Seminar with Romain Francois R Chuffart

Screening for Sustainability Seminars 

Romain Francois R Chuffart

This article investigates the colonial legal repetitions that emerge as autonomous shipping vessels are deployed in the Arctic region. Through examining the extractive component of autonomous shipping, we uncover how autonomous shipping operations contribute to an “Othering” and reification of the Arctic; ignoring existing forms of knowledge and systems for knowing the Arctic and mirroring prior forms of colonial displacement. We argue that this reification constructs a form of data nullius that functions as autonomous colonisation: repeating earlier legal constructions of terra nullius to justify re-mapping through extractive lens that frame the more-than-human as requiring mastery and offering humans sites of ownership. Through examining how autonomous shipping contributes to the commodification of the Arctic, we highlight how the digitization and automation of Arctic shipping operations strip the region of its sensory and cultural dimensions, reducing it to a data-driven environment where ice and marine ecosystems are seen merely as obstacles or data points that has legal, social and cultural ramifications. This detachment from the Arctic's tangible realities facilitates a reconfiguration of agency, where human and more-than-human entities lose their acting capacity in the face of overarching technological and economic agendas that are consolidated through legal relations. Through the lens of posthuman feminism, we explore the consequences of neglecting the Arctic’s ecological and cultural agency, proposing a critical reflection on what is lost and what new forms of agency emerge in this transition

Bio
Dr. Romain Chuffart is the Nansen Professor in Arctic Studies (2024–2026) at the University of Akureyri in Iceland to promote scientific collaboration between Iceland and Norway. Romain is also the President and Managing Director of The Arctic Institute - Center for Circumpolar Security Studies, a 501c3 nonprofit organisation in Washington D.C. (USA). He holds a PhD in Law from Durham University and an MA in Polar Law from the University of Akureyri.  His research interests include human rights and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, international environmental law, Arctic and ocean governance, and the law of the sea. Romain also conducts more theoretical research on public international law combining insights from political theory, international relations, political geography, and other social sciences.

Contact:
If you want to attend online please contact sustainability [at] jur [dot] lu [dot] se

Partners:
This seminar is made possible thanks to the support of Formas, the Marcus and Marianne Wallenberg Foundation, and the Centre for European Studies (CFE) at Lund University