Víctor Cobs-Muñoz presents at FAU workshop on human rights beyond territory

From 17 to 19 June 2026, Víctor Cobs-Muñoz participated in the interdisciplinary workshop ‘Where Human Rights Take Place: Spaces of Rights and Responsibilities Beyond Territory’, hosted by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Nuremberg.

Organised within the Cluster of Excellence Transforming Human Rights, the workshop brought together researchers from geography, law, and related fields to examine how mobility, infrastructures, digital networks, environmental crises, and transnational configurations challenge territorially bounded understandings of human rights, responsibility, and accountability.

As part of the session on environmental harm, displacement, and contested landscapes, moderated by Prof. Dr. Sandra Jasper, Víctor Cobs-Muñoz presented the talk ‘Harm in Plain Sight: Sacrifice Zones and the Architecture of Social-Ecological Disposability’. The presentation addressed sacrifice zones as territories in which severe harm to life, health, food and water, and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment becomes visible, named, and often legally recognised, while continuing to be reproduced. Drawing on current work in environmental justice and critical realism, the presentation argued that this persistence cannot be explained simply by weak governance or by the territorial limits of rights frameworks. Instead, it highlighted recurring structural logics through which harm is normalised and sustained, including regulatory deferral, economic indispensability, technocratic normalisation, and legal exceptionalism.

The workshop offered a valuable interdisciplinary setting for exchange on the spatiality of human rights and its contemporary challenges. For the Spatial Modelling Lab, participation in such discussions strengthens ongoing work at the intersection of spatial thinking, governance, and environmental justice.