2025 ESIL Monograph Prize

The 2025 ESIL Monograph Prize was awarded in September 2025 during the 20th ESIL Annual Conference in Berlin to Emmanuelle Tourme-Jouannet (Sciences Po Paris)  for her book Un nouveau droit international écologique. Habiter autrement la Terre (Larcier-Intersentia, 2024).

Jury’s decision:

Emmanuelle Tourme Jouannet’s Un nouveau droit international écologique. Habiter autrement la terre presents an innovative rethinking of international law through an ecological lens, offering a fresh conceptual approach that integrates environmental ethics with legal norms. This challenges the traditionally anthropocentric orientation of international law and pushes for a more just, sustainable, and globally equitable legal order.

The book stands out for its interdisciplinary depth, drawing on law, philosophy, and political theory to construct a compelling normative vision that calls for transformative—not merely incremental—change. Despite the book’s highly theoretical nature, it offers concrete legal tools and pragmatic strategies for reform of global environmental governance. For instance, the book proposes how its suggested ecological legal order could be practically enforced or implemented within existing international institutional frameworks, in particular within the United Nations.

The book also offers a good balance of Western legal and philosophical traditions and of non-Western, indigenous, or Global South perspectives on ecological justice. This is a book that is timely when new ideas are needed on how to integrate planetary thinking in the future of international law-making to make the latter more robust for a healthy planet.

The book is written by one of the leading international lawyers known for critical thinking and innovative approaches to international law. Beyond the book, the awarding of the 2025 ESIL Book Award Prize is also a testimony to the great scholarship of Prof. Jouannet in several fields of international law. There is no doubt that the book will inspire present and future generations of international lawyers who are reflecting on new legal paths to protect and preserve Mother Earth from the adverse effects of global environmental degradation. The Committee for the 2025 Award ESIL Prize has been unanimously admirative of the book of Prof. Jouannet and is convinced that it reflects originality as well as the values of ESIL.