McKenzie Johnson

Assistant Professor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States

Jan 10, 2023

McKenzie F. Johnson is an Assistant Professor at the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2018. Her research and teaching focus on global environmental politics, environmental justice, and human security. During her undergraduate studies, she was interested in fisheries governance. She completed her Master of Arts in Conservation Biology at Columbia University and upon her graduation in 2007, she traveled to Afghanistan to work on a peace park project between Afghanistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan spearheaded by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Although this project was not ultimately successful, McKenzie ended up working and living in Afghanistan for three years as a program manager for two projects -- Wildlife Trade and the Program of Work Protected Areas. In this role, McKenzie gained a deep understanding of environmental and conflict issues, which led to an interest in how environment is connected to wider conflict and peacebuilding topics in Afghanistan. After this experience, she decided to pursue a PhD in order to understand the linkages between conservation and conflict. She headed to Duke University for its Environmental Policy PhD Program. During her PhD studies, she received a Fulbright scholarship and studied in West Africa where she focused on extractives, seeking to understand the ways that social justice and security are linked to minerals and other resources.

She is currently working with a colleague on a project on land cover and land use change in post-conflict Colombia, with a grant from NASA. While much of the analysis focuses on changes after the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC, there is a much longer historical context. Accordingly, this project attempts to assess how the long-running conflict in Colombia shaped individual abilities to access land and human security. Within this framework, this project focuses on two regions in Colombia to understand the impacts of conflict, peace, and peacebuilding on individuals from local perspectives. In this regard, this project tries to show empirically how the consideration of environmental issues can contribute to peace or act as a barrier to peacebuilding.

McKenzie is also working on another project that relates to the conflict around the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). She asks how the energy and infrastructure conflict dimensions of DAPL played out in other states, particularly in Illinois and Iowa. Much of her previous work focused on Africa and South Asia, where many environmental governance approaches had been imported and adapted from Europe and the US. In this regard, her work on DAPL examines difference in how environmental governance is practiced in the US and in different places such as Ghana or Sierra Leone. 

Reflecting on environmental peacebuilding, McKenzie highlights that we cannot destroy the foundations of our environment essential for livelihoods, clean water, energy, and other needs. These resources are critical for everybody everywhere, but they especially they are critical in conflict-affected situations. Hence, she has adopted a Human Security and Capabilities Approach. She states that the freedom to pursue, have access to, and use natural resources, and those linkages can create opportunities for peace. In her view, environmental peacebuilding is about understanding different contradictions as well, from top/down to economics/political/livelihoods perspectives at different scales and see pathways to peace through environmental means.

McKenzie appreciates the Environmental Peacebuilding Association for they ways that it supports a truly global membership in a way inclusive of Global South scholars and practitioners. She also believes that the Association will attract more people because it is a truly open and inclusive community and is still being defined by many perspectives.  Furthermore, she also notes the value in the Association’s approach to bringing together not only academics, but also practitioners, students, and decisionmakers from different people disciplines and perspectives.

Her upcoming work includes finding funding for projects, involvement of master’s students and PhD students in her projects, making connections and writing her experiences and how that influence her understanding on environmental peacebuilding. For young people who are interested in and aiming to build their career in environmental peacebuilding, she emphasizes that it is okay to not know what your next step is, to need time, or to get lost. Therefore, she advises them to be open to new opportunities, but not to be afraid if they do not come their way right away, as she underlines that sometimes we may need to take a break to reassess our situation and act accordingly.