Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa is a new Lecturer in Law and Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Queen Mary. He talks to us about himself, and his research.
I have a long-standing interest in how law can work both to perpetuate the status quo and to transform social reality (if not always for the better). At the same time, since I was young, I have had a strong inclination towards the historical, conceptual, and philosophical exploration of our ideas and institutions, and their local manifestations. In particular, having been born and raised in South America, a child of parents with very different backgrounds –European and Japanese– I’ve been quickly drawn to the contingency and variability of human expressions and social arrangements.
As an undergraduate student at law school, I was quickly attracted to critical legal studies and the law and humanities movements. These theoretical interests, coupled with my early experience as a lawyer in criminal and human rights cases in Argentina –I practised law for more than five years before becoming a full-time academic– led me to explore different legal-theoretical aspects from a philosophical point of view, but without forgetting the potential of legal practice to shape reality. So, my initial writings combined, in a fashion similar to CLS, both philosophical analyses of particular legal concepts and contributions intended to influence legal practice and litigation. I have had the satisfaction of seeing how some of these works and ideas shaped the “juridical field” in Argentina –to use a well-known expression coined by Pierre Bourdieu– when used by national courts, non-governmental and state bodies to rethink the role of criminal law in contexts of social inequality or cases of serious human rights violations. But I also have experienced the helplessness of realising how little that meant for improving people’s lives. This possibly determined my early departure from legal practice.
Over time, my philosophical interests also led me to embark on a deeper exploration of Western law, which I began to do after moving to the UK on a scholarship that gave me the opportunity and time to do so. First, I began by critically examining contemporary phenomena such as the fast ascendency of the liberal rights discourse –for example, by studying how the promise of justice in human rights is always deferred to a future that never comes, an aspect well mirrored in the idea of “transitional justice” – and then by focusing on genealogical-historical enquiries into the expansion of Western law in the sixteenth century. Indeed, the latter was the subject of my doctoral thesis. In my dissertation, which I hope will soon become a book, I analyse how European legal forms –the ius commune of Roman and Christian-theological roots– that were quite local, “provincial” as Dipesh Chakrabarty would say, could begin a process of universalisation that would eventually lead to the current international legal order – an order in which the Global South, the former colonial world, is exploited by the North through different instruments that, for the most part, have a juridical basis. Unlike other works that have analysed this phenomenon (e.g. the “historical turn” in international legal studies), I do not focus on the writings of jurists and theologians but have tried to analyse how concrete colonial institutions that were brought to the Americas and, in particular, the practices of imperial agents on the ground, shaped the global institutions of our contemporary world.
Interestingly, from this genealogical exploration emerged my current interest in non-humans and the new ecological-technological problems of a “hybrid” world (i.e., a world where it is difficult to distinguish between humans and non-humans, as Bruno Latour puts it). On the one hand, as several environmental historians have pointed out, the colonisation of the New World represented a turning point for the world-environment –the Conquest of America involved not only the subjugation of human beings but also the incorporation of a multitude of non-humans (from plants and animals to minerals, tools and artistic objects) which, conceived as things and natural resources, would later allow the cycle of scientific-industrial revolutions that began in Europe. But more immediately, it is worth noting how the Conquest triggered a series of questions and discussions by imperial agents, jurists and theologians about the nature or essence of the Indians (or “naturals”, as they were also known at the time). The questions the conquistadors asked are not so different from the questions we ask today about non-humans: Can they be considered people? Are they persons or simply animals or things? Are they agents with reason and will of their own? Do they have rights? Can they be exploited and owned, or are they possessors and owners? In the case of the Conquest, these questions were relevant because if Indians were considered persons, they could own their land, potentially placing a limit on the colonial expansion. For us, these questions are relevant because they modify the ontolegal status of non-humans, also setting a limit, at least a juridical one, on the unbridled expansion of global capitalism that has brought us to the brink of environmental catastrophe and the sixth mass planetary extinction.
The intellectual journey I describe above spans several years. While my academic interests have varied over time, I think this has been, to some extent, more in appearance than in substance: my work revolves around a problematic core regarding the conservative/transformative powers of the law. Formulated in the form of a question, I think my concern would be the following: Is it possible to save the law? Is it possible to save it from the point of view of an emancipatory politics? I think it is Borges who once said in an interview that one spends one's life trying to answer one or two questions, even if one does so in different ways.
Over the next few years, I will focus on two parallel but interconnected projects. On the one hand, I will finish my book (entitled The Cannibal Laws. From The Juridical Forms of Conquest to the Global Legal Order) on the expansion of Western legal forms in Early modernity. On the other hand, I will be working on a new project on non-humans generously supported by the British Academy and Queen Mary University of London. Although they seem to be different projects, there is a robust philosophical-historical connection between the two, which, as I noted above, cannot be overlooked. There is no doubt, in this respect, that the expansion of Western legal forms in the sixteenth century has much to do with the ecological crisis we are experiencing today. The notions universalised by Western law structure the contemporary political ontology based on the expansion and unlimited exploitation of an objectified world at the service of human beings. The idea of the atomistic subject, the distinction between persons and things, the notion of land appropriation derived from Roman law, the idea of private property, the conception of animals and the natural world as things, the theory of rights as subjective rights, the distancing and dualism between nomos and physis, the distinction between the state of nature and the civil society (and, of course, the hypothesis of a foundational social contract that is characterised by the exclusion of nature from the human society!), distinguish the cosmology that the West has exported to the rest of the world. Yan Thomas, in a way, already pointed out these issues brilliantly when he warned that Western law has never ceased to be an increasingly absolutist enterprise in the service of mastering nature. We jurists often forget the ontogenetic and worldmaking powers of the law and its role in shaping the (all too human) world in which we live, at the expense of non-humans.
Moreover, as part of this project, I would like to analyse how the growing importance of non-humans in law (for example, the granting of rights and legal personality to animals, rivers, mountains, and also robots or AI) is framed by a larger “non-human turn” in the humanities and social sciences (an issue that is currently redefining its field and what we understand by humanities and human sciences). In this regard, an exciting range of possibilities is opening up for legal theory as it is possible to transfer, and perhaps translate into their field, a whole series of studies that today show that we need to rethink how we conceive and apprehend the world. Ontological pluralism, a term that Philip Descola uses to name the attitude of validating other ways of thinking about the world on an equal footing with the Western way of doing so, will have an undoubted impact on legal thought. Especially because legal thought is today called (I correct myself, urged!) to rethink its most basic assumptions at a time when we realise, perhaps belatedly and without remedy, that we live in a more-than-human world.