David Whyte joined the Department of Law in February 2022 as a Professor in Climate Justice from the University of Liverpool. We ask him about his research, his vision for the Centre for Climate Crime and Justice, and what role academics should play in the fight against the climate crisis and social injustice.
I have always been interested in studying how collective and institutional violence occurs – its origins, motivations and the social responses to different forms of violence. I was a student in Aberdeen when the Piper Alpha disaster happened, an explosion on an oil platform that killed 167 people. Nobody in the city was untouched, everyone knew someone who knew someone involved. And this was an archetypal disaster waiting to happen. Everyone knew that all of the North Sea oil companies - the Shells and BPs - had been cutting maintenance budgets and cutting corners, putting workers at risk. And at the same time they were aggressively anti-union and it was routine for workers to be sacked for complaining about safety. Everybody also knew that the law, the regulatory regime, was different, an exceptional law applied to the oil industry which allowed much lower safety standards. Not just academics or lawyers, but ordinary people talked about Piper Alpha as an act of violence, about the oil company Occidental as ‘killers’ and ‘murderers’ and about the lack of any legal accountability. So those discussions with friends and neighbours were all a profound influence on my thinking I suppose. How could they not be? My work tries to understand how a symbiotic relationship between states and corporations – a relationship that in capitalist societies is always about extracting value and accumulating capital – produces violent outcomes. And I try to understand how this relationship ultimately shapes legal outcomes in different ways: how law places limits on some forms of violence, but at the same time produces and accelerates the most extreme forms of violence.
The Centre is based in the School of Law, so the first question that it must engage with is how law and struggles around law can play a useful role in dealing with climate change and the ecocide. At the outset, we need to be really honest about what the role of domestic and international law is: for example, is inserting a new law of ecocide into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court going to achieve what some big name lawyers claim it will? Will it be a useful source of censure? Those legal questions are big questions for Richard and I, but also for everyone who might be involved in a centre on climate crime and climate justice. At the same time, the Centre can play an active role in supporting struggles for climate justice. Climate change has been permitted and indeed encouraged by industrial processes that are enshrined in, and protected by force, by law. Again, we need to be very honest here: this means accepting that any legal system that has allowed us to get to this point is a major problem standing in the way of a sustainable world. The Centre’s agenda will evolve over the coming months, and will depend on the people who get involved. But certainly this agenda will need to directly challenge a system of law that has encouraged climate change and it will need to find ways to support social movements that seek sustainable alternatives.
We should all slow down. We work too many hours. And we are working in a sector that is becoming more and casualised and unsustainable. After we’ve slowed down, then we might have time to talk about what a sustainable university might really look like. So, beyond divestment, and thinking about what we teach and research, what kind of economy do universities help to reproduce and how can university workers demand truly effective collective solutions? Individual change is important of course (flying less, avoiding single use plastics and so on) but if we are to achieve lasting change, we need to organise collectively. In universities, this means joining your union and demanding the right to negotiate and bargain on casualisation and sustainability, on workloads and on our role in the economy. But first of all, lets all slow down.