In this presentation, I explore the legal protection of wolves in Sweden through rhizomatic relations between diverse phenomena in the Swedish landscapes and beyond. What appears as legal protection of wolves is analysed as meta-stable patterns emerging from the entanglement of formal legal processes, climatological processes, social-ecological processes, culture wars, and other factors. Legal agency are understood as distributed in networks consisting of legal and human as well as non-human actors. 

With this approach, normativity or legality is not an inherent property of legislations or other human or non-human phenomena, but rather emergent patterns that appear in, and co-produce, our human-dominated landscapes. The legal protection of wolves in Sweden is hence not dependent on laws or regulations as much as on, for example, the wolf’s entanglement with toxic human discourses or its inability to dwell in Sweden’s northern part and connect to the populations in Finland and Russia. Increasing the legal protection of wolves is therefore not so much about changing legal paradigms as about utilising ways to use laws to affect the broader spectrum of anti-wolf processes in the landscape in progressive directions.