The School Strike for Climate as people’s engagement in the transnational legal process and global constitutionalism

What is the significance of the School Strike for Climate from an international constitutional perspective? In this article, I compare the School Strike for Climate with the Hong Kong protests of 2019–20. Both these movements became necessary because of gaps in their countries’ respective domestic and international legal frameworks – what I term constitutionalism gaps. The immediate cause of each protest was how state and non-state actors exploited these constitutionalism gaps in the existing legal framework. Protests in Hong Kong were triggered by the attempt to enact an Extradition Law that threatened people’s autonomy, whereas the School Strike for Climate is a response to the failure of the state to deliver climate justice. Both these movements use similar strategies of advocacy and they have relied extensively on new technology. Based on this comparison, I argue that the School Strike for Climate promotes procedural and substantive values of constitutionalism at the international level, similar to the Hong Kong Protests at the domestic level. Through the School Strike for Climate, people seek to engage directly in the transnational legal process. In attempting to bridge the constitutionalism gap at the international level, the School Strike for Climate promotes values of global constitutionalism.

Defining Crimes in a Global Age: Criminalization as a Transnational Legal Process

The design of empirical research and theory-building projects in the sociolegal literature on criminalization is often premised on a presumed dichotomy between domestic and international planes of criminal lawmaking. However, in a global era in which domestic processes of criminalization are increasingly shaped by norms, institutions, and actors developed and operating outside national borders, criminalization research should develop a new theoretical frame for studying how international and domestic practices of criminal lawmaking interact with one another. This article builds from the theory of transnational legal orders and the recursivity of law to propose a transnational processual theoretical framework for the study of criminalization. This framework provides tools for investigating how criminal prohibitions are constituted through recursive interactions between actors operating in international, national, and local sites of legal practice. It draws on empirical studies to show how the processes of constructing, applying, and contesting definitions of international and transnational crimes are embedded in broader structures of power. The article demonstrates how a processual theory of transnational criminalization sheds light on important sociolegal questions about the driving forces and consequences of current efforts to harmonize the definitions of criminal activities across national jurisdictions.

World Heritage Convention and Transnational Legal Process to Protect Indonesian Nature

The World Heritage Convention demands its states parties to strengthen mechanisms to conserve and preserve natural and cultural heritage consistently. A party to the Convention, Indonesia faces challenges to maintain the balance of economic, social, and environment considerations, pertaining to policies that affect natural heritage. Nevertheless, Indonesia remains committed to observe the Convention’s rules, including ones on sustainability and conservation. As analyzed through transnational legal process theory, the performance of this commitment helps to internalize the Convention’s rules into domestic context. It is suggested that Indonesia step up its interaction with the Convention’s actors in the hope of expanding the internalization of the Convention since it will help Indonesia to design better nature conservation and preservation mechanism.

Transnational Legal Process and Discourse in Environmental Governance: The Case of REDD+ in Tanzania

Governments in developing countries have adopted policies, laws, and programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), with the funding and rules provided by global institutions and transnational actors. The transnational legal process for REDD+, entailing the construction and diffusion of legal norms that govern the pursuit of REDD+, has been driven by discursive struggles over the purposes and requirements of REDD+. At the global level, the development of legal norms for REDD+ has been primarily influenced by coalitions committed to the discourses of ecological modernization, civic environmentalism, and to a lesser extent, climate justice. Through discourse analysis of the transnational legal process for REDD+ in Tanzania, I show how domestic efforts to operationalize REDD+ have been dominated by a government coalition that has emphasized green governmentality, made few concessions to the discourse of civic environmentalism, and completely neglected the climate justice claims of Indigenous Peoples. This case study reveals how discourse analysis may enhance the study of transnational legal phenomena by drawing attention to the complex interplay of global and domestic discourses and its role in shaping legal norms and reinforcing or challenging structures of power and knowledge within and across legal systems.

What’s at Stake

This closing chapter argues that what is ultimately at stake is a struggle between the post–World War II system of Kantian global governance versus an Orwellian vision of spheres of influence supported by President Donald Trump and other global authoritarians. Thus far, history shows that various techniques of resistance can be marshaled to good effect. The foreign policy tally thus far shows that Trump has not been winning and that the rope-a-dope is working. The book closes by arguing that Trump does not own transnational legal process; we all do. But our understanding of transnational legal process carries with it a normative edge. It confers on all of us a continuing obligation to keep pushing the arc of history in the right direction.

Introduction: Trumping International Law?

How to resist President Donald Trump’s assault on international law? This introduction sketches the tripartite plan of this book. First, it discusses a counterstrategy of resistance based on transnational legal process. Second, it illustrates that counterstrategy with respect to immigration and refugees, and human rights; the Paris Climate Change Agreement, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and trade diplomacy; with countries of concern such as North Korea, Russia, and Ukraine; and with respect to America’s wars: Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Afghanistan, and Syria. Third, it reviews what broader issues are at stake in the looming battle between maintaining the post-World War II framework of Kantian global governance versus shifting to an Orwellian system of authoritarian spheres of influence.

The Counterstrategy Illustrated: Transnational Legal Process in Action

This chapter illustrates how the counterstrategies of rope-a-dope and transnational legal process have played out since the start of the Trump Administration. The outside strategy of domestic litigation has been combined with other forms of external and internal pressure from many stakeholders in a wideranging effort to resist President Donald Trump’s draconian immigration policies, particularly the Travel Ban, or Muslim Ban. The chapter also describes the core strategy of internalized bureaucratic resistance to efforts to reimpose torture as an “enhanced interrogation tactic.” This counterstrategy, which gives meaning to the slogan “This is what democracy looks like,” will likely continue whether or not the Trump Administration successfully defends its immigration policies in the courts.