More-Than-Human Promise: Relationality, Materiality, and Performativity

Abstract

By analysing the relevant case law, this article argues that the promise must be understood as a more-than-human practice rather than merely a human affair of exchanging commitments to make agreements. Promise is always rolled into, and complicated by, the heterogenous networks formed up by humans and nonhumans in the world. Within the broader scope of this special issue – to build dialogues between comparative law and legal geography – this article, by analysing the legality and spatiality of promise, unpacks spatio-legal tangles, which are dynamic, contextual, and territorial, producing knowledge about law and society. It assesses three cases of promise in different spatio-legal settings: first, a piece of legislation about seismic risk management in Türkiye; second, a judicial decision regarding land use rezoning in Hong Kong; and, third, some disputes over property rental arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. These cases are analysed through three interrelated aspects of making sense of the social world: relationality, materiality, and performativity. Different material objects, which can help relate and unrelate actants, are embedded in the performance of the law’s territory. The identification of these three components begins with the provocative vision shared by the scholarship of both comparative law and legal geography that aims to understand how the world is ordered, as well as with the awareness of comparison and spatiality. When using these three notions, the theoretical framing is not only limited to the analysis of the promise, but it can also be extended to make sense of other aspects of law and society.