The nature of peace: trajectories of environmental peacebuilding between dominant narratives and power relations

Peacebuilding initiatives play an important role in the reconstruction of political, economic, and social conditions after internal armed conflicts. If these initiatives also account for environmental aspects, they have the potential to address both ecological damages and resource-related conflict causes. The sprawling literature on environmental peacebuilding therefore stresses the need for a holistic perspective to study conditions for sustainable peace. Recent scholarly work has directed attention to peace trajectories that draw connections between political, socioeconomic, and environmental dimensions of peacebuilding processes. We contribute to this growing research field by synthesizing key findings from the inter-disciplinary research program the “Nature of Peace” and related studies. Our goal is to identify, explain, and understand the trajectories that environmental peacebuilding processes may take in societies after an internal armed conflict. We first introduce the theory-based analytical framework that guided our studies. Based on this, we study trajectories that lead from the integration of environmental concerns in peacebuilding efforts to environmental and social consequences of these efforts and to chances for sustainable peace. We apply this framework to a range of geographical contexts, drawing, inter alia, on Colombia since the signing of the peace agreement in 2016, and environmental peacebuilding efforts in Uganda since 2002. We find that both constellations of power and dominant narratives considerably shape the routes that environmental peacebuilding may take. In particular, dominant nature-neglecting, instrumentalizing, and extractivist narratives have far-reaching impacts on the trajectory of peace processes. This is not only with regard to their environmental implications, e.g., deforestation and biodiversity loss, but also social consequences, e.g., threats to livelihoods of vulnerable communities, and, ultimately, old and new forms of physical, structural, and cultural violence. Thus, although addressing power asymmetries remains an important step for environmental peacebuilding, it is essential to counter narratives that instrumentalize nature to open new alleys for sustainable peace.