Political violence in the anthropocene

Nature, in the form of geography, has always played an important role in influencing whether and how political conflict and violence unfold. Geopolitical perspectives of various sorts have tried to theorize this interaction but the underlying geographic determinism has led to substantial criticisms, particularly from the 1990s onwards. On the one hand, critical geopolitics (e.g. Selby) have pointed out that geographic terms like 'the West' or 'the South' are often ideological constructions, and therefore should not be treated as fixed and everlasting entities. This insight, inspired by the spatial turn, emphasizes the socially constructed character of human understanding of nature and geography. On the other hand, various scholars have focused on changing ecological parameters arguing that these lead to new patterns of violence unfolding. Authors like Homer-Dixon have tried to avoid a simplistic view of causal influences and have thus established an elaborated research program of how environmental changes like water pollution or climate change lead to societal problems (e.g. scarcity, migration, governance…) that then cause violent behavior. More recently, three interesting lines of argumentation have built on these insights and have enriched our understanding of how political violence is unfolding in parallel with the rise of the Anthropocene: First, environmental changes/ changes in planetary boundaries are perceived as an effect of Western lifestyles and capitalist structures. Thus, it is not water pollution, biodiversity loss or climate change that is theorized as causing political violence but rather it is capitalism that is a form of violence being played out in a spatial (disproportionate climate impact of wealthy industrialized countries on low-emission societies) as well as a temporal dimension (future generations as bearers of climate consequences ). In this perspective, the capitalist exploitation of natural resources is said to fuel political violence by creating conflicts over land use and access to resources. Second, societal mobilization against the transgression of planetary boundaries is being framed as a form of political violence. This literature deals with insights from scholars of radical social movements trying to understand whether new forms of political violence might evolve as an answer to environmental change. Finally, societal demands for protecting the integrity of planetary boundaries are often times being met by various forms of political violence from repressive state and non-state actors, sometimes leading to escalation effects and widespread use of violence. The proposed contribution will particularly focus on the last three developments arguing that it is the interaction effects between these three developments that are most interesting for future research on conflict in climate policy making.