“Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”: Unsettling Environmental Peacebuilding through Anti-Colonial Approaches

Date & Time
Jun 16, 2026 | 13.30 - 15.00

Participants
Sol Santos, Independent (Argentina/Switzerland)
Mohammad Khadim Habibzai, War Child Canada (Afghanistan)
Ahmednoor Bashir, The KESHO Alliance (Kenya)

Inspired by Tuck and Yang’s 2012 piece “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and building on the Peace Science Digest’s Special Issue “Decolonial and Indigenous Approaches to Environmental Peacebuilding”, this workshop will critically consider what anti-colonial approaches to environmental peacebuilding actually entail, in practice. The largest-scale resource conflict in history - European colonialism in the 1500s-1900s - has yet to be truly resolved. Few formal apologies have been given; even fewer reparations have been made. American and Canadian academics of settler descent speak about “decolonizing the curriculum” and work on peacebuilding projects in Africa while sidestepping their complicity in the degradation of Indigenous Lands and ongoing colonial rule of Island Nations. Is environmental peacebuilding only relevant in places with acute armed conflict? Might its frameworks and approaches be relevant in anticolonial and decolonizing efforts…including in colonial countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, which are often not classified as ‘in conflict’? ******** This session will be facilitated by the ECCP Decolonization Group