Changing the World: The Ethical Impulse and International Law

Dismantling Your House with Dignity: Ethics, Justice and the InternationalThere is currently, in rich countries and poor, a groundswell of activism, activity, protest and popular engagement directed at creating a better world.Everywhere we look, people are singing, dancing, shopping (or not shopping), blogging, protesting, writing, performing, sponsoring and volunteering in the name of global justice.It is obvious that people care.This ethical impulse is coming from both the Third and First worlds, or if you prefer, from the both the Global South and the Global North.It is democratic, and not confined to young idealists and old hippies.As a human being, this makes me optimistic.I am grateful for people's energy and engagement.But as an international lawyer and scholar, the political shape of this ethical impulse and the institutional form to which it ultimately translates gives me pause.The precise reasons for my unease recently became clearer to me at an exhibition at the Brunei Gallery at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2011, which brought together a photographic essay by Robert Wallis with works by the Tribal Women's Artist Collective from North Central India. 1The exhibition, called 'A Disappearing World', centred on the battle currently being waged between the non-Hindu tribal people in what is now Jharkhand, and the resource companies who have been granted mining rights by the Indian state.These rights have been granted over areas where this group of people have been living since well before the existence of the Indian state, since before colonisation, even before the idea of India.Much of the exhibition was devoted to chronicling the dispossession of the tribal people by the mining companies and the struggle to secure land titles and compensation that activists, both Indian and foreign, were waging on behalf of those peoples.As I walked around the exhibition, I thought about the number of clashes like this one occurring all over the world.In Brazil, China, Canada, the US, Myanmar, Colombia, South Africa, Indonesia, West Papua -even here in Australia -extractive industries and indigenous people are meeting every day in ways that will determine the fate of the indigenous peoples as well as the world's valleys, hills, forests and waterways.

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