In this seminar Thalia Viveros-Uehara examines the role of courts and constitutions in shaping the legal and political dimensions of Indigenous rights within the climate crisis, positioning climate litigation as both a site of resistance and a structural constraint. Expanding mainstream scholarly geographical and thematic horizons, it explores cases from Africa and Latin America, where constitutional frameworks have enabled courts to mandate transformation. These jurisdictions reveal a complex Indigenous-climate relationship, where struggles extend beyond emissions to the compounded effects of historical inequalities and the extractive imperatives of the so-called low-carbon transition, which often reproduces colonial dispossession.
Moving beyond a sole focus on constitutional courts, the seminar also situates these judicial engagements within the asymmetries of the global political economy, examining how they intersect with trade and investment law and its dispute settlement mechanisms, which operate legally and politically through entrenched hierarchies of power and accumulation.
More information and recommended readings are available here.
🔹 Speaker:
✨ Thalia Viveros-Uehara – is a Researcher at Tilburg Law School, Public Law & Governance. She has a PhD from the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, University of Massachusetts Boston focused the intersections between climate change litigation and the right to health in Latin America. She is a LawTransform fellow and also associated with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.
This seminar is part of the RDV seminar series, a collaboration between the Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism (DIPA) at the University of Bergen (UiB) and the CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation. To present in the interdisciplinary series, we have national and international researchers to talk about their pioneering research on topics regarding law, democracy, and welfare.
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🗓 Date: April 10
⏰ Time: 2:15 PM CET
📍 Place: Law Faculty, Auditorium 3