Notes from a PhD: Why Environmental Peacebuilding?

Why study a PhD, and why environmental peacebuilding? 

This is hopefully the first in the series of occasional blog posts based around my PhD at Lancaster University's Environment Centre. They are written more for myself, as good training to set down and articulate my thoughts on current reading and research investigation, and using accessible, informal (normal) language rather than bleak academia.  

This first post is simply why I decided on a PhD, why specifically a PhD exploring environmental peacebuilding and resource security, and why I think it’s important enough to dedicate the next 3 years of my life (at least) to it.  

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Jacques Derrida. French.

Jacques Derrida was a 20th Century French theorist who wrote about the creative potential borne of an interchange of events - any play that occurs between different entities or systems - when discussing the creation of ideas or language. He was interested in how ideas emerge from encounters with difference or strangeness, and how the germs of those ideas might develop into forward action. He asked what comes next to the person to who this process happens, how they might ‘make way’ for any ideas that are forthcoming or ‘incoming’ from possibly beyond our usual circle of experience and familiarity. These changes, he said, are triggered by incoming elements and disruptive movements.  

He termed this incoming an ‘event’. This event, says Derrida, is set in motion by something that calls upon and addresses us, overtakes or surprises and even maybe overwhelms us, to which we must respond, and so be responsive and responsible: ‘A sort of animal movement seeks to appropriate what always come from, always, from an external provocation’. When discussing research, particularly a PhD research project, it’s an interesting thought experiment to explore from what elements, what ‘external provocation', the event that leads to the research emerged.   

  

Derrida places emphasis on changes that are triggered by incoming elements, in a reality that is constantly in motion and ceaselessly self-transforming; what the world does, rather than what it is. He also noticed that these incoming elements are rarely a singular event, but a weave of circumstances in which our own position as the researcher, or observer, and our reaction to them, is simply one element of the mix, rather than the main overriding focus; our appearance in the weave of elements is a force as central, no more or no less, to every other element that leads to an event. We all have that event, that combination of elements that just happened to weave together at a particular time in a particular place and leads us to develop an idea on which our research is now building. The weave of elements that led to my PhD came due to an already-existing academic interest in the global warming regime (undergrad), 15 years in frontline politics, in antifascist, refugee and environmental organising, the 2015 so-called refugee crisis, and...  

Photo from DW.com (https://www.dw.com)

One cold winter afternoon in Berlin in 2016 I stood with a small group of fellow antifascists, squaring up to about 3000 right-wing anti-immigrant arseholes as they marched through the city’s Government quarter, chanting ‘We are the people’ and ‘Merkel must go!’. These scumbags were protesting the arrival of refugees from the MENA (Middle East and north Africa) region, but who were mostly Syrians escaping the civil war.  

In 2015 we watched masses of desperate people fleeing the violence and chaos of their home countries, seeking refuge within Europe’s safe borders. Europe’s political institutions were ill-prepared for this wave of refugees, seemingly wrong-footed by the scale of arrivals. The total breakdown of care was such that European governments allowed people in their country to live in squalid camps set up around where refugees landed, or at the borders they were trying to cross, or were forced to beg or steal to survive. It was left largely to charities, humanitarian groups and volunteers to pick up the slack, to provide basic care and provisions, and to fish people and bodies out of the Mediterranean Sea. 

Farage. Arsehole.

At the same time we watched in horror at how far-right politicians exploited these enforced conditions, whipped up the threat and exploited the fear of immigration for political gain, from UKIP in the UK to the Le Front Nationale in France, and in Germany, with the meteoric rise of the anti-immigrant, Islamophobic Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). In one way or another, the electoral cudgel of immigration can be identified in the Brexit mess, and has given strength to the far-right agendas of the likes of Boris Johnson, Farage, Orban, Salvini, Trump, Erdoğan and other spectacular dicks. This some way is a response to western political institutions failing so ineptly to manage the humanitarian crisis on our doorstep. 

As I stood in Berlin, watching 3000 faces screwed up in anger and spitting hate against people with dark skin and funny accents escaping war and violence, I thought, this is just the start.  

Diagram from the good people at Climate Migration
 http://climatemigration.org.uk)

As climate change condemns more vulnerable communities and countries to system-supporting resource scarcity; as fresh water shortages become more critical; as arable land becomes less fertile and crops fail; as sea rises begin to engulf lower-lying regions; as conflicts become greater and more severe due to diminishing resources; and as extreme weather brings with it drought and disease, the rush of forcibly-displaced people seeking safety in Europe and developed-world countries is sure to increase exponentially.  

What has been happening since 2015 isn’t going to go away. Climate change will get worse. 2015 isn’t an anomaly; it is the beginning. We in the wealthy developed world had best get used to it, instead of doing nothing and hoping it will all just go away. It won’t. If we continue to do nothing, more people will be turned into (climate) refugees, the camps will grow, more people will drown, and the far-right will get stronger. And then we all lose. 

Although there is academic disagreement between a few of the links below (there is disputed current evidence for step 3, for example, and there is no inevitability of the link between steps 5 and 6 if European governments provide political and institutional solutions) my thought process goes like this: 

1) Climate change worsens >> 2) system-supporting resource loss >> 3) violent conflict over diminishing system-supporting resources in vulnerable countries >> 4) forced displacement of people fleeing violence >>5) mass migration to Europe >> 6) far-right and fascism grows across Europe. 

Well-meaning campaigns from environmental, refugee and antifascist NGOs (that I spent 15 years working for) can only offer sticking plasters to this sequence. It has to be dealt with at step 1, at the source. Only a massive, sustained and well-financed effort from the developed world with the aim of tackling climate change right now can halt the sequence above. But as the world is run by political dwarves and pygmies, this is as unlikely as it sounds.  Without that effort, political action from countries can only really deal with step 6, can only address what is happening within their borders.  

So, we must accept that climate change will happen (indeed, is happening).  

(Which is, in itself, an existential crisis. Throughout history there has always been hope that things will get better. If you live under a sadistic king – he will die; an authoritarian regime – all regimes crumble eventually; an occupation – the occupying force will leave or be chased out. But I think this is the first time in human history that we can categorically say that things will only get worse!) 

We cannot (will not) prevent the ecological collapse – addressing step 1 is out. It's a question now of slowing it or preventing a warming of over 2oC and the devastating, irreversible consequences that follow such a rise. 

So, onto step 2 and 3. The received wisdom is that the depletion of system-supporting resources (fresh water, arable land etc) will lead to or accelerate violent conflict between resource users. However, if we can somehow improve efforts of system-supporting resource conservation so that it doesn’t become a source of resource conflict in the first place, then we will go some way to preventing a major cause of the forced displacement of people, whether seeking areas with better resource access, or fleeing from violent resource conflict. Even better, if that shared resource can somehow be catalysed as a peacebuilding platform, a conservation process around which two (potentially) conflicting countries can unite, then the conservation of that resource has the potential to become a source of both human and resource security. 

For example, if two conflicting countries share a body of fresh water that they both rely on for agriculture, sanitation or as drinking water, it is in both countries’ interests that that water isn’t polluted. Pollution doesn’t care about borders: if one country pollutes the water and renders it unusable, that pollution will cross the border and the water will be unusable for both countries. Even at a very technical, scientific level, both countries are forced to cooperate in order to protect and conserve their shared resource. The ‘spill-over’ effects (lower levels of suspicion, higher levels of trust and familiarity, increased norms of working together), so the theory goes, is that local communities from both countries will be brought into the conservation efforts, which will bring in local, municipal or regional political interests, and so on, rippling up the political and societal ladder.  

This initial process has then potentially acted as an entry point into peace negotiations between the conflicting countries; the resource has been a catalyst towards peace (human security) and cooperation around conservation (resource security). 

Israeli and Palestinian communities working together
to conserve freshwater in the diminishing Jordan
Valley basement (photo from FoE Middle East)

In the shadow of climate change, environmental peacebuilding has the potential to become a virtuous circle of security in countries and communities vulnerable to climate shocks. Utilising a shared transboundary system-supporting resource as a source of cooperation could potentially move a situation from one of conflict to one of peace, establishing greater human security (stopping people getting killed). The spill-over effects of such cooperation could lead to greater resource conservation (resource security), which could lead to greater political cooperation (human security), towards greater environmental cooperation (resource security) and so on.  

Environmental peacebuilding reflects the frustration with the limitations of traditional environmental security (that conflict will erupt around resource scarcity), which fails to demonstrate how environmental degradation and rivalry over natural resources might not automatically lead to conflict. The ‘environmental peace perspective’ has the potential to exploit shared ecological challenges to instead stimulate peace and cooperation. It seeks to place socially just forms of natural resource conservation at the heart of conflict prevention, utilising a shared natural resource to move a situation from conflict towards peace, while also potentially conserving the resource for equal distribution and management. 

In the next blogpost I’ll talk more fully about the processes and theory of environmental peacebuilding. 

As people are often keen to point out (including my PhD supervisors!), this may all sound hopelessly naïve, but if developed into general international peacebuilding policy I see the potential of environmental peacebuilding as a speck of light in the descending climate darkness: waging peace, preserving life, preventing conflict, halting forced migration, preventing the creation of refugees, giving fascists one less excuse - it’s something worth dedicating my time to.