Mihnea Tanasescu

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Research Fellow at University of Mons

Developments in Ecuador, New Zealand, Spain, and elsewhere show how legal representation for the nonhuman world has begun to take hold around the world, varying with local circumstances. Ecuador’s 2008 constitution broke new ground by including rights for nature, but these have since been wielded by the government in questionable cases. New Zealand...

There is no political representation without performance. When politicians, protesters, or politically engaged entertainers appear in public, they perform political representation. When statues of historical figures are put in the urban space, when people get together to deliberate in an institutional building, when they symbolically occupy the str...

Restoration of nature is spreading as a practice and policy approach. The European Union (EU) has not only promoted restoration, but made it an obligation with the Nature Restoration Law. This Comment evaluates the law for its potential to achieve the needed transformation. The law is not inherently disruptive of established approaches to nature co...

Representación, Democracia, y la Edad Ecologica Abstract: We live in the age of ecology ? the Ecocene. And if we start from the messy ecological relations that are pushing radical changes in human societies, new problems and new questions arise. This research note is concerned with how the ecological age is shifting the meaning of political represe...

This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The au...

Este artículo explora algunos de los elementos conceptuales más importantes de los derechos de la naturaleza, así como momentos históricos clave en su desarrollo. La discusión se centra en varios casos que se examinan con mayor detenimiento, como la Constitución ecuatoriana y la Ley Te Urewera de Aotearoa (Nueva Zelanda). Mediante este análisis, el...

We present an analysis of the Danube Delta (Romania) that is centered around the evolution and use of roads, so as to highlight the primacy of movement in spatialization and the fluidity of roads themselves. We demonstrate that local inhabitants of the Danube Delta have relied on a network of roads for survival and have in the process fitted themse...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantlin...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Rivers, landscapes, whole territories: these are the latest entities environmental activists have fought hard to include in the relentless expansion of rights in our world. But what does it mean for a landscape to have rights? Why would anyone want to create such rights, and to what end? Is it a good idea, and does it come with risks? This book pre...

Available open access: https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-5431-8/understanding-the-rights-of-nature/?c=411000239

This chapter argues that any examination of the legal status of natural entities must be conducted and understood in the particular context of a particular political struggle. In light of the political context, it may or may not make sense to appeal to rights for nature. The chapter argues that the purpose of granting rights to the environment cann...

This article investigates the relationship between legal personality for nature and indigenous philosophies by comparing two cases: the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 and the 2014 Te Urewera Act of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Through these case studies, the article considers the nature of indigenous relations with the concept of rights of nature, argui...

This article presents a case of environmental transformation at multiple scales and across a significant historical arch. We show how the expansion of state power into marginal territories can itself be considered a main driver of environmental change, and detail how this expansion has happened in the case of the Romanian Danube Delta, known as one...

This paper is motivated by one central question: when do we say that representation has been achieved well, and how can we be wrong? In asking this question, I am interested in finding the norm internal to political representation. My assumption is that the norm of representation is discernible through how we speak about representation, and indeed...

This paper analyses the ways in which human knowledge of the golden jackal ( Canis aureus ) is formed in the case of a rural community of the Romanian Danube Delta. We focus on the territory where humans and jackals overlap and, by using wildlife monitoring alongside interviews and participant observation with humans, we detail how villagers come t...

https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/the_edges_of_political_representation/3-156-db053f15-3b3c-4f28-ad2f-1ce0c6b659cb#ReviewsDiv

This paper engages with rewilding practice in the particular case of European Bison reintroductions to the Southern Carpathians. In doing so, it questions traditional notions of species purity implied in wisent conservation so far, and shows how these can be problematic. The argument takes animal agency seriously and explores how incorporating the...

In the Romanian Danube Delta, many activities involve some degree of concealment from state authorities. Residents live off strategies that are largely illegal, and authorities are largely in the business of making sure that everyone knows that most of their strategies are illegal. If the phrasing of the previous sentence sounds vague, it is becaus...

This paper analyzes the ways in which human knowledge of the golden jackal (Canis aureus) is formed in the case of a rural community of the Romanian Danube Delta. We focus on the territory where humans and jackals overlap and, by using both wildlife monitoring and interviews and participant observation with humans, we detail how villagers come to h...

The information contained by historical maps provides a good source of understanding the complex transformation of a deltaic environment by human activity. Using the Danube delta as an example, here we show that a cartographic diagnosis for river deltas is based on four main steps that outline the learning stages for every similar area: 1) explorin...

This paper argues that the concept of responsibility can andshould ground an ethics of ecological restoration. It starts with WilliamJordan’s concept of restoration, namely the creation of mutually beneficialhuman-nature relationships. It builds a concept of responsibility using theworks of Hans Jonas and Martin Drenthen, understood as a correlate...

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in history to grant constitutional rights to nature. What is termed the indigenous symbol played a significant role in this event. The rights of nature are used as an occasion to interrogate the indigenous symbol in order to reveal what it does, as opposed to what it says. The account of the rights of natur...

This paper investigates the concept of rewilding by looking at its uses so far and its implementation by Rewilding Europe, one of the leading rewilding organizations today. Juxtaposing theory with practice, it proposes understanding rewilding as a hybrid ecological semiotic concept. More precisely, rewilding's ecological goals are necessarily media...

The idea of giving rights to nature is gaining ground. Already, there are several jurisdictions where nature has a number of rights. There is even a proposal for a universal declaration granting the entire Earth at least the right to exist. Mihnea Tanasescu offers a much needed examination of the concept of giving rights to nature, as well as a fir...

The moral, political, and legal aspects of the concept of rights would mean nothing at all if they weren’t somehow connected to the category of the legal person. Who is the legal person? And must it be a ‘person’ at all? Are there, in other words, any limits to what can count as a legal person? And finally, is there a difference between the ‘subjec...

When we started this investigation, the rights of nature seemed like an outlier, a wild idea. They confronted us with an uncanny strangeness, seeming to either deliver absurdity, or else a truly radical vision. Increasingly, they seem to shed their radical content, and what haunts us as a truly emancipatory politics is one in which representative c...

When speaking for others, what is it that we do? Why should others even be spoken for? There is an arrogance to speaking that inheres in the voice itself, and nowhere is this clearer than when one speaks for an-other. In voicing a claim, the speaker substitutes herself for the one she speaks for, as if she knew, with any amount of certainty, what t...

In this chapter I want to start discussing the practice of the rights of nature by looking at what has become its paradigmatic example to date: the 2008 constitution of Ecuador. Besides the wide publicity that the rights of nature provisions in this constitution benefitted from, they also enjoy the status of paradigmatic for being the first constit...

We have seen so far the alleged intellectual origins of the idea of rights for nature, as well as its paradigmatic case to date. In terms of practical implementation however, Ecuador was not the first case of rights for nature in the world. That distinction goes to Tamaqua Borough, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, USA which, in 2006, passed a munic...

In this chapter I will describe what I see as the basic outline of non-human political representation in order to give an account of what goes on when we represent. The starting point for this reflection is given by the following issues: what is the structure of political representation, who or what is being represented, by whom, and what kinds of...

Though modeled on human rights, the only successful applications of the rights of nature to-day have been domestic. There has never been a case of the rights of nature being protected against a state, and though the absence of such a case does not prove anything, nor would its existence prove that the contradiction between universality and belongin...

Rights have an essential connection to the making of claims — to have a right, one must claim it, either for oneself or in the name of another (Douzinas, 2000; Campbell, 2006; Bourke, 2011), and a right is itself a particular kind of claim (Hohfeld, 1964; Sunstein, 1999). In other words, it is of the essence of rights to both be claimed (Wellman, 1...

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in history to grant constitutional rights to nature. What is termed the indigenous symbol played a significant role in this event. The rights of nature are used as an occasion to interrogate the indigenous symbol in order to reveal what it does, as opposed to what it says. The account of the rights of natur...

This article argues that the standard model of political representation mischaracterises the structure of representation. After surveying the classical types of representation and their application to non-humans, the basic nature of representation is shown to have been unduly centred on interests, responsiveness and unidirectional protocols. It pro...

This volume has shown that the interplay between the theory and practice of environmental politics is rarely straightforward. In this chapter I will present an idea that is seen as unorthodox even at the theoretical level, but which has nonetheless been implemented. In 2008 Ecuador adopted a new constitution that pioneered rights for nature. This c...

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in history to guarantee rights to nature, in its new constitution. This article tells the story of this extraordinary moment in constitutional history, presenting a detailed description of how these rights came about, why they appeared when and where they did, and what they mean to those concerned with this...

This investigation is concerned with elaborating on the theory of political representation, particularly on its application to non-human beings. It therefore starts by introducing the subject (Chapter I), and establishing that the lens of representation is appropriate for debating the role of non-humans in politics. Chapter II looks at the classica...