Space, discourse and environmental peacebuilding

Abstract

The concept of environmental peacebuilding is becoming increasingly prominent among peacebuilding scholars and practitioners. This study provides a brief overview about the various discussions contributing to our understanding of environmental peacebuilding and concludes that questions of space have hardly been explicitly considered in these debates. Drawing on discourse-analytic spatial theory, I discuss how the social construction of scale, place and boundaries are relevant for environmental peacebuilding processes and outcomes. This theoretical approach is then applied to the Good Water Neighbours project, which aims at improving the regional water situation and at building peace between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. The results suggest that discursive constructions of space are important in facilitating, impeding or shaping environmental peacebuilding practices. Analyses of environmental peacebuilding, but also of peacebuilding more general, are therefore encouraged to draw more strongly on the findings of spatial theory

Participation of civil society in decisions to mitigate environmental degradation in post-conflict societies: evidence from Somalia

“…A mounting body of literature on environmental conflict has examined the potential linkage between environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and conflict (Buchanan 2013;Farrell 2017), but arguably a significant restriction of this theory has been its inability to identify the existence of opportunities for cooperation between the actors in a coupled human-environment system (Conca and Dabelko 2002). An emergent alternative theory is that environmental degradation has the potential to lead environmental cooperation resulting in lasting peace (Conca and Wallace 2009;Ide 2017). The theory of environmental peace-building has put forward three strands of scholarship in which environmental cooperation may generate peace-building opportunities (Ogden 2018).…”

“…The first concerns the prospect that environmental cooperation in places with environmental security can encourage common-pool resource management and conservation initiatives (Ogden 2018;Conca and Wallace 2009;Ide 2018;Conca and Dabelko 2002). Such initiatives can contribute to the prevention of conflicts that occur due to the over-exploitation of natural resources or livelihood insecurities due to environmental pressure (Ide 2017). The second is that collective environmental concerns can lead to a dialogue between conflicting interests, which can then spill over into different areas (Ogden 2018;Conca and Wallace 2009;Ide 2018;Conca and Dabelko 2002).…”

“…The third is the notion that even conflicts where environmental degradation is not the root cause of the armed conflict, continuous environmental monitoring and environmental cooperation between the communities and governments can promote sustainable peace (Carius 2006;Conca and Wallace 2009;Conca and Dabelko 2002;Ogden 2018). The majority of environmental cooperation practices have been observed in transboundary international conflicts such as Palestine and Israel (Ide 2017), Peru and Ecuador (Kakabadse, Caillaux, and Dumas 2016), Serbia and Croatia (Ruckstuhl 2010), India and Pakistan (Ali 2013), and Armenia and Azerbaijan (Carius 2006). However, there are some successful cases within individual countries where non-state actors, as representatives of the larger community, worked jointly with the government to manage shared natural resources and that cooperation between non-state actors and the government prevented the eruption of violent conflict.…”

Participation of civil society in decisions to mitigate environmental degradation in post-conflict societies: evidence from Somalia

“…A mounting body of literature on environmental conflict has examined the potential linkage between environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and conflict (Buchanan 2013;Farrell 2017), but arguably a significant restriction of this theory has been its inability to identify the existence of opportunities for cooperation between the actors in a coupled human-environment system (Conca and Dabelko 2002). An emergent alternative theory is that environmental degradation has the potential to lead environmental cooperation resulting in lasting peace (Conca and Wallace 2009;Ide 2017). The theory of environmental peace-building has put forward three strands of scholarship in which environmental cooperation may generate peace-building opportunities (Ogden 2018).…”

Space Law at 21st Century: The Security Issues

“…Such a large number of objects forms the problem of establishing their safe interaction and further disposal. Thus, Tobias Ide is working on the concept of the ecological universe: according to the author, the discursive-analytical spatial theory forms such an idea of the environment in which all phenomena and processes are closely related [Ide, 2017]. Indeed, that is why the determinants of the connection of the General universe do not just localize space, and justify the categorical nature of human responsibility.…”