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