Political Uncommons

Kathryn Milun teaches in the Anthropology/Sociology department of the University of Minnesota Duluth and has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. She is the author of Pathologies of Modern Space: Empty Space, Urban Anxiety and the Recovery of the Public Self (Routledge, 2007).

• Contents: Introduction; An emergent global commons: biodiversity - a case study of how culture becomes law and nature becomes empty space; Part I Res Nullius/Terra Nullius and the Epistemic Imaginary of International Law: Terra nullius, res nullius and res communis: a conceptual confusion of terms; Res nullius - the tragedy of the (modern global) commons: from Grotius and the high seas to the internet; Covering res that move: theory and practice: whales as res divini juris; The law of the seas extended vertically into the law of outer space and the law of outer space reterritorializing the Earth. Part II Two Cases of the Revocation of Terra Nullius: the Western Sahara case: genealogies captured by the census; Negotiations and the Mabo case: comparative epistemic imaginaries. Conclusion: beyond empty space - expanding the epistemological repertoire of the global commons through biofigural and technological imaginaries; Bibliography; Index.

'Back in the exhilarating days of rampant culture theory during the 1980s when all manner of concepts applied in our everyday lives were being critically rethought, I considered Kathryn Milun's scholarship on "empty space" both exemplary and exciting. Now in our age of doing, of activist desire and effort, I meet again Milun's work, but this time as the most successfully realized case of scholarly action, following the threads of her earlier work to achieve a legally cunning and ethnographically plausible program for establishing commons in the new empty spaces amid and alongside neoliberal designs.' George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine, USA and co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary