Understanding Perspectives of Environmental Security in the Brazilian Amazon

Alice Taberner, Universidade de São Paulo and King's College (Italy/Brazil)

The proposed presentation draws upon research gathered for an ongoing PhD exploring environmental security in the Brazilian Amazon. Based upon interviews with Indigenous groups, government officials, NGOs, the Armed Forces, Federal Police and academic actors across the Brazilian Amazonian states, the study constitutes the first research to systematically compare these diverse actors’ understandings of environmental security in the region. It examines how competing understandings of "environmental security" reflect deeper tensions over what "development" and “good life” mean and how they shape security practices. The differing ontologies of security in the Brazilian Amazon, (national, human, and cosmological) generate both friction and opportunities for dialogue, and by revealing these dynamics, the research reframes environmental peacebuilding as a process of inter-ontological negotiation rather than merely conflict management. In so doing, the study adopts a decolonial orientation by amplifying plural ontologies of security and development in the Brazilian Amazon.