Environmental Degradation and Genocide
Publisher: Genocide Studies and Prevention
Author(s): Emily Sample and Henry Theriault
Date: 2022
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Conflict Prevention, Disasters, Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Gender, Governance, Land, Renewable Resources
Countries: Angola, Armenia, Colombia, Congo (DRC), Cyprus, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India
In January 2021, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and Genocide Studies and Prevention journal hosted three panels on Environmental Degradation, Climate Change, and Mass Violence. Each one showcased a specific intersection within this nexus: Indigenous issues, gender, and ecocide. This special issue emerges from this series of panels as a means for many of those speakers to explore their cases and arguments in greater depth, and for a broader audience. As the effects of anthropogenic climate change become more accepted, evident, and widespread, many fields of conflict research and practice, including our own, must shift to include this new reality. This special issue offers an opportunity to invite additional scholars into the discussion which began through the three panels, and to disseminate research or a yet wider set of issues. The diversity of topics and approaches in the following pages, as well as the insightfulness and relevance of each article, provide a broad foundation and set of models for subsequent scholarship in this overarching area. The pressing need for sustained focus and discourse on the challenge of climate change for human rights and peace make the ideas and cases presented here of immediate concern to all scholars of genocide and, indeed, all human beings.