ABSTRACT
The chapter examines contemporary processes shaping the emerging extractive regime in the international seabed beyond state jurisdiction, a zone referred to as the Area in international law. In particular, it considers overlapping processes pursued via the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the agency charged under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) with regulating extraction from the Area, and state legislation established by nonparties to UNCLOS, in particular the United States. The chapter employs what it posits as three significant features of an explicitly critical geography of natural resources: (a) an interrogation of the firms and institutions that seek to produce and market nature as resources, (b) a geo-juridical examination that considers the global political tensions shaping legislation and regulation of the production of nature, and finally (c) attention to the role of finance and venture capital in contemporary industrial extraction. It does so through an exploration of the activities of the British subsidiary of Lockheed Martin at the ISA and the dynamics entailed by the US-Mexico 2012 Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement pertaining to extraction in an overlapping jurisdictional zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Taken together, the features that constitute an extractive regime for the international seabed via UNCLOS/ISA and state and bilateral jurisdiction express a world-making process that in turn allows the minerals and hydrocarbons in the international seabed to be produced as commercializable resources.
