Taking Stock of Environmental Peacemaking at 20

Mar 11, 2022 | Shruti Samala
View Original

Twenty years after the publication of Environmental Peacemaking, a foundational theoretical and case study volume on environmental peacebuilding, what has not changed is the thorny conceptual problem the field poses to practitioners and researchers, said Ashok Swain, Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. How do you define environment and peacebuilding? Is environmental peacemaking an area of research or an area of policy-making?  

As a crowdsourced field, environmental peacemaking has diversified. But with the proliferation of topics in the field, environmental peacebuilding has also gained legitimacy in the last two decades, said Swain. 

More attention to environmental defenders, land defenders, and human rights defenders has enabled engaged research with local actors. In the last decade, however, the ascent of hegemonic regionalism as well as securitization frameworks have shifted the axis of theory and praxis towards the small scale. With collective dilemmas such as climate change now dominating environmental spaces there is a growing push to return to scale.