TRANSKRIPT 🔗
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Good afternoon, everyone. And it's it's a great pleasure to be here today.
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And welcome to the People Line and many thanks to the discussion group and the law
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faculty for inviting me and to Natasha for organising this talk and my visiting expert.
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So in this presentation, I want to give a brief overview of my book, The Ecology of War and Peace, which was published last year with COPD.
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In order to have a more informal conversation during the Q&A session.
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I will highlight the key concerns underpinning the book.
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Say something about the literature I engage with and the methodology I use and point out the main intervention
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arguments and finally sketched the contour of a future research agenda which builds upon the findings of the book.
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So early. In 2004, the journal Science published a rather controversial article by Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser.
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In that piece, King repressed the Bush administration for its failure to acknowledge the seriousness of
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anthropogenic climate change and its unwillingness to take steps to kerb its country.
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Disproportionate share of greenhouse gas emissions in light of mounting scientific evidence and the growing severity of extreme weather events.
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He argued We need to acknowledge that climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today more serious even than the threat of terrorism.
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Although King did not push the comparison any further.
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Its message was clear the world's richest country had failed to confront the threat of global warming
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warming with the same political urgency it had accorded to the lesser threat of terrorist violence.
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In the following weeks, King's article provoked strain to support the damage control within the Blair government and fuelled a stream of
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invective from there from climate change sceptics and conservatives who accused them of alarmist environmental rhetoric.
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And that diminished the importance of the war on terror and the tragedy of those who died in it.
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Yet King's assessment of the relative dangers posed by climate change and terrorism was based on uncomfortable evidence,
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according to the United States National Counterterrorism Centre.
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Only nine Americans were killed in terrorist attacks outside of Iraq in 2005.
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That is approximately the same number of people that died in the US that year of whooping cough.
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The National Counterterrorism Centre also calculated that 14,600 deaths from Paris attacks occurred globally in 2005, of which 55% in your neck.
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And as noted by the concern, that means that outside of western Iraq,
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the total number of people who died at the end of Paris in 2005 was less than the number that died each day that year of HIV aids.
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So in 2019, the World Health Organisation estimated that between 2013 and 2050 climate change is
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expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition,
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malaria, diarrhoea and stress. Further, according to the latest report by the IPCC published just a couple of weeks ago, between 2010, 2010 and 2020,
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human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in vulnerable regions compared to the rest of the world.
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This region are located in West, Central and Eastern Africa to South Asia, Central and South America, small island developing states.
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Only this summer, the devastating monsoon floods in Pakistan resulted in the death of nearly 1007
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hundred people in floods from the torrential rains wiped out entire villages,
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devastated millions of acres of crops and made millions of people homeless.
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The U.N. secretary general, who visited Pakistan in September, said,
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I have seen many humanitarian disaster in the world but have never seen climate carnage on this scale.
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I have simply no words to describe what I have seen today.
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So when confronted with the disproportionate effects of climate change upon the most vulnerable,
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the imbalance between the moral gravity we attribute to direct,
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limited forms of violence such as terrorist attacks,
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and the casual expediency with which we accept the systemic harm inflicted upon millions by climate change and ecological collapse is striking.
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Part of this imbalance, I would suggest, derives from dominant, legally sanctioned definitions of violence.
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Terrorist acts and other monetary atrocities understood this direct and premeditated infliction of physical harm
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by identifiable perpetrators upon identifiable victims fit precisely within our common sense notion of violence.
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Whereas the manifold forms
Load full transcript
of destruction and suffering associated with climate change, toxic pollution and environmental degradation do not.
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So why is it so? This puzzle or the question of the relationship between violence,
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disability and international law has been a key concern of my research for the past few years and is at the core of my recent book,
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The Ecology of War and Peace, which I am presenting today. Professor and now a judge at the ICJ, Ellery Charlesworth,
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has famously argued that the discipline of international law often develops in
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response to crisis writing in the context of the military intervention in Kosovo.
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She observes that one problem with the crisis model is that it leads lawyers
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to concentrate on single events or issues while missing the larger picture.
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In turn, this attitude results in a poor understanding of the complexity of global concern and therefore in unsatisfactory approaches.
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Notably, she points out how the crisis model is silent on structural injustices which remain sidelined in mainstream legal discourses and practices.
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International deployment of the crisis narrative is therefore, according to Judge Charlesworth,
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never neutral by elevating certain crisis international or distracts from other pressing issues.
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While of course, there are many implications of understanding international law as a crisis discourse.
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This presentation I want to draw attention to what that discourse obscures,
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namely the less visible but more pervasive socio ecological dimensions of militarism and warfare.
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In thinking about these issues, I built upon two theories that originate from legal fields of study and are concerned with understanding the normal,
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unexceptional, anonymous and often scrutinised violence woven into the routine workings of power structures.
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The first is the concept of law violence developed by the American political scholar Robert Nixon.
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In his little violence and the environmentalism of the poor.
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Rob Nixon claims that there are forms of violence, notably those associated with climate change,
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deforestation and the environmental aftermath of work that takes place gradually, often invisibly, which equals violence.
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The violence associated with this phenomena use is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and oppressive.
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And this rate is, of course, several theoretical, political and legal questions.
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Nixon observes that the casualties of slow violence are most likely not to be seen, not to be counted,
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as they take years or decades to occur, in contrast with more spectacular, immediately sensational and.
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But visible threats such as terrorist attacks.
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So in his book, he offers a number of examples of the delayed effects of slow environmental violence.
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The most relevant, I would say, for the present analysis is the discussion of the impact of precision warfare upon the environment and human health.
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So you observes that during the 1991 Gulf War, American troops fired weapons containing £340 of depleted uranium,
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which contributed to making the Gulf War the most toxic work in Western military history, at least until today.
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Operation Desert Storm was presented as a quick victory and a demonstration of the technological superiority of the American military,
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which, in its opinion, hides the long term legacy of depleted uranium on water land.
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Iraqi equity people and American troops, as one indeed agreed of thousands of veterans,
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reported the so-called Gulf War Syndrome experiencing a spike in leukaemia renal collapse album deformities.
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Nixon thus underlines a dissonance between the idea of smart war and precision warfare,
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which are intended to shorten conflict and reduce the number of casualties and thus violence inflicting Ofcom casualties.
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The second concept I draw upon is that of structural violence, which was given early expression by the UN gas tool in the 1960s.
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Guston famously famously formulated the concept of structural violence in opposition of that of personal violence.
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He notes that whereas personal violence can be traced back to concrete persons as actors,
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in the case of structural violence, they may not be an actor directly arms and other person.
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The violence, he says, is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.
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He points out Outfest,
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since the dying of tuberculosis hundreds of years ago was to large extent unavoidable for those who contracted and given more than advantage advances.
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Gusto suggests dying from it today is best seen as a form of structural violence bound up with iniquity,
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inequality, maldistribution of resources and the dereliction of public services.
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So most of you would certainly think of the many, too many COVID 19 related deaths,
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especially among the most marginalised segment of the world's population.
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Nixon Agatha's theories have obviously many implication three are, in my view,
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particularly relevant for the legal analysis and critique conducted in the book.
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The first is the rejection that violence occur only occurs only when there is a visible perpetrator or agent to whom responsibility can be attributed.
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Legal doctrine such as attribution and conservation intention as the mandatory requirement for international crimes.
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Personalise violence by connecting certain harmful consequences to an identifiable actor, often imagine as an individual with conscious and free will.
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Conversely, arms that cannot be traced back to an agent are dismissed as accidents.
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Unavoidable unintended.
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Historically given features about what present world think again about the deaths and suffering caused by the floodings in Pakistan.
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The second is the need to pay attention to the root causes of wars and insecurity,
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rather than only focusing on the most visible effects or consequences.
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As I do in the book, an important dimension of contemporary conflict that has been marginalised in international legal
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debates concerns the unequal distribution of natural resources as drivers of violence and instability.
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So while legal norms and regulation have been developed to address greed as a motivation for starting and prolonging conflict,
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the complexities of grievances in countries in the Global South have not received the same level of attention by international lawyers.
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Third is regarding the distinction between negative and positive based.
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Well, negative peace, as in all means, simply the absence of direct and visible violence.
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The concept of positive peace requires something more.
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It demands to address the underlying causes of conflict, including poverty and marginalisation.
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You know what case it requires? That issues such as access to natural resources.
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Social inequality linked to resource extraction and environmental degradation are put forward in
efforts to build more peaceful societies.
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Rob Nixon and John Galton's theories are, in my view,
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as a starting point to investigate international engagement with what they call the ecology of war and peace.
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So let's say something about international law.
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International law, as a discipline and practice, has been concerned with violence and work since it's more than origin.
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And as decolonial and postcolonial scholars have indeed claimed, violence is foundation to international law.
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But humanity's relationship to nature has also been equally central to international lawmaking,
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as observed by SCOTUS, such as Natarajan, Mickelson and Julianne them.
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Yet only quite recently, the intersection of nature, violence and conflict has received attention in legal scholarship,
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becoming, over the years, a niche area of research and practice.
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So over the last couple of decades, a political debate on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict has emerged,
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driven by the need to fill gaps and clarify ambiguities in the international legal landscape.
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So some scholars, for instance, have examined how rules in principle in international environmental law or human rights law could be
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interpreted to ensure that conflict related environmental degradation or resource exploitation are addressed.
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The culmination of this debate has been the drafting by the International Law Commission
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of 27 principles on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict,
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which are expected to be adopted by the UN General Assembly this autumn.
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So while there is value, of course, in pushing political changes, the book takes a step back and moves beyond a mindset of problem solving.
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It impacts and problematise some of the assumptions about the environment, its relationship to conflict,
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underpinning legal debates and practices, and by moving across disciplinary boundaries and engaging with rich literature,
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international relations and political sciences,
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it aims to develop a better theoretical understanding of how international law deals with the ecology of war and peace.
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The installation of violent conflict and the natural world has been the object of extensive study by political ecologists, economists and scientists.
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A closer engagement with this literature, such as the literature in particular environmental security and the resource curse,
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the political economy of civil war and environmental peacebuilding is necessary to question the assumption that underlie international law.
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So my use of the term ecology is therefore not random.
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It's informed by discussion in other fields of study and signals.
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The value of taking a more holistic or systemic approach that considers the interrelations of environmental injustices,
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violent conflict and insecurity more generally.
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So in other words, an ecological approach is based upon what we might call relational thinking rather than silos thinking.
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A point which I will return in my conclusion. So since at least the 1980s,
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accumulating research in peace and conflict studies has sought to explain how environmental issues broadly understood may contribute to the outbreak,
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escalation, prolongation and even resolution of violent conflict.
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Recognition of these issues has grown over the years, and international efforts to manage them, including through international law, have risen.
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Ongoing debate, framing climate change as an international peace and security issue are a clear indication of this trend and
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of the importance of expanding our understanding of the ecological dimensions of contemporary conflict.
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It's also important to note that this literature is not monolithic.
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Different criticism of theories on environmental scarcity and abundance have emerged in recent years,
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challenging early studies and underlining their failure to address the broader political and economic dynamics at play.
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So, for instance, a literature on environmental security has been criticised for its excessive determinism,
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racial undertone and generalised conclusion.
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The researchers thesis put its emphasis on greed as the motivation for starting armed struggles and on local
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pathologies through the reference to the failed or the weak state series on the political economy of civil war.
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For the limited attention to the mechanism of a globalised economy and supply chain and environmental
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peacebuilding for the indirect support to liberal peace interventions in post-conflict countries.
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So rather than thinking of these theories as external to the discipline and practice of international law,
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my contention is that they have fed into the legal field shaping how the ecology of war and peace has been approached, discussed and addressed so far.
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Further, by privileging certain explanation of the nexus between environment and conflict, all the others,
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our own discipline has also contributed to a specific and arguably simplified understanding of this complex social realities.
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So what are the normative implication of adopting a certain frame to describe issues such as illegal resources,
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predation and environmental security over other?
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What perspectives are privileged and what get marginalised?
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And what may happen if we change the lens through which we re?
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The interrelation, ecology, war and peace.
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To answer this question in the book, I conduct a close analysis of the practice of three different institutions.
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So one chapter is on international courts and tribunals.
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And there I look at both the practice of criminal tribunals and International Court of Justice, the U.N. Security Council.
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And another chapter is on threat commissions in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Timor-Leste.
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So I'm well, I'm more than happy to elaborate more on the on the case studies in the Q&A.
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I would like to use the remainder of this presentation to summarise the key arguments and interventions on the book.
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And these are intentionally controversial and provocative in the sense that they hope to provoke your questions and reactions.
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So first, the book charts the different ideas of nature in rules governing war and the transition to peace,
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and reveals how these legal norms preserve nature as a public or private property and as an economic asset to be protected from the axis of war.
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So in the laws of war, the environment is treated as instrumental to other, more pragmatic goals associated with armed conflict.
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So ideas of nature as an object to be targeted or collateral damage in the
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pursuit of military advantage or as an economic asset to sustain the war effort,
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have shaped in scholarly debates and legal practices since the modern origins of the discipline,
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the way in which both and post World War Two tribunal dealt with scorched,
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scorched head practices and exploitation of natural resources in Nazi occupied territories
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confirms that the main concern was to establish legal accountability for candidates that,
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while degrading the environment,
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resulted in immediate harm to the enemy's property and the economic interests of the concerned countries or its economic capital.
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The vision of nature as a resource and commodity that needs to be protected against the
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threat posed by armed conflict is deeply entrenched in international law practices.
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In the Armed Activity Case and activities case.
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The ICJ, for instance,
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referred to the prohibition of pillage in the use in Belgium to proscribe illegal resource exploitation by the occupying state gander.
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Without considering the more subtle ways in which exploitation practices entail ecological degradation,
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loss of livelihoods and adverse social consequences.
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Likewise the use by the Security Council of Chapter seven measures to handle resource conflict and support good governance,
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intervention in post-conflict countries, focus on the economic dimension of resource extraction,
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and reveal a limited attention to questions of sustainability in countries emerging from conflict.
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More recently, the idea of nature as a victim of war has also emerged,
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and you can see that also in ongoing debates on the codification of the crime of ecocide.
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Yet even when framed as a victim,
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environmental degradation is acknowledged as a tragically unavoidable sacrifice in relation to the larger objectives of war.
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It's a constant casualty that that is not to say, of course,
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that concerns about environmental preservation and human well-being have been ignored in legal debates and practices.
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On the contrary,
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interpretative efforts to introduce environmental consideration into the laws of war have proliferated over the last couple of decades.
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Yet, as the nuclear weapons advisory opinion demonstrates, reconciling ecological sustainability and militarism making remains a difficult task.
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What there is by definition the negation of sustainable development and intergenerational equity.
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So while environmental principles and may mitigate the rationale underpinning the youth symbolism, they cannot transform it.
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So ultimately, international legal arguments struggle to reconcile the ethical justification
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for preserving nature with the pragmatic logic of warfare and militarism.
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Raising the question of whether they can ever be a reconciliation between the two logics.
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So second, my argument is that by embracing a simplified understanding of the relation between nature, violence and conflict,
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international legal discussions and practices jeopardise the prospect of
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creating more peaceful societies while perpetuating deeply rooted inequalities.
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Whereas the field of peace and conflict studies incorporates different theories which are constantly subject to critical scrutiny and redefinition.
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Two ideas have become quite popular in international law, resulting in a variety of policy and normative initiatives.
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So one is the idea that resource abundance in the Global South may have a negative impact on the quality of institution,
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economic performance, and the motives for starting or prolonging armed rebellion.
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This is also known as the paradox of Plenty or the resource curse.
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So the great thesis in particular emphasised emphasises the desire of rebel groups and warlords
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to enrich themselves through the exploitation of valuable commodities such as diamonds,
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mineral oil, and pave the way to the adoption of commodity and targeting section by the U.N. Security Council.
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For instance, in countries and in conflict, like in Sierra Leone, in Liberia and Angola, and also resulted in the development of governance,
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regime regulating trade in resource commodities, for instance, the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative.
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So the book questions the assumptions implicit in these normative measures,
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notably the idea behind sanctions that once the promise for economic gain is reduced, the conflict will somehow die out.
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So unfortunately, as research has showed, that's not always the case.
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And moreover, as scholars like Michael Bevis has argued, by failing to consider how marginalisation and inequality in resource,
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access and distribution are also part of the stories of this conflict.
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This normative intervention may lead to the revival of all grievances or create new ones.
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So in other words, to go back to you and Galton.
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Without confronting this knowing, structural ecological violence involved in this complex piece is more fragile.
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So the opposite has also been successfully discussed.
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But he argued that scarcity of natural resources, such as fresh water and croplands, can generate political instability in fragile countries.
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So against this background, the argument that climate change may increase risk and vulnerability and pose a threat
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to national human and collective security is gaining traction in policy circles.
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Concerns about climate security have also progressively fed into international law debates.
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So while scholars have showed that a broader interpretation of the Security Council mandate may
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legitimise the adoption of measures dealing with the peace and security effects of climate change,
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the issue remains highly controversial, as exemplified by the different position of developing countries,
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presents the Group 77, as opposed to small island developing states.
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So my research finds how the limitations of existing conceptual and legal frameworks underpinning the practice of the UN Security Council.
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It builds upon a feminist and political ecologist perspective to suggest that we may
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need to rethink what peace and security means mean in times of ecological disruptions.
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So when confronted with the violence of climate change, legal notions of peace and security must evolve beyond traditional militaristic security
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interests and include ecological sustainability and questions of redistribution.
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So moving forward, more research is needed to further interrogate certain ideas and assumptions that have
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dominated academic debates and shape international legal practices in this area.
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In doing so, we may turn to the field of political ecology for some insights.
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Political ecology is an interdisciplinary field of study, including anthropologists, geographers and sociologists.
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With a rich research tradition that dates back at least to the 1980s.
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Well, of course it would be impossible to convey the diversity of this field.
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In concluding, I wont outline
how a political ecological approach may open new lines of inquiry
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into the role of international law in times of raising authoritarianism,
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militarism and social ecological disruptions.
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So at this point, to be noted, is that political ecology would resist the urge to assign power of concession to the environment
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while maintaining that the effects of ecological problems being environmental degradation,
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pollution, deforestation, climate change are always mediated by social factors.
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So as Nancy Peluso and Michael Woods point out in Violent Environments,
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the book that gives the title to this presentation, Conflicts or Struggles or the Natural.
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He says this cannot be understood without considering the structural dimension of uneven power relations.
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Such relations are made of local and global linkages.
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Therefore, rather than blaming local actors for local dysfunctions being corruption or my governance,
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the more useful move would be to trace the broader political economic dynamics involved in the making of the conflict,
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as well as to interrogate the role of international law and law in general,
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in the commodification of the natural world and in supporting global extractivism.
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In contrast with the depoliticised concept of environmental scarcity or abundance as drivers of conflict,
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a political ecological approach would emphasise the politicisation of the environmental conflicts.
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So research in the field of political ecology points out that costs and benefits associated with environmental changes are,
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for the most part, distributed among actors unequally, which reinforces the existing social and economic inequalities.
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So his argument, for instance, in these days has been made by Indigenous people and in global south countries during the course of 27.
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So a political ecology perspective invites us to pay attention to historical processes
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of environmental degradation and resist dispossession to the legacies of colonialism,
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specialisation and gender discrimination in shaping the current order and arguably
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to shaping the current legal order further in line with other critical traditions.
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It also invites to reconceptualize justice, international justice in broader terms as involving corrective,
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procedural, distributive and social components.
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So I would suggest that opposing the determinism of certain literature and resisting
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the appeal of grand theories on the environment conflict nexus is empowering.
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If we agree that environmental factors do not unleash disorder or harmony in societies,
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but rather it is the institution that we create and the decision we make to determine the consequences for ongoing conflict and peace processes.
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Then, a new audit horizon of possibilities open up for our field law and in particular,
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international law is part of such institutions and thus can play a role in realising a more just and peaceful world.
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What can be part of the problem? By ignoring complexity and reproducing troubling assumptions.
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So by arguing for an ecological relational approach.
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And by exploiting the limitations of silos, thinking so between issues, between disciplines and also within international norms.
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The book ultimately urges international legal scholars to reflect on the implication of defining
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the problem in certain terms and the possibilities associated with its critical description.
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To use an expression borrowed from Sandy apologia and I want to emphasise that theory and practice go hand-in-hand in this endeavour.
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Although the relationship between the two can be dialectical.
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So as put by Gerard School in his book Savage Ecology, and I'm quoting, ideas matter even if they cannot save us.
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Stories, explanations and philosophical adventures optimise the mission the best of what the human estate has to offer.
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No matter how desperate things get, someone will still ask why this is happening,
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and we still will share in that question the possibility of thinking together.
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Thank you very much for your attention.