inhuman’ is key to move towards liveable conditions for the living.

We are delighted that such a wonderful and thoughtful group of thinkers accepted our invitation to gathered in Tilburg, and agreed to share these conversations in this series of posts for Critical Legal Thinking. We invite you to explore the separate posts that follow, reflecting our discussions at each of the four roundtables and concluding comments by Sophie Chao.

As a tribute to the work of Kathryn Yusoff, which inspired this workshop in the first place, we begin our series with a revealing ‘geologic dirge’, from Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race:

Unground the human, fall off its edges

into rocky gatherings, seismic rifts, and

world-altering geologic grammars;

Brake geo-logics of enclosure:

alluvial plantations, oceanic, magma, mine, Mine, mine

fungible units, black-gold, coiled and recoiling earth,

Of inhumanities.

Nonbeing quickens into fugitivity

from the category of “natural resource”

to subterranean rifts unburdened by the weight of surface “discovery”

Toward other geologic lives

unthought. Intramural. Crystalline.

Ore of the earth. Cradling islands, remembering seas.

Subjects unfolding in magma-fired embrace.

imaginary / ground / Subject / Earth / Relation

Beyond extraction.

“senses as theoreticians”

plays aesthetics voluminous underground

as praxis; insurgent geophysics

defying racial gravities,

in deep discovery with rocky abandonment.

Every moment in Relation to another.

Every Earth a broken ground.

–––

Marie Petersmann is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at LSE Law School. Her research combines legal theory with political ecology and ecological philosophy, with a particular interest in practices of refusal and resistance against new frontiers of extractivism. Her project Anthropocene Legalities: Reconfiguring Legal Relations within More-than-human Worlds is funded by a Dutch NWO Veni grant (2022-2025). Her book When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide was published with CUP in 2022. She is currently editing (with Dimitri Van Den Meerssche) a volume on Underworlds: Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering, to be published in 2025.

Julia Dehm is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe Law School. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan) and Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.

Kathleen Birrell is a Senior Lecturer in Law at La Trobe University, Vice President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia, and Editor of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. Prior to joining La Trobe Law School, she was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School and published her monograph, Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (2016). Her current research adopts critical legal methodologies to explore the implications of new materialism and geophilosophy for legal theory and praxis, with a focus on the limits and possibilities of rights and obligations.

Afshin Akhtar-Khavari is a Professor of international law at the School of Law of the Queensland University of Technology. His research engages in critique and develops normative perspectives on the relationship of the law to non-human living beings and their social lives. He has published studies focusing on global governance, restoration, plastics, and jurisprudence. He is presently completing a book on restorative mindsets in international law for the Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies series on the topic of international law and restorative environmentalism. He is currently a Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Council discovery grants studying the intersections of science, ecology and law.

The cover image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014)