On July 28, 2022 the United Nations General Assembly declared that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. This volume explores and accounts for the primary vector of violence degrading this purported human right: environmental violence. Environmental violence is harm due to excess pollution put into the earth system through human activities and processes. Environmental violence is not the only mode of framing the myriad ills facing humanity and the planet, but as a tool it is designed to map, trace, and draw out the multitude of potential and realized pathways of harm from environmental hazards framed in the antecedent conditions and impact-mediating contexts that are integral parts of the whole of the violence facing humanity and the planet. The global metabolism for material and energy shows no signs of abating and the possibility of relying on decoupling consumption from material use and emissions shows no sign of materializing in a sufficient way to avoid ecological catastrophe. To drawdown emissions and regenerate biotic and abiotic communities are likely the orders of the day, and this volume proposes the environmental violence framework as a tool to help us get there.

This chapter investigates how both direct and structural violence unfold in concrete situations. Analyzing examples from Palestine, I show how structural violence is enacted in concrete situations of domination and, building on empirical research from the Arab Uprisings, I develop a micro-sociological model for direct violence. The chapter shows how violence is difficult because it goes against the human tendency to become attuned and fall into each other’s bodily rhythms. Hence, violence usually happens from afar or when a victim is dominated. Once violence is initiated, however, it attains its own rhythm and momentum, making it difficult not to respond to an attack with another attack. The chapter further discusses how violent situations are not only shaped by inter-bodily dynamics but also by embodied habitus, emotional energy, and material availability. Coupling this with insights regarding micro-interactions of violence, I develop a micro-sociological model of violent situations.

This chapter develops an analytically functional concept of EV and begins to identify its sources, pathways, and outlets into the global ecosystem and everyday life. The chapter then expands on the core concepts of Earth Systems theory, complex adaptive systems and human niche construction to address topics such as vulnerability and violence, especially cultural, structural, and direct violence. The next step will be to build and parse a heuristic model that conveys the range of the concept’s applications and traces EV’s production, pathways, mediators, and outlets, as well as its facilitators and effects throughout its cycling. Next, the chapter examines previously developed and related concepts of ecologically associated violence. The purpose of this is not to take issue with them, but rather to synthesize and build upon previous iterations. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the nuances and politics of EV. These ideas will be developed further in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, a brief presentation is useful here because it helps to understand how EV has become normalized and ingrained in the everyday life of the contemporary human niche.

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the book. It sets the scene by providing fundamental background information on the issues explored in the book. It then situates the present study within the existing literature. In so doing, it identifies the novel research questions, methodology, and contribution to debates in international law and beyond. It introduces key concepts that will be further discussed in the book, notably the idea of ‘new wars’ and its relationship to the environment. Further, it outlines two theories that provide the foundations and inform the critique developed in the book. The first is Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and the second is the notion of structural violence, taken from Johan Galtung and adapted to the present issues. Lastly, it offers an overview of arguments made in subsequent chapters.

This chapter’s ethnography of the “quality of life” West Bank development/settlement of Alfei Menashe describes the structural realities and security schematic narrative lens through which this Jewish Israeli audience filtered “the conflict” and understood the series. They are viewed from outside by stateless-nation Palestinians as living behind the “Wall Enclave” and by state-minority Arab/Palestinian Israelis as a “settlement” (most Jewish Israelis regard it as a “consensus settlement”). Alfei provides its children the greatest opportunity for contact with Palestinians, which the separation barrier has all but eliminated for Israelis. Neither interpersonal contact with Palestinian day laborers who build and clean their homes and playgrounds, nor imagined contact influenced their readings of the text. From secondary conversations, news media portrayals, and artifacts like the barrier constructed to maintain the secured existence of Israel, they learn Palestinians are those who commit terror. Via a binary logic, anyone allowed into Israel (or Sesame Street) is not Palestinian. Fearing harm, a majority erased Palestinian characters. These processes, not Sesame Street, were overwhelmingly socializing them, leading them to oppose the series’ attempt to communicate peace. They normalized and reproduced “the conflict,” assuming defensive play patterns; for them, the resolution is “evicting, killing or imprisoning” Palestinians.

Explores the emerging subdiscipline of Peace Communication (PeaceComm), beginning with a discussion about the history of the practice, and the author’s ongoing quest to introduce a subdiscipline, dedicated to assessing and evaluating the critical efficacy of the practice. A methodological template for comparative global assessment and evaluation is offered, stressing the need to prioritize political conflict data and conflict zones-based context analyses, given that political conflict is caused by collective grievances related to “group”-level disadvantages and perceived disadvantages, not individual prejudice. The template is operationalized through the assessment of Sesame Street interventions into the Israeli Palestinian ethnopolitical nationalist conflict, drawn from field work in 2001, 2004-2006, and 2011. Best practices and other interdisciplinary contributions for practitioners are recommended, to understand conflict intractability where socialization, culture, and inter-“group” (mediated and interpersonal) communication intersect in glocalized conflict zone contexts, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically. The interventions targeted children, who comprise the majority within conflict zones. The model used, mediated contact effects, is one of seven models and six subtypes of PeaceComm practiced historically worldwide the author has previously categorized, and is one of those most in need of PeaceComm scholarship, with potential to succeed but scarce evidence collected about its efficacy.

This chapter examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s to the 1990s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.

From its inception, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (better known as the Khmer Rouge) emerged as one of the most violent and brutal apparatus of state terror and murder since the Nazi party held power in Germany. Between April 1975 and January 1979, approximately 2 million people died from starvation, disease, exposure, torture, murder, and execution. The dominant interpretation of the Cambodian genocide presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy. From this vantage point, the victims of the regime perished because of misguided and irrational economic policies, a draconian security apparatus implemented to instill terror, and the central leadership’s fanatical belief in the creation of a utopian communist society. It is no so much that previous accounts are inaccurate as much as they are incomplete and theoretically vapid. To this end, I argue that CPK policy pivoted around surplus agricultural production and a selective engagement with the global economy as informed by its allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement. Accordingly, I challenge the standard historiography of the Cambodian genocide by providing an analytical overview of the structures of violence set in place by the Khmer Rouge.

This chapter aims to provide a conceptual overview of the role of violence in the workings of the colonial state in British India, with reflections on how various modalities of violence constructed concepts of the nation, shaped anti-colonialism, hardened communal identities, and informed the constitution of the early independent Indian state. In this we bring theoretical interventions on violence and the state to the historiography of the Indian nationalist movement, with the aim to underscore the violence of colonialism and to de-centre the emphasis on non-violence in anti-colonialism. We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism’. Such a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was among other things marked by the extraordinary violence of partition. The independent state inherited many of the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it.

This chapter introduces two different approaches to understanding disasters. The 'hazard' paradigm, identified in chapter one as influencing the 'dominant view' regarding the application of the refugee definition in the context of disasters and climate change, is described as being characterised by a focus on hazards such as cyclones and earthquakes, with limited attention paid to the role of social factors in the unfolding of a disaster. The 'social' paradigm is then presented as providing a richer theoretical lens owing to its recognition of social factors as key elements in any disaster. The role played by discrimination in contributing to differential exposure and vulnerability to disaster-related harm is highlighted, and the relevance of this paradigm for guiding refugee status determination in the context of disasters and climate change is underscored.

In this chapter, we trouble the implicit and explicit assumptions tucked behind the phenomenon of the unsaid, actually the forbidden, by examining events that unfolded in a New Jersey (US) state courtroom where conflicting stories about sexual love/violence clashed in the fall of 2015. We examine the ideological and social functions of banished testimony in the context of the trial on aggravated sexual assault where “protection” was deployed to silence a sexual relationship that violated most normative taboos; where “denying voice” to the presumed victim was enforced; where reproducing an old story of “sexual violence” was used to bury another story of connection, love, and desire. Data we present derive from what was said and unsaid, who was and was not allowed to speak, and what evidence was admissible and excluded. It unpacks how voice, silence, protection, and exclusion operate at the delicate intersection of disability, science, law, and sexuality to reproduce hegemonic notions of power and the denial of desire. The binaries and boundaries that were crafted within this case allow us to theorize how the unsaid can sustain and mask injustice as if it is were normal, appropriate, and fair while it reproduces brutal exclusionary realities within our social world.