Can We Make Peace with the Coronavirus?

Apr 27, 2020 | Erica Sheeran and Jeremy Moore
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The field of environmental peacebuilding understands the degradation of our planet’s environment as a common human foe against which groups divided by conflict can be mobilized. “Nature knows no political borders,” notes the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which brings together Israelis and Palestinians to address water scarcity in their shared ecosystem. USIP has supported Arava’s work with youth from the two sides through a grant.

Climate change has been the most global, but not the only, challenge that opens paths for communication and cooperation among groups in conflict. Natural disasters have done so. The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s Kashmir region prompted violent extremist groups there to halt attacks on neighboring India and instead support relief work in parallel with Pakistani government and U.S. military efforts. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami helped lead Indonesia’s government and separatist guerrillas to halt and resolve the insurgency in the region of Aceh.

Where disasters are more likely to trigger violence is in societies that exhibit widespread ethnic exclusion from political power and that have overall lower levels of human development. This represents a sobering challenge as COVID-19 rapidly spreads into fragile states across the developing world.