Territory is a conceptual trope in international law that mediates how we come to understand place. In traditional international legal literature, territory is presented as a portion of the surface of the Earth which, predominately, belongs to State sovereignty. It allows international law to carve up the world, both past and present, into neatly organised political and legal unities, which givenness can be articulate and claimed within a particular legal repertoire. But as a relatively rich body of scholarship has noted, the way that territory is conceived under international law offers a legal abstraction which tend to provide a rather limited and sterile understanding of place – and particularly the non-human actors in it. By presenting territory simply as a divisible portion of the Earth, the international law of territory arguably fails to fully account for the networked and complex terrestrial (rather than territorial) relationships which constitute the planetary world we live in.
This talk is concerned with how the concept of territory shapes imaginaries of reparations for climate change under international law, and how a turn to ‘place’ might offer a different frame of reference. It explores the Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect to Climate Change by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), with a particular attention to the oral hearings and written submissions. Whilst the hearings, submissions and Advisory Opinion itself covered a wide range of legal matters relating to reparations for climate change, it included extensive references to Statehood, territory and, importantly, the relations between place and people. The talk reflects on what we might make of the references to territory and place in the proceedings and the Opinion. It explores how a collection of actors appear to ground legal claims relating to reparations for climate change under international law in affective relations between human communities and non-human actors in ‘place’. The talk opens new questions relating to climate change, environmental harm and the broader issue of how we – as international lawyers – are to engage our discipline so that it repairs relations for a better and more sustainable world.
Tim Lindgren is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), and an SNSF Scientific Exchange at the Geneva Graduate Institute (2026). His work concerns public international law with a particular attention to territory, sovereignty, climate change and the performance of international law in informal spaces. At the EUI, Tim is developing a project that theorises the relationship between place and international law, with particular attention to State obligations for environmental harm and climate change. Prior to joining the EUI, Tim was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Amsterdam Center for International Law and a sessional Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, where he completed his PhD. He has been a returning faculty member for the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights at the University of Oxford and has published in, amongst others, Leiden Journal of International Law, The International Journal of Human Rights, Postcolonial Studies, Griffith Law Review and the Journal of World-Systems Research.