Papers by saptarishi bandopadhyay
Stanford Environmental Law Journal, 2023
Turn here, there's Covid. Turn here, there's the fires. You turn here, there's mass incarceration... more Turn here, there's Covid. Turn here, there's the fires. You turn here, there's mass incarceration as a whole.
Before the plague, 2020
Obsessing over the Trump White House’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis is a mistake. The ong... more Obsessing over the Trump White House’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis is a mistake. The ongoing crisis in the U.S. reveals deeper problems in the ‘normal’ social and political status quo that preceded Trump and the outbreak. The 1720 Marseille plague offers insights into how powerful and prosperous societies make disasters inevitable.
Hazards, from storms to viruses, become disasters in societies that are susceptible to, and unprepared for, them. Lay readers need precedents to understand how susceptibility and unpreparedness get baked into the public culture and political institutions in a prosperous society. it's easy to get overwhelmed trying to understand the problem by focusing on this (ongoing) disaster and the accompanying information firestorm. The 1720 plague offers a close parallel to the inequities that characterize American society. Learning how leaders and subjects, together, made Marseille vulnerable, will allow readers to reflect on what they fear, who they want to elect, and why.
This paper contributes to the currently lean legal history of disaster governance. It offers a wi... more This paper contributes to the currently lean legal history of disaster governance. It offers a window into the relationship between early modern economic development and disaster management in the context of the Marseille plague of 1720—one of the earliest instances of a modern “state” government committed to development and aware of the underlying risks, struggling with the real-world and narrative consequences of the ensuing crisis. Through a deep study of the social order in Marseille—from the legal codes to social hierarchies, from architecture to medico-legal protocols, from a culture built on civic virtue to one favoring commercial profits—I show how the history of disaster management is inextricable from the history of generalized legal and administrative governance dedicated to securing a particular vision of right (i.e. ‘normal’) social order whose fulfillment would secure society against future disasters. Accordingly, I argue that even in their infancy, modern “state” governments understood disasters to be exceptions but also routine; they interpreted the state’s disaster functions to be the same as its everyday function of governing (including fulfilling the perpetual goals of surveilling its subjects and monopolizing the use of force). Citizens continue to understand disaster management as an exceptional and time-limited form of governance because, much like in early modern France, contemporary governments continue to explain a given crisis as an unexpected event that should be understood in the context of deeper structural causes that are within the grasp of organized governance, even as they may be produced by said governance.
While technology and globalization continue to pervade every aspect of the world, the scope for t... more While technology and globalization continue to pervade every aspect of the world, the scope for the sustenance of national or regional culture is rapidly disappearing. This paper will seek to use the lessons and experiences obtained through the controversies in the use of Direct Broadcasting Satellites in its more initial years and apply the same to the Internet to assess its effect on the culture of developing States. The eventual thesis proposed here argues that the freedom of information upheld through technology, and the human right to culture need not be seen as perpendicular interests, but that the latter may be secured by its active participation in the market place of ideas (or cultures) i.e. by its projection rather than protection. Further, by drawing analogies with the evolution of principles for the protection of the environment, this paper offers a psychological framework for the development of a larger normative standard on which developing nations can base their struggle to correct the existing technological imbalance and demand technology transfer and knowledge sharing as matter of right and thereby ultimately, competitively project their culture.
The text that follows is intended to serve as an examination of the approaches and methods employ... more The text that follows is intended to serve as an examination of the approaches and methods employed by the Indian Supreme Court in its effort to integrate international environmental norms such as the principle of Sustainable Development, the Precautionary Principle and the Polluter Pays Principle as part of the existing body of binding, municipal rules in India.
Virtually all of Indian legal jurisprudence that speaks to this subject has been developed by the Supreme Court. Likewise, in no small part for this contribution, the Court has developed a reputation for being an activist institution that has since the mid 1980s transformed itself into a guardian of India’s natural environment. But what is forfeited in the pride parade that follows is any serious accounting of the extent to which the Court’s entanglement with international environmental rules has been substantively heavy but methodologically and argumentatively scant and even ahistorical. This is to say that the Court’s movements, as internalized, betray a startling lack of coherence and justification both within the logic of its decisions and externally i.e. with respect to how the Court chooses to view the development of international law—proceeding, instead, through rhetoric, avoidance and ultimately self-referential rationalization.
From this absence of scrutiny begins the story, spread across roughly three decades of judicial decisions and related commentary, of why very little is actually understood about what the principles mean to the Court or how it may choose to apply them from one decision to the next. The commentary attempting to critique this status, proceeding, as it does, from a presumption in favour of the Court’s ability to integrate international rules, is ultimately hamstrung because of its inability to identify the broader scheme of movement, the patterns and trends evidenced by the Court’s logic and method (i.e. the how?).
In this paper, I offer an alternative reading of precaution with the hope of recovering the capac... more In this paper, I offer an alternative reading of precaution with the hope of recovering the capacity of this ethic to facilitate legal and political decisions. Despite being a popular instrument of international environmental governance, decision-makers continue to understand this principle as reflecting an immemorial and natural instinct for preserving the environment in cases of scientific uncertainty. This reading ignores the history and moral basis underlying this principle and thereby renders it obvious, and automatically adaptable to the politics of Sustainable Development.
By offering a thicker history of precautionary governance at exemplary moments of ecological crisis I trace the changing legal and political interpretations of precaution and show that through the 19th and 20th centuries, policymakers developed this unique form of governance in response to crises related to modernization. Lawyers and policymakers who interpret precaution by subjecting it to the politics of scientific verification and the goal of Sustainable Development, ignore this history to our shared detriment because they utilize an inert form of precautionary thinking incapable of facilitating public decisions or investigating how modern risks are generated and distributed. The result is that precaution no longer articulates anything.
By contrast, I argue that “precaution” and “sustainability” should be understood as articulations of certain historically-contingent, necessarily political and still-evolving moral relations. Precaution, understood in the context of environmental law, is a cultural strategy that accepts the imperfectness of human knowledge and facilitates decisions that guard against easy anthropocentric assumptions of redundancy in the natural environment. In embracing scientific uncertainty and related insecurities, precautionary thinking identifies with an ethical tradition that facilitates decision-making by prioritizing experiential knowledge and moral choice over a rationalistic valuation of ecological interests.
This paper offers an introductory survey to the interdisciplinary field of law and disaster manag... more This paper offers an introductory survey to the interdisciplinary field of law and disaster management.
Books by saptarishi bandopadhyay
Oxford University Press, 2022
Disasters are all around us. In everyday parlance, disasters are understood as exceptional occurr... more Disasters are all around us. In everyday parlance, disasters are understood as exceptional occurrences that destroy human life, property, and resources. For centuries, people have looked to political authorities for protection from disasters and for relief in the aftermath. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic and an endless torrent of storms, floods, and forest fires have shown that modern states and intergovernmental institutions frequently fail this burden. Worse, world leaders routinely ignore evidence that accelerated climate change is an already-rolling planetary catastrophe. So, what is a "disaster"? Who determines when and why a disaster has occurred or ceased? And what is the relationship between such occurrences and modern states who promise to "manage" them?
In All Is Well, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay argues that there is no such thing as a “disaster” outside of rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific contestation through which such occurrences are morally distinguished from the rhythms of everyday life. Disasters, Bandopadhyay asserts, are artifacts of "normal" rule. They result from the same, mundane strategies of knowledge-making and violence by which authorities, experts, and lay people struggle to develop state-like power, to define and defend the social order.
Challenging traditional narratives, All Is Well looks at “disaster management” as a historical process that produces both catastrophes and political authorities. To do so, Bandopadhyay draws on three case studies: the Marseille plague of 1720, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the Bengal famine of 1770. As far back as the eighteenth century, aspiring rulers understood disasters to be occasions for testing their state-like ambitions as they swapped divine authority for the supremacy of natural rights, Enlightenment ideals, and colonial rule. Bandopadhyay examines these exercises in catastrophe conservation and state formation and shows how the underlying beliefs and resulting insights underwrite sophisticated but deeply inequitable present-day norms and practices of global governance. He concludes that climate change, and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past.
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Papers by saptarishi bandopadhyay
Hazards, from storms to viruses, become disasters in societies that are susceptible to, and unprepared for, them. Lay readers need precedents to understand how susceptibility and unpreparedness get baked into the public culture and political institutions in a prosperous society. it's easy to get overwhelmed trying to understand the problem by focusing on this (ongoing) disaster and the accompanying information firestorm. The 1720 plague offers a close parallel to the inequities that characterize American society. Learning how leaders and subjects, together, made Marseille vulnerable, will allow readers to reflect on what they fear, who they want to elect, and why.
https://aeon.co/essays/disaster-relief-as-a-threat-to-state-sovereignty
Virtually all of Indian legal jurisprudence that speaks to this subject has been developed by the Supreme Court. Likewise, in no small part for this contribution, the Court has developed a reputation for being an activist institution that has since the mid 1980s transformed itself into a guardian of India’s natural environment. But what is forfeited in the pride parade that follows is any serious accounting of the extent to which the Court’s entanglement with international environmental rules has been substantively heavy but methodologically and argumentatively scant and even ahistorical. This is to say that the Court’s movements, as internalized, betray a startling lack of coherence and justification both within the logic of its decisions and externally i.e. with respect to how the Court chooses to view the development of international law—proceeding, instead, through rhetoric, avoidance and ultimately self-referential rationalization.
From this absence of scrutiny begins the story, spread across roughly three decades of judicial decisions and related commentary, of why very little is actually understood about what the principles mean to the Court or how it may choose to apply them from one decision to the next. The commentary attempting to critique this status, proceeding, as it does, from a presumption in favour of the Court’s ability to integrate international rules, is ultimately hamstrung because of its inability to identify the broader scheme of movement, the patterns and trends evidenced by the Court’s logic and method (i.e. the how?).
By offering a thicker history of precautionary governance at exemplary moments of ecological crisis I trace the changing legal and political interpretations of precaution and show that through the 19th and 20th centuries, policymakers developed this unique form of governance in response to crises related to modernization. Lawyers and policymakers who interpret precaution by subjecting it to the politics of scientific verification and the goal of Sustainable Development, ignore this history to our shared detriment because they utilize an inert form of precautionary thinking incapable of facilitating public decisions or investigating how modern risks are generated and distributed. The result is that precaution no longer articulates anything.
By contrast, I argue that “precaution” and “sustainability” should be understood as articulations of certain historically-contingent, necessarily political and still-evolving moral relations. Precaution, understood in the context of environmental law, is a cultural strategy that accepts the imperfectness of human knowledge and facilitates decisions that guard against easy anthropocentric assumptions of redundancy in the natural environment. In embracing scientific uncertainty and related insecurities, precautionary thinking identifies with an ethical tradition that facilitates decision-making by prioritizing experiential knowledge and moral choice over a rationalistic valuation of ecological interests.
Books by saptarishi bandopadhyay
In All Is Well, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay argues that there is no such thing as a “disaster” outside of rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific contestation through which such occurrences are morally distinguished from the rhythms of everyday life. Disasters, Bandopadhyay asserts, are artifacts of "normal" rule. They result from the same, mundane strategies of knowledge-making and violence by which authorities, experts, and lay people struggle to develop state-like power, to define and defend the social order.
Challenging traditional narratives, All Is Well looks at “disaster management” as a historical process that produces both catastrophes and political authorities. To do so, Bandopadhyay draws on three case studies: the Marseille plague of 1720, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the Bengal famine of 1770. As far back as the eighteenth century, aspiring rulers understood disasters to be occasions for testing their state-like ambitions as they swapped divine authority for the supremacy of natural rights, Enlightenment ideals, and colonial rule. Bandopadhyay examines these exercises in catastrophe conservation and state formation and shows how the underlying beliefs and resulting insights underwrite sophisticated but deeply inequitable present-day norms and practices of global governance. He concludes that climate change, and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past.
Hazards, from storms to viruses, become disasters in societies that are susceptible to, and unprepared for, them. Lay readers need precedents to understand how susceptibility and unpreparedness get baked into the public culture and political institutions in a prosperous society. it's easy to get overwhelmed trying to understand the problem by focusing on this (ongoing) disaster and the accompanying information firestorm. The 1720 plague offers a close parallel to the inequities that characterize American society. Learning how leaders and subjects, together, made Marseille vulnerable, will allow readers to reflect on what they fear, who they want to elect, and why.
https://aeon.co/essays/disaster-relief-as-a-threat-to-state-sovereignty
Virtually all of Indian legal jurisprudence that speaks to this subject has been developed by the Supreme Court. Likewise, in no small part for this contribution, the Court has developed a reputation for being an activist institution that has since the mid 1980s transformed itself into a guardian of India’s natural environment. But what is forfeited in the pride parade that follows is any serious accounting of the extent to which the Court’s entanglement with international environmental rules has been substantively heavy but methodologically and argumentatively scant and even ahistorical. This is to say that the Court’s movements, as internalized, betray a startling lack of coherence and justification both within the logic of its decisions and externally i.e. with respect to how the Court chooses to view the development of international law—proceeding, instead, through rhetoric, avoidance and ultimately self-referential rationalization.
From this absence of scrutiny begins the story, spread across roughly three decades of judicial decisions and related commentary, of why very little is actually understood about what the principles mean to the Court or how it may choose to apply them from one decision to the next. The commentary attempting to critique this status, proceeding, as it does, from a presumption in favour of the Court’s ability to integrate international rules, is ultimately hamstrung because of its inability to identify the broader scheme of movement, the patterns and trends evidenced by the Court’s logic and method (i.e. the how?).
By offering a thicker history of precautionary governance at exemplary moments of ecological crisis I trace the changing legal and political interpretations of precaution and show that through the 19th and 20th centuries, policymakers developed this unique form of governance in response to crises related to modernization. Lawyers and policymakers who interpret precaution by subjecting it to the politics of scientific verification and the goal of Sustainable Development, ignore this history to our shared detriment because they utilize an inert form of precautionary thinking incapable of facilitating public decisions or investigating how modern risks are generated and distributed. The result is that precaution no longer articulates anything.
By contrast, I argue that “precaution” and “sustainability” should be understood as articulations of certain historically-contingent, necessarily political and still-evolving moral relations. Precaution, understood in the context of environmental law, is a cultural strategy that accepts the imperfectness of human knowledge and facilitates decisions that guard against easy anthropocentric assumptions of redundancy in the natural environment. In embracing scientific uncertainty and related insecurities, precautionary thinking identifies with an ethical tradition that facilitates decision-making by prioritizing experiential knowledge and moral choice over a rationalistic valuation of ecological interests.
In All Is Well, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay argues that there is no such thing as a “disaster” outside of rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific contestation through which such occurrences are morally distinguished from the rhythms of everyday life. Disasters, Bandopadhyay asserts, are artifacts of "normal" rule. They result from the same, mundane strategies of knowledge-making and violence by which authorities, experts, and lay people struggle to develop state-like power, to define and defend the social order.
Challenging traditional narratives, All Is Well looks at “disaster management” as a historical process that produces both catastrophes and political authorities. To do so, Bandopadhyay draws on three case studies: the Marseille plague of 1720, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the Bengal famine of 1770. As far back as the eighteenth century, aspiring rulers understood disasters to be occasions for testing their state-like ambitions as they swapped divine authority for the supremacy of natural rights, Enlightenment ideals, and colonial rule. Bandopadhyay examines these exercises in catastrophe conservation and state formation and shows how the underlying beliefs and resulting insights underwrite sophisticated but deeply inequitable present-day norms and practices of global governance. He concludes that climate change, and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past.