Beachfront resort development on the ancestral lands of Indigenous seafarers in southern Thailand (© Andreas Neef)

New Publication on Global Land and Resource Grabbing

The Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing has just been published. Co-edited by ETO Consortium academic member Andreas Neef (University of Auckland, New Zealand), “[this] handbook provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive overview of global land and resource grabbing.”

The abstract of the handbook further reads:

Global land and resource grabbing has become an increasingly prominent topic in academic circles, among development practitioners, human rights advocates, and in policy arenas. The Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing sustains this intellectual momentum by advancing methodological, theoretical and empirical insights. It presents and discusses resource grabbing research in a holistic manner by addressing how the rush for land and other natural resources, including water, forests and minerals, is intertwined with agriculture, mining, tourism, energy, biodiversity conservation, climate change, carbon markets, and conflict. The handbook is truly global and interdisciplinary, with case studies from the Global South and Global North, and chapter contributions from practitioners, activists and academics, with emerging and Indigenous authors featuring strongly across the chapters.
The handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in land and resource grabbing, agrarian studies, development studies, critical human geography, global studies and natural resource governance.

The 31st and concluding chapter – Filling Gaps in International Human Rights Law to Address Global Land and Resource Grabbing. Extraterritorial Human Rights Law Obligations of States and the Rights of Future Generations – looks into gaps in international human rights law to address global land and resource grabbing, combining extraterritorial human rights obligations and the rights of future generations. This chapter’s abstract reads:

Traditionally, human rights law (treaties in particular) applies only to the territories of states that have ratified such treaties, and only states are legally bound by these agreements. Yet, as a result of processes of globalization and the conduct of states, corporate actors and international organizations, including their involvement in land and resource grabbing, increasingly have effects beyond national borders. Does international human rights law also apply in such circumstances? This has been defined as the extraterritorial scope of international human rights law. The Maastricht Principles on the Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2011) have provided a sound legal framework drawn from international (human rights) law. Meanwhile, the rights of future generations remain a blind spot in international human rights law to date. Yet illegitimate appropriation and exploitation of different types of resources does not only affect the human rights of members of present generations. This chapter therefore discusses the question what the contribution of international human rights law can be in protecting the human rights of future generations. It analyses the role of the precautionary principle and the different types of domestic and extraterritorial human rights obligations states have to guarantee a sustainable and dignified life for members of future generations.