Environmental Peacebuilding Must Pay More Attention to Armed Groups

Nov 29, 2022 | Judith Verweijen
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Environmental peacebuilding is a rapidly grow field of research and practice. It examines how addressing conflicts over natural resources and improving resource governance can serve as a stepping stone for broader peacebuilding efforts. These ideas have also been applied to the domain of biodiversity conservation, building on earlier thinking around conflict-sensitive conservation.

State and non-state armed actors often play crucial roles in conflict and cooperation over natural resources. This is certainly the case in protected areas mired in armed conflict, where armed actors are involved in both illegal resource exploitation and law enforcement. However, neither the theory nor the practice of environmental peacebuilding pays explicit attention to armed actors.

As we argue in a recent report based on research in protected areas in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this oversight is problematic. Armed actors can both hamper and reinforce environmental peacebuilding interventions in important ways. Analyzing how and why this occurs will strengthen both environmental peacebuilding’s effectiveness and its theoretical underpinnings.