The close connections between climate change and conflict – and between climate sustainability and peace – are increasingly recognised. Several members of the Visualising Peace team have been exploring human-environment relations, the ongoing climate crisis, environmental protection projects and climate campaigning as part of their research into how we conceptualise peace and approach peacebuilding.
This work connects to wider research on peace and place, which has underlined how grounded in both physical and conceptual places our sense of peace and experiences of conflict always are. Guest lecturers and team members have got us thinking about the ‘disarming’ of ‘ex-combatant buildings‘, ‘urbicide‘, architectural utopias, local peace and the connection between peace-making and place-making.
Visualising Peace student Madighan Ryan has led the way in our recent research into the links between peace-building and environmentalism. She has combined this with her interests in journalism, advocacy, public debate and civil resistance – which are all key to how we identify and address conflicts and their causes. In her report on Constructive Climate Communication in Wealth Democracies, Madighan examines the barriers to constructive discussion and action, and explores some solutions that might close the ‘attitude-behaviour gap’, converting fear and false hope into constructive worry, realisable aspirations and positive steps towards both climate security and human security. She considers the pros and cons of civil disobedience as a peacebuilding tool – in the context of climate change – in a blog on Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding, arguing: ‘My aim is for visualisations of peacebuilding and changemaking to be reoriented to include not just palatable visions of compromise and dialogue, but also more disruptive, grassroots, civil resistance…’.
Alongside her interest in public discourse, Madighan has investigated the implications of climate change and climate activism (like other campaigning) for inner peace, offering a reflective analysis of oanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s theory of Active Hope in an entry for our virtual Museum of Peace. Connecting with our team’s wider work on inner peace, Madighan reflects: ‘In fostering the elements of inner peace – interconnection, the honouring of our pain, gratitude, and the reimagining of complex systems like time – Active Hope builds up people and groups to a point where they can partake in collective action, whatever that may look like.’ In another museum entry, she explores Jim Bendell’s theory of Climate Doomism, which – as Madighan summarises – argues that ‘if political change remains inadequate and extreme projections about the climate crisis become a reality, then desperation will mount, norms of behaviour will decline, and society will cease to exist in its current state. These are not inevitable outcomes, but unless there is a dramatic change in policy, scaling of technology, or geoengineering, this vision of doom may be the future we are working with.’ She then discusses Bendell’s ‘deep adaptation’ theory, which ‘provides the framework through which to start creatively brainstorming how society could adapt.’ As she concludes, ‘Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation”, in all its pessimism about climate change and society, also provides a strange kind of comfort and hope that there are creative ways to adapt and coexist in a different kind of peace.’
Taking her cue from this, Madighan has spent time researching some examples of creative approaches, including SEvEN: Seven voices, One Future, a videogame aimed at building an environmentally sustainable future for Scotland by highlighting Minoritized Ethnic people’s voices and the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. She discusses this game in a podcast interview with its designer, Dr. Mark Wong, which underlines the inseparability of peace and sustainability and emphasises that a peaceful future will only be possible if the voices of minoritised ethnic peoples are centred in conversations surrounding a just transition towards an environmentally and socially sustainable future.
Other team members have contributed to our wider exploration of the connections between climate change and peacebuilding. We have museum entries on the Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina, Waging War against Nature in Tolkien, sustainable Fashion for Peace, Care for Nature, and Green Mosul. Student Kim Wahnke has explored the connection between peace and sustainability in political rhetoric, and Harris Siderfin worked with the wider peace education team on a comic-based teaching resource that explored links between climate change, forced migration and peacebuilding. Eleni Spiliotes and Margaux de Seze have got us thinking about the relationship between peace and place (and peacemaking and placemaking); Harris Siderfin and Otilia Meden have prompted us to explore peace in space; and Joe Walker, Samuel Huff and Sofia Lobue have reflected on different forms of inner peace, mindfulness and transcendence we can experience through being in nature and conquering physical challenges: