On 5 March 2026, Professor Tanja Aalberts joined the Law and Development Research Group to present work in progress, co-authored with the LDRG's Juliana Santos de Carvalho.
Tanja Aalberts is Professor of Law and Politics at the department of Transnational Legal Studies, VU Amsterdam. Her work revolves around the interplay between politics and law within global governance, with a specific interest in aesthetics as a legal technology.
Abstract
From 9 to 20 March 2026, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) convenes its thirty-first session to advance draft regulations for deep-sea mining (the ‘Mining Code’) in areas beyond national jurisdiction—the ‘Area’. Despite mounting pressure from states and industry, the Mining Code for exploitation remains unfinished. This delay reflects not only political disagreement but a more fundamental condition: the object of regulation is, in many respects, unknown. The Area lies beyond sovereignty claims, and its ecological risks exceed current scientific knowledge. Regulating its exploration and exploitation is therefore a paradigmatic exercise in world-making. Against this background, we ask: what does this world-making produce in and through law? We conceptualise the ISA’s regulatory practice as assemblage-making: an ongoing labour of bringing disparate elements into relation (Li 2007: 263) to render deep-sea exploitation thinkable and lawful. Our analysis traces three interrelated assemblages. First, we revisit the historical emergence of the principle of the common heritage of mankind within the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). We show how this principle operates as a normative assemblage, forged through a fragile compromise between Global North and Global South interests—an unfinished settlement requiring continuous work to be operationalised. Second, we examine the ISA’s production of the deep sea as a spatial and material assemblage. Through grids of licences, sponsorship arrangements, and regulatory techniques, the Authority stabilises an ever-shifting seabed into a governable resource space. Third, we analyse the making of “mankind” as a subject assemblage: assembled as both beneficiary and co-producer of regulation, and variously figured as a right-holder, stakeholder, and knowledge-holder. These categories, we argue, conceal hierarchies and exclusions beneath the patina of universal participation. We conclude that the ISA’s framework stabilises a precarious extractive future that demands ongoing regulatory, epistemic, and political labour to endure.