Relational Peace and More-Than-Human Agency: Rethinking Environmental Peacebuilding Guidelines and Training through the Transdisciplinary Project EnviPeace

Juliana Krohn, University of Graz and Austrian Center for Peace (Austria)
Astrid Holzinger, Austrian Center for Peace (Austria)

Both Peace Studies and Peacebuilding increasingly acknowledge a gap between their conceptual frameworks and the plurality of lived experiences and contexts they address (Trownsell et al. 2019; Mac Ginty 2025). This gap becomes particularly evident at the environment-peace nexus, underlying epistemologies and corresponding societal relations to nature. The mastery of, rather than relation to, the more-than-human world has shaped both modernity and the international system, resulting in a dominant, anthropocentric paradigm (Blackbourn 2007; Blom 2022). Persistent knowledge gaps at this nexus, alongside an increasing securitization of research, policy and practice, continue to limit comprehensive approaches (Bertrand 2018; Gomes and Marques 2021; Iversen and Khalifa 2023). To address these challenges, the transdisciplinary project EnviPeace advances relational approaches to peace by conceptualizing more-than-human beings as peace-relevant actors. Building on its empirical findings, it develops policy-relevant guidelines for Environmental Peacebuilding and reconceptualizes the Environmental Peacebuilding training program at the Austrian Center for Peace.