Writing
A selection of graduate and early academic work from the University of Oxford, UC Berkeley School of Law, and Seattle University School of Law, written between 2010 and 2014. The throughline is power: how legal, economic, and environmental systems concentrate it, and how the people on the losing end resist. These are an archive of a particular period of thinking. I'd argue some of it differently today, but the core concerns have only sharpened with time. Each piece is available as a PDF.
Disastrous Climate Change and Capital's Failures
My master's dissertation, arguing that the capitalist system causes, perpetuates, and ultimately fails to address climate change. Working through anthropogenic sea-level rise and the corporate, market-based "solutions" offered in response, it draws on Marxist theory of capital and nature/society relations to argue that environmental and social degradation are fundamental to capital itself, and confronting climate change requires frameworks built outside its logic of limitless growth.
↓ Read PDFThe Geographies of Race, Patents and Traditional Knowledge
An examination of how patent law provides a legitimizing legal facade for the appropriation of traditional knowledge of plants and biocultural resources, what Indigenous groups and their allies name "biopiracy" and "biocolonialism." It traces the patent regime from its origins to its hegemonic present and asks how resistance can avoid Reva Siegel's "preservation through transformation," where reform changes the narrative while leaving elite power intact.
↓ Read PDFBelo Monte Dam: Social Movements, Law and State Repression
A study of the decades-long resistance to Brazil's Belo Monte dam, read through the framework of legal mobilization: law not as neutral protection but as a "contested terrain" on which social movements build oppositional consciousness, and on which the state and elite power-holders maneuver around their own legal obligations.
↓ Read PDFSustainable Development and Climate Change Policy: An Environmental Justice Case Study of Belo Monte
A companion study of the same dam through an environmental-justice lens, interrogating the contradictions of "sustainable development" discourse, its attempt to reconcile continued industrial growth with ecological integrity, and the social and environmental costs borne by the people in the dam's path.
↓ Read PDFFrom De- to Post- to Neo-Colonization: A Brief History of Haiti's Occupations
Opening from Fanon and the 2010 earthquake, this paper traces how Haiti has been narrated as an "other," a nation outside modernity whose only hope is aid from former colonizers and international agencies, and how that narrative licenses successive occupations dressed as development and humanitarian relief.
↓ Read PDFCitizenship Rights in Times of Disaster: The Ethics of International Intervention
As climate-driven disasters grow more frequent and severe, what duties are owed to those whose own states cannot or will not protect them? Working through Arendt's "right to have rights," T.H. Marshall on citizenship, and Iris Marion Young's politics of positional difference, the paper builds an ethical case for international obligation grounded in our greater duties to the most disadvantaged.
↓ Read PDFCounter-Narrating the Violence of Hegemony in Climate Change Conflicts
An argument that climate change, extreme poverty, and conflict emerge from a shared set of social relations and ideologies, and confronting them requires a "battle of ideas" against the scripts that benefit a privileged minority while billions absorb the consequences.
↓ Read PDFMechanisms of the Politics of Oil: Spaces of Exception and Governmentality in Nigeria
Since the discovery of oil, the Nigerian state has distributed power through territorial and spatial networks of domination, passing laws governing property and citizenship to secure continued extraction. Drawing on Agamben's "spaces of exception" and Foucauldian governmentality, the paper analyzes the techniques of postcolonial oil-state power.
↓ Read PDFOn One Condition: The Politics of Conditional Lending in Developing Countries
An analysis of the International Monetary Fund: its conditional lending, its outsized influence after the 2008 financial crisis, and the politics embedded in the conditions it attaches to credit for developing countries.
↓ Read PDFCorporate Social Responsibility for the Marginalized
Corporations often operate in states with little or no regulatory control over human rights or the environment. This paper asks whether, and how, the corporation might be pushed into a genuinely protective role, using corporate social responsibility and human rights discourse to strengthen the realization of rights rather than launder their violation. An argument I'd interrogate more skeptically today, included for the tension it works through.
↓ Read PDFBeyond TRIPS: Questioning the Effectiveness of the Global Intellectual Property Regime
An examination of how the TRIPS agreement extended patent protection over life-saving medicine into developing and least-developed countries, and whether its flexibilities (compulsory licensing, the Doha Declaration) actually deliver access to drugs. The conclusion resists the easy thesis: neither patent regimes nor corporate behavior alone explains the global health gap. The underlying issue is poverty.
↓ Read PDFChina and Mitigating Climate Change
A data-driven analysis of China's renewable-energy policy: coal dependence, the 2006 Renewable Energy Law, and the real capacity of hydropower, wind, solar, and nuclear to meet its emissions targets. A look at where energy policy and climate mitigation meet, and the limits of market-based environmental solutions.
↓ Read PDFComplexity, Emergence and IMF Responsibility
A companion to the conditional-lending paper, using complexity theory to argue that the IMF, as an emergent collective with coordinating control over its own actions, can bear genuine moral responsibility for the consequences of the reforms it imposes.
↓ Read PDFCommunicative Action and Just Global Institutions
A synthesis of Habermas's theory of communicative action, and his idea of the "colonization of the lifeworld" by money and power, with Thomas Pogge's account of justice, arguing that unjust global institutions can be reconstructed through rational, emancipatory discourse.
↓ Read PDFPakistan's Struggle for Judicial Independence
An account of the 2007 confrontation between Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and General Pervez Musharraf (the dismissal, the state of emergency, the lawyers' movement) and what it reveals about judicial independence and constitutional order standing against military rule.
↓ Read PDFCritical Study of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon
An analysis of the gaps in legal protection for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, who fall outside the basic securities afforded other refugees and stateless persons under international law. Working from Susan Akram and Wadie Said, the paper argues for restoring those rights through the adherence to and enforcement of international law.
↓ Read PDFNature as a Limit to Capital: Ecological Critique and Climate Change Mitigation
An ecological-economics argument that nature functions as a hard limit to capital accumulation: because natural value sits outside the price system, it is consumed without accounting, and the endless growth capitalism requires runs against the finite barriers of the earth. A theoretical case for mitigation grounded outside market logic.
↓ Read PDFThe State Apparatus and Andean Water Reforms
Reading Bolivia's and the wider Andes' water-reform conflicts through theories of the state (Althusser's repressive and ideological state apparatuses, Foucault on power and law) to ask where transformative politics and resistance actually sit when the state is both the site of coercion and the terrain of struggle.
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