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. 

Patriarchy

MISS NAN KNOCKABOUT wouldn’t wash her face, and everybody thought it was a real disgrace. But Nanny K don’t give a crap. Well-behaved women seldom make history.

On Approach to Beijing

ENGINE NO. 4 of the Moscow State Railway Company steamed across the barren open vastness of Siberia in imperial splendour, powering south to the Mongolia-China border. Thousands of miles of isolated tracks lay ahead and behind, stretching through the endless nothing like two long lines of footprints through a vast minefield, picking out the safest and quickest route across the emptiness, for empires to follow.

Nestled in one of the first class carriages, three down from the heaving, sweating engine, Jan and Peter drained their fine cocktails and nodded to the barman for another round. The barman deftly delivered two more to the table - white Russian for him, vodka martini for her. Jan sat back, drink clutched in her hand. She was enjoying herself immensely. Slightly tipsy from her third cocktail of the evening, she was excited about reaching Beijing in a few days time.

The train carriage rocked gently as the great steppes of southern Mongolia sped by the window. The past two weeks had been simply unparalleled, from the trans-Western Europe train odyssey from Bristol to Moscow, to the Trans-Mongolian Express from Moscow to Beijing: Bristol-London-Brussels-Cologne-Warsaw-Moscow; a few days in the Russian capital, a few in Irkutsk and a couple in Ulan Bator, finally to Beijing, and not a good few days and nights on the train itself, steaming across the most beautiful and breathtaking lands Jan had ever seen.

Best. 60th. Birthday. Present. Ever.

Very soon they would be thundering across the border into China. And just two days later they would be arriving in Beijing, the sprawling and congested capital city of the country that had many years ago wrapped its beautiful, maddening, enigmatic cloak around her, and in the warm embrace of which she continued, even after a 17 year absence, to long for. Beijing was to be the conclusion to a most wonderful story, a Catherine Wheel full-stop to a neon-lit paragraph.

Only a few miles from now, just crossing the border would be a return; an East Asian recharge to her Western soul. And even though the unworldly expanses flitting past her window were unlikely to change much, at first, just knowing that she was back on Chinese soil was enough to make flutter the bright butterflies in her stomach.

Then outside went dark, as the train plundered into the cross-border tunnel. The next time they see daylight, Jan thought, happily, they will be on Chinese soil and it will be Chinese daylight, on Chinese time.

She grinned at her husband, who grinned back. They clinked their cocktails together, drinking to Beijing. Oh yes, Jan was having a fine time.

Twenty minutes later, after pouring through the dark, deep tunnel, as the last of the vodka martini drained from her glass and they started eyeing up the barman for another round, they burst out of the gloom into dull sunlight.

Jan peered wide-eyed out of the window for her first view of China after 17 years. The view that greeted her, though, was odd. Streaming past outside in the overcast afternoon ran an endless dirty grassy bank, littered with discarded plastic bags and drinks cans, as ragged bits of newspaper fluttered from straggly bushes and bent trees.

Suddenly, with a stammer that threw her forward against her table, the train started to slow as the brakes screeched on the line. She looked questioningly from the window at Peter, who was nonchalantly packing his book and reading glasses into his bag. Her fellow travellers were similarly packing their belongings away and throwing on coats. The barman rattled down the shutters on the bar and slipped away.

The train slowed to a halt beside the station platform. Looming large in Jan’s window was the dirty yellow and black station sign, with the train company’s omnipotent ‘M’ logo crouching on it like an angry insect. Jan’s mouth fell open. She tore her eyes away from the sign, stared suspiciously at her empty cocktail glass, then around the carriage at her fellow travellers, then back at sign. She peered closer, unbelieving.

‘Birkenhead... North?!’

The train intercom fizzled to life: ‘Thank you for travelling with Merseyrail,’ it Scoused. ‘Change here for trains to Liverpool, West Kirby, Chester and New Brighton. Birkenhead North is our last stop. All change, please. All change.’

Peter slung his bag over his shoulder and headed towards the exit, chatting amiably to the other passengers.

A cavernous, empty silence replaced the low hum of the train engine as, one by one, the carriage lights began to flick off.

Lovely Man

LOVELY MAN STOOD stooped in the kitchen, putting away the last of the clean plates, when a sharp movement in the garden caught his eye. He grimaced.

The two neighbourhood cats, his nemesis, had darted into the garden and were now standing together, staring back the way they had come, quite purposefully, on the soft soil. Correction, his soft soil, in his garden. The corner of his mouth curled upwards in a shadow of a smile.

He gently stepped out of the back door and quietly picked up the nozzle of the garden hose. Tiptoeing, out of sight of the cats, to the side of the garden shed, he peered around. The mangey things were now sunning themselves in the Spring warmth, in his garden, not ten feet away.

Perfect.

Using a starting car engine as cover, he aimed the nozzle at the cats and turned on. A powerful jet of cold water sprang out of the hose and arched towards the dozing cats, hitting the fluffy white one on the side of the head. In a satisfying scrabble of soil and fur, the cats like lightening disappeared up over the wall.

Lovely Man chuckled contentedly, returned the hose to its holder, stepped back into the kitchen and switched on the kettle for a nice cup of herbal tea.

A week later

Meowington cradled his left arm, trying to stem the bleeding, shaking uncontrollably from the attack. Seconds later Mr Tibbs came haring over the rough, wooden fence and flew under the car, skidding to a stop just before careering into his friend. He turned immediately and peered back out, waiting for Tinkerbell to come marauding and snarling after them.

‘Bloody hell’, he breathed. ‘That was close.’

‘Close?!’ Meowington held out his unharmed paw, saturated in his own blood seeping from the deep gash in his right shoulder.

‘Yeah, close. You know what she can do, man. We were lucky.’

Mr Tibbs kept sentry while Meowington licked his wound fervently, eyes never moving from the fence they had bound over, watching and waiting. But the seconds turned into minutes, without further danger.

‘OK’, he said, catching his breath at last. ‘I think we’ve lost her for now. Come on, let’s get to 119.’

‘119?’, Meowington snarled. ‘Christ. You really think we’ll be safe there?’.

‘Tinkerbell won’t follow us there. She won’t come, I’ve told you. They say that that’s where she grew up, where she was born, years ago. She won’t go near the garden. They say it’s where her dad battered her into...well, into what she is now.’

‘What, a fucked-in-the-head maniac! But 119? What about Lovely Man? You know what that bastard does to the likes of us.’

‘I know. We’ll just have to be really quiet.

Meowington looked unconvinced. ‘Look’, continued Mr. Tibbs, impatiently. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We can’t stay here. We’re too exposed. Next time it won’t be just your arm Tinkerbell will try to rip off.’

Meowington stared gloomily at the floor. ‘So it’s come to this. Choosing between a cold-blooded killer who murders for shits and giggles, or a human sadist who just blind hates us and wants us dead.’

Mr Tibbs sniffed. ‘Well, you do crap in his soil, to be fair. And you go after his birds.’

Meowington threw his good arm into the air. ‘Christ almighty, I’m a friggin’ cat!

‘I know. Sorry. Look, number 119’s garden is the only sanctuary we have. You know Tinkerbell won’t stop until she rips you and me apart. We set her up. You think she’s ever going to forget that she did time because of us? Time at the vets?’’

As if in confirmation, a terrible, mewling howl erupted from nearby; a piercing caterwaul of promised violence and endless suffering, like the banshee scream of a plummeting bomb.  

‘Christ, I wish I had thumbs. Then I could throttle the fluffy bitch!’

‘Tibbs’, said Meowington, looking Mr. Tibbs square in the eyes. ‘Why don’t we just keep going? Let’s not go to 119 and have fucking water sprayed at us again. Let’s just leave.’

Mr. Tibbs’ eyes widened in astonishment. ’You mean’, he whispered, incredulously, ‘leave the neighbourhood. Are you out of you tiny cat mind?’

’Mate’, replied Meowington, eyes narrowing. ‘We’re trapped between a rock and a hard place here. And when you’re trapped between a rock and a hard place, you fuck them both off and do one! How much money have you got?’

Mr. Tibbs routed around the folds of his fur. ‘Not much. About 20 quid.’

‘OK, I’ve got the same. 40 quid will get two cats a long, long way from here. Let’s just keep going, and never come back here.’

Mr. Tibbs’ eyes welled, but he nodded. He loved Meowington so much, but his dream of them settling down and adopting some kittens together, and finding a garden to call home, seemed more distant than ever. He loved Meowington, and would do anything to make them work. But Meowington was right. There was just nothing else left to do.  

Together they darted out from under the car, Meowington limping on three legs, a brush of engine oil colouring the tip of Mr Tibbs’ soft, white coat, heading in the opposite direction to the wooden fence over which they had just escaped.

Concerning the Sighting of the Red-Throated Needletail Hawk

IN ONE LONG, graceful arc, the hawk swooped down from its perch at the top of a tall oak tree, gripped Janice tightly by the shoulders, closing its talons like a vice and, with a powerful beat of its wings, lifted her clean away. As the hawk climbed higher with Peter's bait clasped in its claws, he clicked and clicked his new Canon SX 50 digital camera, noting excitedly the vivid dash of brilliant red on the hawk’s throat and chest that confirmed two things: firstly its rarified breed, not often spotted in the UK, and secondly that he was now surely odds-on favourite to win the 2014 Extreme Birding in Bristol photo competition. He allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction, slung the leather strap of the Canon over his shoulder, and headed back to his car for a nice cup of ginseng tea.