Green Criminology: Politics of Environmental Crimes
Researcher
This project on ‘green criminology’ will look at the politics of environmental right-claims against the backdrop of efforts to ‘harmonize’ European and Turkish legal regimes regarding a new category of crime, known as green crime. Such harmonization attempts have also opened up green criminology as an idiom through which environmental justice groups articulate and press their claims against state and corporate dispossession. What does it mean to treat the environment or nature as a legal subject that can be killed, harmed, slaughtered—or spoken for and protected—in ways that are locally new, and what are the broader implications of this? How does everyday securitization infuse our relationship with our environment, such that we increasingly see our relationship with nature through a lens of security? In what ways and on which scales does green criminology produce new ways of understanding and acting toward the environment? With these questions, at the intersection of law and eco-politics, I will show how specific legal procedures and practices can rework the political and moral legitimacy of environmental rights. The project also explores new topographies of judicial activism and eco-justice in the Middle East. These are central yet often overlooked themes in popular and scholarly accounts of the contemporary Middle East.
Key publications
“Can you Murder a Tree? Rights of Nature and Environmental Activism in Turkey” (Forthcoming). Middle East Brief, Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brandeis University.