Home » Articles » The Role of International Law in Intrastate Natural Resource Allocation: Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Peoples-Based Development

The Role of International Law in Intrastate Natural Resource Allocation: Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Peoples-Based Development

PDF · Lillian Aponte Miranda · Jun-6-2012 · 45 VAND. J. TRANSNAT'L L. 785 (2012)

State natural resource development projects have become sites of intense political, social, and cultural contestation among a diversity of actors. In particular, such projects often lead to detrimental consequences for the empowerment, livelihood, and cultural and economic development of historically marginalized communities. This Article fills a gap in the existing literature by identifying and analyzing emerging international law approaches that impact the intrastate allocation of land and natural resources to historically marginalized communities, and thereby, carve away at states’ top-down decision-making authority over development. It argues that while international law may have only been originally concerned with the allocation of land and natural resources in an interstate context, it plays a distributive role today in an intrastate context. Ultimately, this Article proposes that an emerging human rights approach to the allocation of land and natural resources supports a peoples-based development model potentially capable of more readily alleviating conditions of inequity and continued subordination for historically marginalized communities.




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The Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law hosted a symposium called “The Role of Non-State Actors in International Law” at Vanderbilt University Law School in February 2013.  The October issue of the Journal will showcase articles by distinguished symposium guests including:

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Professor Jean d’Aspremont, “Cognitive Conflicts and the Making of International Law from Empirical Concord to Conceptual Discord in Legal Scholarship”

Professor Peter J. Spiro, “Constraining Global Corporate Power: A Very Short Introduction”

Professor Suzanne Katzenstein

Professor Peter Margulies

Professor Harlan G. Cohen

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