Irregular Ecologies: The Environmental Impact of Unconventional Warfare
Workshop – Florianopolis, Brazil
20.07.2019 – 21.07.2019
Conveners: Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich) and Javier Puente (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Warfare seldom affects humans alone. While inflicting devastating effects on societies, armed conflicts also shape economic, cultural, sociopolitical, and ecological transformations. As violence territorializes, armed conflicts begin to affect the ecologies and livelihoods that once sustained them. Environmental transformation thus emerges as an inextricable correlate of human conflict. With the dawn of the Cold War, the environmental impacts of human conflict unfolded alongside the same geopolitical trends that engulfed the Global South. Decolonizing movements, guerrilla warfare, rural insurrections, and other forms of intrastate conflict developed from within ecologically fragile areas and eco-sensitive zones, including savannahs, valleys, watersheds, islands, mangroves, forests, plateaus, and jungles. Over the years, emerging and consolidated republics such as Ethiopia, Colombia, the DRC, Vietnam, Peru, Liberia, Mexico, Myanmar, the Philippines, Nepal, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, among others, have become gruesome epicenters of armed conflict in sensitive ecosystems and precarious agrarian landscapes.
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) and the Armed Conflict and Environment Research Network (ACERN) invite paper proposals for a two-day workshop focused on the interaction between guerilla warfare and social and environmental transformations in the Global South, with a special focus on the last three decades. We invite papers on questions that include, but are not limited to, the following: