richterich@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Nils Richterich (he/him) studied Political Science (Bachelor) and Sociology (Master) in Frankfurt and Maynooth (Ireland). After holding a position as a Research Associate at the Chair of Social Inequality in Frankfurt, he is now a PhD candidate at the DFG- funded Research Training Group „Fixing Futures. Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies.“ His research interests involve more-than-human (inequality) sociologies, ethnography, environmental sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
Project Description
Becoming a Legal Subject of Nature
Rights of Nature for the Mar Menor Lagoon
In the face of multiple ecological disruptions, social-ecological practices are increasingly emerging that move beyond the classical paradigm of sustainability. A prominent example of this shift is Rights of Nature (RoN). In the form of subjective rights, they grant ecosystems legal personality and rights of action, thereby enabling more-than-human representation in the political sphere. In this mode, RoN do not operate within the paradigm of sustainability. Rather than presupposing an intact nature to be preserved, they respond to ecological disruptions that have already occurred or are anticipated.
My dissertation takes up this constellation by examining the first successful European RoN case: the legal personality granted to the Spanish saltwater lagoon Mar Menor. Following multiple ecological degradations of the lagoon, civil society actors successfully introduced RoN for this ‘little sea’ through a popular legislative initiative, granting it, among other things, the right “to exist” and a governance structure consisting of three guardianship bodies. I conceptualise these rights as a political technology – a socio-material arrangement that enables and constrains action without determining its uses in advance – in order to analyse empirically how it is constituted and what it brings into being in and beyond the legal sphere. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis in Spain, I ask how this technology gives rise to practices of social-ecological justice and thereby aims to transform extractivist relations in a region that relies heavily on more-than-human exploitation. To address this question, I show how this political technology is historically enabled (I), made desirable and practically prepared (II), and presently mobilised (III).
First, I reconstruct how selected scientific and legal problematizations of the Mar Menor’s environmental history formed the lagoon as a vulnerable problem-object, inseparable from its basin and representable in its own right, and made legal personality thinkable as a possible response. Second, building on these conditions, I analyse how legal personality became desirable and was prepared between 2017 and 2022. As an affective event, the anoxia of 2019 broke activists’ long-standing hope that the lagoon would recover and gave rise to a melancholic hope – a hope without the promise of return. Drawing on this hope, Spanish activists and legal scholars shaped the legal personality into a political technology for addressing local social-ecological conflicts. Third, I analyse the present unfolding of legal personality, by following three forms of mobilisation: discursive-affective, juridical, and governance mobilisation. In doing so, I show how these mobilisations determine who may speak for the lagoon, which relations count as part of it, and which are excluded. Through this overall analysis, my project conceptualises RoN as a political technology through which more-than-human practices of justice are tested and institutionalised in response to ongoing ecological disruptions.
Publications
Bräunling, Daniel, Sarah von Querfurth, Nils Richterich, Annika Troitzsch, Franziska von Verschuer, and Tobias Wagner. 2026. ‘Hurra, die Welt geht unter! Zur Transformation und Gestaltung lebenswerter Zukünfte im Zeichen interdependenter Krisen. Tagungsbericht zur 21. Tagung der Nachwuchsgruppe Umweltsoziologie (NGU), (Link).
Richterich, N. ( 26.02.2025). Rights of Nature Through the History of Problematizations: From the Problem of Environmental Pollution to the Subjective Rights of the Mar Menor, Völkerrechtsblog. https://doi.org/10.17176/20250227-000837-0.
Online: https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/de/rights-of-nature-through-the-history-of-problematizations/
Hoppe, K., Meier, L., Richterich, N., & Wratschko, L. (2024). Der Supermarkt als pandemischer Raum: Affektive Ansteckung in der Corona-Krise. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 53(1), 58-72.
https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-2024-2006
Richterich, N. (2024). Spontanhelfende als Vergemeinschaftung des resilienten Selbst? Eine ethnografische Spurensuche im Kontext des ‚Jahrhunderthochwassers 2021‘. BEHEMOTH A Journal on Social Dis/Order, 17(1), 115–132. https://doi.org/10.6094/behemoth.2024.17.1.1112