Peace Studies and the Limits to Growth
Publisher: Journal of Social Encounters
Author(s): Selina Gallo-Cruz
Date: 2023
Topics: Economic Recovery, Extractive Resources, Gender, Governance
Scientists have issued increasingly dire warnings about the present and future danger posed by ecological overshoot. Peace scholars’ entrée into this discourse is often through a concern over extractive politics, a central locus for how conflicts are bound up in environmental destruction at the hands of the same industries responsible for ecological decline. Policy and practical responses to the urgent need to scale down production lag behind reality, however, and a global growth-based economy continues to prevail. Here, I explore the dilemmas faced by peace studies scholars who may want to take these limits to growth seriously. Reviewing interdisciplinary literatures on extractive politics, conflict and peacebuilding, I identify epistemological and pragmatic path dependencies in solutions-based scholarship that has developed within a growth-based paradigm, shaped also by psychological and cultural barriers to accepting a future of environmental decline and escalating conflict. I conclude by considering the kinds of questions scholars might raise if we are to reorient the field toward an acceptance of and engagement with a limits to growth understanding.