Call for Papers: Special Issue on Climate Change Mitigation, Peace and Conflict

Feb 3, 2025 | Tobias Ide, Murdoch University

Tobias Ide is facilitating a special issue on climate change mitigation, peace and conflict. If you are interested in participating, please read the below brief concept note and call for abstracts. Note: In addition to an in-person workshop in London, there is potential funding available for contributors for limited data collection.

Brief concept note:

Mitigating climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Without timely and ambitious climate action, global temperature rise will exceed 3°C by the end of the century, which unprecedented consequences for food security, water availability, and human health.

But while climate change mitigation is urgently required, it can be a trigger of political conflicts and violence as well. Large-scale solar parks and the extraction of minerals for renewable energy, for instance, already fuel protests, riots, state repression, and violent skirmishes. Understanding such conflicts as well as ways to address them peacefully will therefore be key to mitigate climate change in a just and efficient way.

The envisioned special issue will present cutting-edge research and provide a state-of-the-art overview about the impacts of climate change mitigation on peace and conflict. In particular, it will focus on three forms of conflict and their violent escalation: (1) Conflicts around land-use changes in the name of mitigating climate change (for instance in the context of conservation and large-scale renewable energy projects). (2) Conflicts related to minerals that are crucial for the renewable energy transition (e.g., the extraction and processing of lithium, cobalt etc). (3) Conflicts and state fragility related to a decarbonisation of economies that are strongly dependent on oil and gas extraction.

All three forms of conflict have a strong spatial dimension. They frequently occur in borderlands or frontier areas, and they contain significant cross-border and trans-national linkages (e.g., tied to global policies, licit and illicit trade, and cross-border conflict coalitions). While not a requirement, contributions that address this spatial dimension will be considered favourably. Likewise, contributions that focus on violent conflict or armed conflict are of particular interest to the special issue.

The special issue is open to a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Once the abstracts are selected, Tobias will submit the complete proposal to a high-ranking journal in the field of peace and conflict studies, international relations, and/or environmental politics.

Call for abstracts:

Please submit a title and an abstract (max. 200 words) for you proposed contribution as well as a short biography of each author (max. 100 words) in a single file until 21/02/2025 to tobias.ide@murdoch.edu.au. Full papers are not expected at this stage, but research should be sufficiently advanced that we can discuss draft papers by the middle of the year. The aim is to finalise the line-up for the special issue no later than 07/03/2025.

The Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) programme will fund a workshop with all contributors in London in mid-2025 and facilitate uptake events in London after the special issue is published. In addition, XCEPT may fund additional, smaller-scale data gathering where it is required for high-quality contributions. This could be, for example, a final round of field work or (sourced through the XCEPT Fund) remote sensing or satellite imagery. Contributors seeking additional funding should include an indication of budget and added value to the research.