Peter Langford

Name and Surname
Peter Langford

Affiliation
Associate Lecturer in Law, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Short Biography

Peter Langford is an Associate Lecturer in Law at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His areas of expertise are in legal and political philosophy, legal sociology, social theory and human rights. Within the areas of legal philosophy and legal sociology, his research has centred upon the work of Hans Kelsen and Max Weber. Within the area of political philosophy, it has focused upon the work of Roberto Esposito (Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political 2015) and Carl Schmitt (Order Crisis and Redemption: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt, co-authored with Saul Newman, 2024). In relation to human rights, his research has concentrated upon normative questions of global justice and human rights, fundamental rights in Gunther Teubner’s sociology of law, non-nationals and the European Convention of Human Rights, and the protection of environmental human rights defenders under the Inter-American Convention of Human Rights.

Research abstract

Justification and Application: Assisting and Reinforcing the Understanding of Environmental Justice in Environmental Movements, Organisations and Political Parties in the Balkans
The objective of the research project is to develop a theory of environmental justice which expresses and reinforces the presence of a notion of environmental justice in the approaches of environmental civil society organisations, environmental grassroots movements and Green or environmental political parties in the Balkans. The research project adopts this particular focus because it understands that it is the existence and activism of these organisations, movements and parties which indicate an important and distinctive understanding of environmental justice. Therefore, these groups and parties should be accorded a central importance in the wider conceptualisation of the process of Green change.
These groups and parties operate in a difficult current context in which they occupy the position of a minority and are increasingly subject to resistance and obstruction. Beyond the clearly illegal and quasi-clandestine forms of fatal and non-fatal violence, threats and intimidation, the other complementary purpose of the project is to emphasise that their orientation to environmental justice requires the guarantee of their civil and political rights. These rights, as fundamental, human rights are those of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. In other words, that these civil and political rights, even insofar as they given formal expression in relevant constitutional provisions, are fundamental human rights. This, in turn, entails that these fundamental rights should prohibit the recourse to substantive domestic criminal law and civil law in order to undermine the capacity for their effective exercise. The project understands the capacity to undermine their effective exercise as a broad one which extends from the explicit prohibition and overt suppression of demonstrations to the use of domestic criminal and civil law by politicians, business owners and corporations against public statements by individual environmentalists and environmental groups. The project, therefore, seeks, in this complementary focus upon human rights, to open a wider discussion of these environmental groups and parties as public environmental human rights defenders.