The Responsibility to Prevent Future Harm
Laura Affolter
Abstract
Through the example of legal resistance to mining in Ecuador, this article explores the shift towards suing states rather than corporations. Key to ongoing resistance struggles is the allocation of preventive responsibility to ‘the state’ through the filing of constitutional lawsuits. I show how both the shift from the ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics of time’ and a shift in the imaginary of the state contribute to claims of responsibility being increasingly directed at states. The article inquires into the effects of the temporal reversal from assessing past harm (and ruling retrospectively) to assessing the likelihood of future scenarios in order to prevent future harm. Finally, I address the limits of such allocation of responsibility, showing that while constitutional lawsuits are political attempts to challenge the government’s economic programme and disrupt the logic of global capitalism, many powerful policy-shaping actors remain beyond the law’s reach.