“[N]o sooner had the contours of the earth emerged as a real globe—not just sensed as myth, but apprehensible as fact and measurable as space—than there arose a wholly new and hitherto unimaginable problem: the spatial ordering of the earth in terms of international law.”1
Geostories of the global commons
RANIA GHOSN
Uncommon Planet
Rania Ghosn is associate professor of architecture and urbanism at MIT and founding partner of DESIGN EARTH with El Hadi Jazairy. Her research charts the geographies of urban systems to speculate on the techno-environment in the age of climate change. The work of DESIGN EARTH has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and collected by MoMA. She is author of Geographies of Trash (2015) and Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018), and editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (2010).
Architecture, Climatology, Technology
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ho governs and owns the oceans, outer space, the Earth’s atmosphere, and biodiversity? The answer “everyone and no one” is the recurring paradox of the global commons today. The enclosure of the Earth into categories of territory has constructed an all-encompassing way of dividing up the planet, with the central category of sovereignty and remainder categories of res nullius, res communis, and common heritage of mankind.2 The global commons thus first arose as a default zone in international law, conceptualized as the ungovernable outside of the international legal order of territorial states. The legacies of this geography, however, make visible the slippages between the two legal notions of territory outside sovereign states: res nullius and res communis. The former relates to territory unclaimed by a sovereign state and is therefore subject to lawful appropriation by a state with the military, political, and economic power to establish and enforce its claim – the colonial proclamation of terra nullius was used by European states to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land.3 The latter, res communis, refers to areas such as the deep seabed, outer space, and Antarctica, which are referred to as global commons and are not subject to the national jurisdiction of a particular state but are shared by other states, if not humanity or the international community as a whole. In practice, however, the outside status of the global commons has often been a legal fiction. Caught in the paradox of modern enclosure, these international areas and their state of affairs might be better described as the tragedy of res nullius with their resources increasingly more open on a “first come, first served basis.” Why has the international order of the global commons so often failed to manage things for the benefit of all humankind? “Commons,” as David Harvey points out, always implies some degree of enclosure.4 The opposite concepts of “enclosure” and “commons,” as with all binaries, end up converging, with the former encroaching on and destroying the latter as extractivism intensifies and expands.5 Once the commons “system” is dismantled, it is only a matter of time until the valuation regime that privileges the internalization of private gains—resource values, and the actors interested in claiming ownership—slowly erodes the domains that had been hitherto ruled by laws of exception. Far from leading to common good, the global commons become the subject and site of contestation in deeply unequal and unsettled sets of spatial relations, in which powerful states and transnational private actors hold the monopoly of resources, violence, and diplomacy. In a world order of extractive valuation regimes, the global commons might be most salient as a microcosm of uncommon interests. How can we convert into image and narrative the “tragedy of the global commons” as a projective chapter in the Earth’s modern history of enclosure and dispossession? The crisis of governing the global commons is that it requires both planetary re-presentation