Irregular Ecologies: The Environmental Impact of Unconventional Warfare

Jul 20, 2019 - Jul 21, 2019 | Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and Armed Conflict and Environmental Research Network
Florianopolis, Brazil
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Warfare seldom affects humans alone. While inflicting devastating effects on societies, armed conflicts also shape economic, cultural, sociopolitical, and ecological transformations. As violence territorializes, armed conflicts begin to affect the ecologies and livelihoods that once sustained them. Environmental transformation thus emerges as an inextricable correlate of human conflict. With the dawn of the Cold War, the environmental impacts of human conflict unfolded alongside the same geopolitical trends that engulfed the Global South. Decolonizing movements, guerrilla warfare, rural insurrections, and other forms of intrastate conflict developed from within ecologically fragile areas and eco-sensitive zones, including savannahs, valleys, watersheds, islands, mangroves, forests, plateaus, and jungles. Over the years, emerging and consolidated republics such as Ethiopia, Colombia, the DRC, Vietnam, Peru, Liberia, Mexico, Myanmar, the Philippines, Nepal, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, among others, have become gruesome epicenters of armed conflict in sensitive ecosystems and precarious agrarian landscapes.

The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) and the Armed Conflict and Environment Research Network (ACERN) invite paper proposals for a two-day workshop focused on the interaction between guerilla warfare and social and environmental transformations in the Global South, with a special focus on the last three decades. We invite papers on questions that include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • How has irregular warfare transformed or conserved environments?
  • How has it reconditioned everyday life?
  • What impact has it had on livelihoods and food access?
  • How were chemical cycles changed through irregular warfare?

Paper proposals (300 words) should be submitted by 15 December 2018 to CarsonCenter@lmu.de.

For more information, please visit https://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/events_conf_seminars/calendar/190720_irregular-ecologies/index.html

When: 20-21 July 2019

Where: Florianopolis, Brazil

Organizers: The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) and the Armed Conflict and Environmental Research Network (ACERN)