Environmental Peacebuilding: New Paradigms (chapter in Research Handbook on the International Law of Peace)
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Author(s): Britta Sjöstedt
Date: 2026
Topics: Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Governance
Environmental peacebuilding has emerged as an interdisciplinary field that integrates environmental governance with conflict resolution and post-conflict recovery. This chapter argues that this emerging field should be understood as a new paradigm in international law in two respects. First, it is a paradigm of legal ordering. In the absence of a single coherent regime for post-conflict environmental governance, environmental peacebuilding functions as an interpretive lens through which fragmented norms from different bodies of international law can be coordinated. These include international humanitarian law (IHL), international criminal law, international environmental law, human rights law, and investment law. Through this integrative approach, environmental peacebuilding aligns these legal frameworks around the shared aims of environmental recovery, legitimacy, and the nonrecurrence of violence in peace processes. International law's contribution lies in mobilising substantive norms, procedural safeguards, and institutional mechanisms so that environmental protection, equity, participatory decision-making and sustainable development are treated as integral parts of peace architecture rather than peripheral "environmental add-ons." Second, environmental peacebuilding is a paradigm in a stronger more critical sense because it challenges dominant legal conceptions of environmental harm, especially the conflict-centred, episodic, and largely anthropocentric framing that leaves slow, cumulative, and governance-related degradation insufficiently addressed. Through law, the chapter seeks to identify pathways for integrating ecological reconciliation into environmental peacebuilding as both a conceptual and institutional orientation. This approach advances the field by treating environmental harm as relational damage that affects not only ecosystems but also identity, belonging, and human-environment relationships, and by reinterpreting existing legal categories accordingly. Drawing on experiences from the Colombian peace process, the chapter shows how the jurisprudence of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP), by for instance recognising Territory as a victim and using intercultural evidentiary practices, illustrates possible legal innovations to advance new perceptions of environmental harm. The conclusion is that environmental peacebuilding is paradigmatic precisely because it is simultaneously (i) an integrative lens for structuring international law's fragmented tools around post-conflict governance and (ii) a field where alternative conceptions of environmental harm, nature, and justice expose the limits of prevailing legal categories, thereby opening space for ecological reconciliation as a core dimension of building sustainable peace.