Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Postgraduate

• LAW7001 Principles of International Law (Semester 1)
• LAW7005 Advanced Legal Research Methods (Semester 1)
• LAW7013 International Economic Law (Semester 2)
• LAW7002 War Law (Semester 2)

Undergraduate

• LAW6004 Law, Environment and Society (Semester 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

Sanjana Karnik, Challenges of Autonomous Weapons Systems  (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 institutions, societies and polities 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 2021.

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 (2021)
  ISBN: 9781138849099 eISBN: 9781315725840
  Abstract

  This book presents a legal genealogy of biodiversity – of its strategic use before and after the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1993.

  This history of ‘genetic gold’ details how, with the aid of international law, the idea of biodiversity has been instrumentalized towards political and economic aims. A study of the strategic utility of biodiversity, rather than the utility of its protection under international law, the book’s focus is not, therefore, on the sustainable or non-sustainable use of biodiversity as a natural resource, but rather on its historical use as an intellectual resource. Although biodiversity is still not being effectively conserved, nor sustainably used, the Convention on Biological Diversity and its parent regime persists, now after several decades of operation. This book provides the comprehensive answer to the question of the convention’s continued existence.

  Drawing from environmental history, the philosophy of science, political economy and development studies, this book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Environmental Law, International Law, Environmental Studies, and Ecology. -- Supplied by publisher.

  Website 

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.), Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook, Edwards Elgar Publishing (2017)
  ISBN: 9781784712563 eISBN: 9781784712570
  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

Invited talks

‘The Geography of “Land Grabbing” Regulation: Challenges for Transnational Law’, University of Oxford Regulation Discussion Group (October 2018)

‘The Role of the Critical Scholar: Can Epistemology Save the World?’, University of Westminster (17 May 2018)

‘The Regulation of Genetic Gold: The Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing’, University of Kent (June 2011)

Research events organised

Searching for Critical Environmental Law: Theories, Methods, Critiques. Workshop. Oxford Brookes University (May 2018)

Environment, Law, Resistance. Conference Stream at the Critical Legal Conference. University of Warwick (September 2017).

The Space of Biopolitics. Workshop. Oxford Brookes University (July 2017).

Locating Resistance, Locations of Resistance: Across and Within the Disciplines. Workshop. Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, (June 2013).

Conference papers– selected

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

‘Genealogical Critique in Uncertain Times’. Turning Points. Annual Critical Legal Conference. University of Kent at Canterbury (September 2016).

‘Towards a Global Political Economy of Environmental Conflict: Some Remarks from the History of Biodiversity’.

Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association (June 2016).

‘The Anthropocene and International Environmental Law: A Challenge from European Non-Centred Ecological Thought’. Welcome to the Anthropocene: From Global Challenge to Planetary Stewardship. Annual Conference of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences. Pace University (June 2014).

‘Environmentalism as Counter-Conduct’. Vermont Colloquium on Environmental Scholarship. Vermont Law School, (October 2013).

‘Micro-politics and Spatial Manifestations’. Law on the Edge. Canadian Law and Society Association and the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Joint Conference. University of British Columbia, Vancouver (July 2013).

‘Governmentalities of the Garden: Heterotopia and Subjectivity’. Gardens of Justice. Annual Critical Legal Conference. KT Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm (September 2012).

‘Judge and Geographer: The Spatial Paradox of Environmental Law.’ Great Expectations: Multiple Modernities of Law. Annual Critical Legal Conference. University of Utrecht (September 2010).

Further information

Follow @DrAndreasK