Dangerous environments: environmental peacebuilding’s technomoral imaginary and its power-knowledge effects

Abstract

In this article we critically analyze the emerging academic field and practice of environmental peacebuilding. We claim that both are saturated by a particular “technomoral imaginary” or a set of beliefs, normative assumptions, and views on desirable futures that betray unwavering faith in the power of science and technology to bring peace and development to the Global South by transforming environmental governance. This imaginary informs particular rules of knowledge production that work to establish environmental peacebuilding as a conceptually narrow and self-referential field. Zooming in on an environmental peacebuilding project in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, we demonstrate how the self-referentiality of knowledge production within the field leads to inadequate analyses of key drivers of conflict and violence. Moreover, it blinds scholars and practitioners to the broader power-knowledge effects of environmental peacebuilding, including its complicity in conjuring up “dangerous environments.” By the latter, we refer to the portrayal of environments in the Global South as potential security threats due to various lacks and deficiencies ascribed to these regions, which contributes to the reproduction of a “global environmental color line.” The conjuring up of dangerous environments embeds environmental peacebuilding within a Global-North dominated, colonially influenced apparatus of security and development whose interventions integrate places more firmly into circuits of global capitalism and global governance. To reckon with these power-knowledge effects, environmental peacebuilding must display more self-reflexivity regarding the politics of knowledge production on the Global South.