Notes from a PhD. Peace beyond boundaries: Catalysing cooperation between warring countries through conservation?

The political process underpinning environmental peacebuilding is a fascinating one (read my earlier post for more on EPB). At its core it attempts to turn on its head the accepted view that environmental stresses (diminishing arable farmland, reducing freshwater etc) will lead inexorably to forced migration, poverty, instability and, ultimately, violent conflict and resource wars (mainly, of course, in the developing world). This view has seeped into the international security debate at the highest levels – in 2007 climate change was discussed within this narrative at the UN Security Council, and has since developed into a dangerously militarised ‘environmental security’ discourse.

However, this view fails to demonstrate how environmental degradation and rivalry over shared natural resources might actually lead to cooperation over its conservation, by mitigating pollution or stresses for the states affected. The cooperation built from this can then be utilised as an entry point into peace negotiations between conflicting states as habits of collaboration, increase in trust, and decrease in mutual suspicion spill over into greater regional unity in wider political arenas outside of conservation.

For instance: the countries involved in my case study are Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Rwanda;  three states that have, largely as a consequence of British and Belgian colonial-era policies, been kicking lumps out of each other pretty much since independence in the mid-20th Century. The Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC) is a transboundary conservation programme, created in 2006/7: a single, huge, unified park that crosses the borders of the three countries, managed by a sole authority supported and funded by the governments of the three partner states. And the conservation goal at the heart of the GVTC? Saving and supporting the last remaining community of mountain gorillas in the world.

That environmental peacebuilding has saved the mountain gorilla from extinction, and seen its numbers increase exponentially, is clear (from near extinction in 1980s to 1000 in the 2019 census). 

What is less clear, however, is whether the political process at the heart of environmental peacebuilding in the region has led to greater cooperation, increased levels of trust, and decreasing levels of suspicion in other regional political arenas. Events of the last decade suggest not.

Why might this be the case? Why hasn’t the successful cooperation and collaboration between those three nation states over a localised conservation programme not translated to further regional political cooperation in other arenas?

Critics of environmental peacebuilding point to the obligation that successful transboundary conservation in a conflict area necessarily depoliticises an issue, rendering stresses and solutions purely at technical levels – in this case, anti-poaching measures, improved gorilla monitoring, greater communication between rangers, best-practice sharing – and removes the political issues at the heart of the conflict. Indeed, this reflects the view that cooperation over environmental stresses obliges states to introduce engineers and scientists to address conservation issues, professions bound by international cooperation, that often exist outside of and unaffected by political conflicts of their governments.

(It also lends weight to my increasingly-held belief that people all over the world just want to get on with each other and live quiet, happy lives, and it’s politicians that fuck everything up!)

This ‘depoliticisation’ of a conflict, the introduction of technical cooperation at the expense of the political, might well see success in its conservation aims. But by failing to address the source of the political conflict, any high-level collaboration will likely flounder outside of those strict technical boundaries (see the wonderful Good Water Neighbours project, a freshwater conservation programme in the river Jordan basement between Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian communities).

Informal cooperation between the three countries over gorilla conservation in the region began in 1991, funded by western-backed NGOs, bringing together staff of the contiguous national parks on either side of the border where the gorillas roamed. In 2005, the governments of the three partner states signed a joint declaration on conservation, confirming high-level political support for the aims of the GVTC.

Using this case study and the environmental peacebuilding political process – catalysing transboundary conservation as an entry point to peace (in its broadest sense) – my research focusses on the exact moment that low-level informal cooperation created and maintained by the IGCP led to high-level formal political cooperation between the three partner-state governments in such a region of violence and conflict:

- How do different organisations and institutions that have different objectives and policies cooperate over diminishing shared ecological resources?

- How does political cooperation emerge from a common technical behaviour and language that depoliticises a region?

- How do the ahistorical effects of technical cooperation around conservation of a shared ecological resource escalate to political cooperation?

Basically, environmental peacebuilding in the Virunga Massif has led to successful localised transboundary cooperation and conservation efforts in a region torn by decades of conflict. But has that cooperation led to greater political cooperation between the three states, and led further to greater levels of peace in the region? If not, why? And what lessons can we learn from this case study that can be used for further international peacebuilding and conservation efforts.

And, crucially, can environmental peacebuilding really help prevent future dystopian resource wars as, and here’s the terrifying rub, climate change begins to destroy our system-supporting resources?

Here's where I come in...

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.