Mountain Areas (2027)

The Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPAx) and the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck will host a three-day Symposium on the "Environmental Peacebuilding in Mountain Areas: Bio-cultural Diversity and the Arts of Living on Damaged Slopes" on July 5-7, 2027.  

The call for abstracts is now open.

The event will be in person at the University of Innsbruck (online participation is permitted in exceptional cases). While papers are not required, the symposium organizers anticipate inviting selected papers for potential inclusion in a special issue of Environment and Security.

The symposium examines mountain regions as spaces where biological and cultural diversity, environmental change, resource management and conflicts intersect. Mountain terrain shapes warfare, borders, political marginalization, raw material extraction, water geopolitics, livelihoods, and climate-related hazards, making conflicts and peace in these areas particularly complex. Nevertheless, environmental peacebuilding often treats mountain regions merely as source areas. Peace research underestimates the importance of mountain studies and frequently fails to engage sufficiently with the causes of violence and political conflict in this natural environment. The symposium addresses this threefold gap by bringing these disciplines together and drawing on political ecology, multi-species approaches, feminist and critical peace research, cryopolitics, the rights of nature and pluriversal perspectives to rethink ecological peacebuilding from the perspective of the mountains themselves.

The deadline for priority consideration of abstracts is 1 December 2026; submissions received by the priority deadline will be informed of the decision no later than 31 January 2027.  The Symposium organizers will continue to receive and review abstracts after the priority consideration deadline as space permits. The full call for abstracts is available here.

To submit an abstract, please click on "Submit Proposal" and fill out the form.  Please note that you need to be signed in to environmentalpeacebuilding.org to fill out the form.  If you do not have an account, it is free, quick, and easy to create one.  For more information, please see the FAQs.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at conference@environmentalpeacebuilding.org.