Prof. Kamrul Hossain lectured at the 16th Polar Law Symposium, 2023!

On the 28^th of October, 2023, Prof. Kamrul Hossain gave a talk in the form of a lecture at the 16^th Polar Law Symposium. The 16^th Polar Law Symposium was organized by the Kári á Rógvi Institute for Law and Legal Research of the University of the Faroe Islands and held in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. The Symposium took place on 26-28 October 2023.  

The Symposium attracted a group of approximately 100 scholars from around the world to discuss and debate the most updated developments taking place in the Polar regions, including the Arctic, Antarctic, and the Third Pole. Although the content of the conference was diverse, discussions included issues such as polar governance, including private governance linked to economic and infrastructural developments; biodiversity – particularly the new developments concerning the Agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction; Indigenous perspectives linked to language rights, conflicts over land use behavior and green shift, and decolonization of Indigenous archives; climate change and climate intervention; and geopolitics and security, etc.

Prof. Hossain spoke on the need for deconstructing or transforming the structure of international law accommodative of various knowledge systems to better protect the Planetary concerns, which the existing state-centric approach fails to do. In this context, he brought the Arctic and the Third Pole Hindukush Himalayan regions as a case study where climate change/cryosphere interactions do not necessarily pose a challenge from the regions only but to the global climate system at large. The title of this presentation reads as follows: “A Common Concern in Uncommon Spaces: Deconstructing the Normative Structure of International Law”.