Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Postgraduate

• LAW7001 Principles of International Law (Semester 1)
• LAW7013 International Economic Law (Semester 2)
• LAW7005 Advanced Legal Research Methods (Semesters 1 & 2)

Undergraduate

• LAW6004 Law, Environment and Society (Semester 2)
• LAW4005 Public Law (Semesters 1&2)

Supervision

Andreas welcomes PhD proposals from prospective students interested in interdisciplinary research in environmental law, international law, law and development, critical legal theory with emphasis on the work of Michel Foucault or Felix Guattari, law and geography, and related fields.

Current Doctoral Supervision

Josselin Lavigne, Reflections on the Adaptability of International Law in the Martian Epic (as Co-Director of Studies)

Ryal Wun, The Use of Force and Statehood-Seeking Territories (as Director of Studies)

Completed

Dr Laurin Correa Carranza, The Role of Regional Organisations in International Copyright Law (as Second Supervisor)

Dr Kotsakis studies the ways societies discover, frame and respond to environmental problems. He has published on topics related to biodiversity governance, energy regulation, sustainable development, and land governance. His approach is interdisciplinary, combining philosophical, geographical and historical perspectives and methods.

His book, The Use of Biodiversity in International Law: A Genealogy of Genetic Gold, is set to be published by Routledge in 2020.

Research group membership

Critical Approaches to Law Research Group

International Law Research Group

Research grants and awards

£1670 Principal Investigator, Royal Society, Lisa Jardine History of Science Award (2019).

Further information

Full-text research papers can be found at: https://oxfordbrookes.academia.edu/AndreasKotsakis

Member of the Critical Legal Conference

Member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association

Member of the Society of Legal Scholars

Books

• Kotsakis A, The Use of Biodiversity in International Law: A Genealogy of Genetic Gold, Routledge ()
  ISBN: 9781138849099
  

Journal articles

• Kotsakis, A, 'Change and Subjectivity in International Environmental Law: The Micro-Politics of the Transformation of Biodiversity into Genetic Gold'
  Transnational Environmental Law 3 (1) (2014) pp.127-147
  ISSN: 2047-1025 eISSN: 2047-1033
  Abstract

  There is no hope for international environmental law to be an engine for global social change when it can no longer provide a compelling account of itself. This article presents a theoretical framework, constructed from the works of Michel Foucault, capable of tracing this loss of descriptive capacity, as well as the resultant prescriptive confusion. The analysis examines the challenges posed by the triptych of biodiversity, biotechnology and neoliberalism housed under the idea of genetic gold, and calls for attention to micro-politics, in the shape of the apparatuses for the production of environmental subjectivity that operate outside the formal structures of the international legal sphere. The trope of genetic gold is revealed as an obsolete attempt to protect a fixed idea of biodiversity based on an outdated conception of environmental value. In response, the author argues for a mature confrontation with the end(s) of international environmental law.

  Website 
• Kotsakis A, 'The regulation of the technical, environmental and health aspects of current exploratory shale gas extraction in the United Kingdom: initial lessons for the future of European Union energy policy'
  Review of European Community and International Environmental Law 21 (3) (2012) pp.282-290
  ISSN: 0962-8797
  Abstract The shale gas revolution has reached the United Kingdom. Licenses for exploratory shale gas extraction have already been issued and a recent independent review commissioned by the British government concluded that shale gas extraction can proceed. However, the regulation of these activities is based on the broader regulatory framework for oil and gas, which does not fully account for the particular technical challenges and environmental and health impacts of unconventional gas extraction, resulting in gaps in authorization and monitoring procedures. This article analyzes the relevant European Union and domestic provisions regarding the licensing and permitting system, hydraulic fracturing and water management, as well as the mitigation of the risk of induced seismicity.Website 

Book chapters

• Kotsakis A, 'On the Relation between Scholarship and Action in Environmental Law: Method, Theory, Change' in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos A, Brooks V (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law, Edward Elgar Publishing (2017)
  ISBN: 9781784712563
  Abstract This chapter examines the intellectual phenomenon of theoretical aversion in legal scholarship, as it specifically manifests in environmental law. It first demonstrates how a proposed turn to methodology seeks to constrain theory within the strict contours of an epistemology that serves to support the scientific aspirations of legal scholarship. This notion of theory as epistemology is in turn linked to environmental law’s overwhelming concern with controlling the relation between scholarship and action for the purpose of constituting itself as valid expert authority in the context of contemporary environmental discursive practices. Building on the critique of this view of theory as a pure research design element, the chapter articulates a different perspective, recovered from theoretical excess and inspired by the life and work of Michel Foucault, which merges the distinction between scholarship and action via the – correct – use of the metaphor of the ‘tool box’, often mishandled in Foucauldian scholarship. By reorienting this metaphor, the chapter argues that the contestation over the precise role of theory within environmental law relates to the historical evolution of the current role of the legal researcher who is expected to function solely as an expert on environmental change. The task of critical environmental law thus becomes to resist the assigned role within the established regime of environmental truth and to make novel and expansive contributions of the ‘tool box’ of environmental thought and practice.Website 
• Kotsakis A, 'The Historical Roots of the North-South Dynamic in Biodiversity Conservation and its Imprint on the Convention on Biological Diversity' in Razzaque J, Morgera E (ed.), Biodiversity and Nature Protection Law, Edward Elgar Publishing (2017)
  ISBN: 9781783474240
  Abstract The formative years of biodiversity conservation in the 1980s were dominated by a series of essentialisms—population, rainforest, resource—that set the stage for a North-South dynamic built upon an orientalist pattern: the North proposed and the South reacted. This period also witnessed the formal entry of the concept of biodiversity into the corpus of international environmental law via the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This chapter examines the confluence of these two phenomena.Website 
• Kotsakis A, 'Heterotopias of the Environment: law's forgotten spaces' in Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations, Routledge (2011)
  ISBN: 9780415587136
  Website 

Kotsakis, A. ‘Community Participation in Biodiversity Conservation: Emerging Localities of Tension’ in A. Perry-Kessaris (ed.) Law in the Pursuit of Development: Principles into Practice, Routledge (2009).

Membership of professional bodies

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Conferences

2017 ‘Nomads in Search of Freedom’. Critical Legal Conference, University of Warwick, 1-3 September,

2017. ‘Land Grabbing as a Spatial Protocol for a Technology of Government’. International Law and Technologies of Land Grabbing. Workshop. University of Cambridge, 4 July.

2016 ‘Genealogical Critique in Uncertain Times’. Critical Legal Conference, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1-3 September 2016.

2016 ‘Towards a Global Political Economy of Environmental Conflict: Some Remarks from the History of Biodiversity’. Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, New Orleans, 2-5 June.

2014 ‘Chaotic Subjects at the Corporate Galleries of the Neoliberal City’. Power, Capital, Chaos Critical Legal Conference, University of Sussex, 4-6 September.

2014 ‘The Anthropocene and International Environmental Law: A Challenge from European Non-Centred Ecological Thought’. Annual Conference of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, Pace University, New York, 10-14 June.

2014 ‘Environmentalism as Counter-Conduct’. Vermont Colloquium on Environmental Scholarship, Vermont Law School, 10-12 October.

2013 ‘Terpsithea Square: Micro-politics and Spatial Manifestations of the Greek Crisis’. Law on the Edge Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2-4 July.

2013 ‘Liberate Tate and the End(s) of Environmental Law’. Locating Resistance, Locations of Resistance workshop, Oxford Brookes University, 14 June.

2012 ‘Governmentalities of the Garden: Heterotopia and Subjectivity’. Gardens of Justice Critical Legal Conference, KT Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 14-16 September.

2012 ‘We Are All in Danger: Equity and International Environmental Law’. Jurisdictions of Equity Workshop, Kent Law School, 14-15 June.

2010 ‘Judge and Geographer: The Spatial Paradox of Environmental Law.’ Great Expectations: Multiple Modernities of Law Critical Legal Conference, Institute of Legal Theory, University of Utrecht, 10-12 September.

2009 ‘Heterotopias of Biodiversity’. Symposium on Critical Environmental Law, Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, 5 June.

2007 ‘Locality of Tension: The Conflicting Spaces of Biodiversity Regulation.’ Justice, Power and Law Conference, Birkbeck School of Law, 10 December.

2007 ‘Global Biodiversity, Local Implementation: Conflicting Space(s).’ Walls Critical Legal Conference, Birkbeck School of Law, 14-16 September.

2007 ‘Biodiversity as Genetic Gold: The Interplay of Law, Politics and Science in Benefit Sharing Arrangements under the Convention on Biological Diversity.’ Young Researchers Workshop on Science and Law, Università del Salento, Lecce, 31 May-1 June.

Further information

Follow @DrAndreasK