Geographic perspectives on international law: Human rights and Hurricane Katrina

This dissertation is about the intersection of geography and international law. Using the case study of Hurricane Katrina's impact on New Orleans and the subsequent participation of Katrina victims in UN human rights processes, I explore whether using the analytic tools of human geographers is relevant to thinking about the legitimacy of international human rights law. The dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section provides an analysis of Hurricane Katrina's impact on New Orleans. It begins by providing an analysis of how injustice has been woven into the urban fabric of the city itself before turning to an overview of the storm and its associated flooding, told through first-hand accounts of those who experienced those events. Section II then examines how that analysis of Katrina relates to international human rights law, how the victims who came to the UN Human Rights Committee meeting in 2006 brought a story about the storm to the UN that focused on the relationship between people, power, and land, and how their participation therefore resulted in a more substantively and procedurally more legitimate interpretation of the law itself. Finally, Section III focuses on two theoretical issues which are tied up with the meaningfulness of human rights to those victims of Katrina who participated in the UN Human Rights Committee meeting: the issue of universality, and the relationship between care-based approaches to morality and human rights. Taken together, Sections I, II, and III provide a detailed analysis of how international human rights law relates to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. The dissertation concludes that incorporating a geographic perspective on the storm's devastation into the law makes the law itself more legitimate.