The nature of peace

This editorial introduces the special feature’s main objective: to provide latest research findings on the dynamics between environmental protection and post-conflict peacebuilding processes after internal armed conflicts. In the feature, we propose a broad understanding of environmental peacebuilding that takes all cycles of the peacebuilding process into account and puts stronger emphasis on the long-term social and environmental impacts. Based on this conceptualization, the contributions to this special feature analyze a series of environmental, social, political, and economic dimensions of post-conflict environmental peacebuilding processes in a diversity of geographical contexts. Building on a wide mix of methods from various disciplinary angles, the feature provides the reader with a range of important and novel results: on different types of impacts on ecosystems and livelihoods (e.g., largely detrimental consequences across Uganda or for environmental human rights defenders in Colombia as a whole, but also decreasing deforestation in Colombia’s Sumapaz territory); for various timings and cycles of peacebuilding processes (e.g., ongoing violent conflicts around Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Iraq’s Kurdistan region, a recent truce in Tigray in late 2022, less than a decade of peacebuilding in Colombia, and over 20 years since the peace agreement in Uganda); at different political levels (from local areas like DRC’s Virunga region or Colombia’s Sumapaz area to national politics and international law contexts); and for a large set of actors (such as local farmers, indigenous communities, civil society groups, rebel groups, and local and national governmental actors). One core overarching finding across these contributions is the dominance of nature-neglecting, instrumentalizing and extractivist narratives with their far-reaching impacts on post-conflict societies. These impacts are not only environmental, e.g., deforestation and biodiversity loss, but also social, in the form of threats to livelihoods of vulnerable communities, and they re-produce old but create also new forms of physical, structural, and cultural violence

Civil society · Democracy · Indigenous · Livelihood · National park · Peacebuilding · Politics · Transboundary Water Resource Management