The Glaring Gaps: Environmental Violence and Peace Research and Practice
Publisher: Peacebuilding
Author(s): Richard Marcantonio
Date: 2024
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Prevention, Livelihoods, Programming, Weapons, Waste, and Pollution
Countries: Azerbaijan, Congo (DRC), Croatia, El Salvador, Indonesia
Human-caused global impact on socio-ecological systems has been labelled the greatest challenge to human and environmental health. It is also a significant, and perhaps the greatest threat to global peace. Restricting peace research to direct violence alone causes a glaring gap in peace research and practice between different forms of human-caused mortality and suffering. Explicitly accounting for Environmental Violence can offer a critical component for building positive peace. This paper seeks to address what I consider to be strategic gaps that require the integration of multi-disciplinary research, intersectional peacebuilding practice, and concerted policy proposals. The four gaps are (1) failure to include environmental violence in peace research; (2) the multi- and trans-disciplinary gap; (3) the gap of scale and thinking in systems; and (4) failure in the specification of the harm and power differentials in contribution to and realisation of environmental risk. Generative pathways to reconcile these gaps are identified and explored.