Hosted by Oxford Martin School Programme on Changing Global Orders, NYU Law School Guarini Program on Planetary Futures, and ITAM School of Law.

Awareness of planetary-scale phenomena has layered onto existing socio-political challenges a raft of new concerns about knowledge-making, institutions and governance, and the durability of arrangements capable of sustaining and improving common life. Planetary referents are moving from science (and specific group cosmologies) into much wider societal awareness and policy – and into political fluxes and mobilizations. These moves involve changing temporalities – compression so that deep geological time figures within the short timeframes of human agency and practical reason – and reconfigurations of spatiality and of scalar relations. This is very influential in some branches of research and knowledge-making. It has not (yet) resulted in new arrangements for human ordering, but it is intensifying the unsettling of existing arrangements. This workshop – which builds out from previous work on the significance and challenges of planetary law and governance – addresses the implications of ‘planetary’ concerns in current rethinking of ‘global’ scripts, and in contestation over the sustenance, remaking, or viability of ‘international’ ordering. It seeks to illuminate systemic change, the critical dynamics of planetary-related knowledge and framings, and the implications of and for power. The goal is to bring together a small and eclectic group of scholars with varied interests and ways of engaging with this theme.