Conflict and Society
Advances in Research
Call for Papers
Special Issue: Climate and Conflict
Special Issue Editors: Erella Grassiani (University of Amsterdam), Tessa Diphoorn (Utrecht University), Thijs Jeursen (Utrecht University), Linda Musariri (University of Amsterdam & University of Witwatersrand)
In 2011, one million plus Syrians, fleeing civil war in Syria reached the shores of Europe seeking refuge. Dubbed ‘Europe’s Syrian ‘crisis’, this sent the western world into panic, as evidenced by the intensified efforts to fortify the walls of Fortress Europe and increased securitization of migration across the globe. As argued by some scholars, the Syrian civil war that led to the mass emigration of Syrians was exacerbated by human-induced climate change and drought.1
Research that has sought to establish the relationship between climate change and conflict has yielded varied and inconclusive results albeit with a consensus that the relationship between the two is complex and context specific. In their 2015 meta-analysis on the link between climate and conflict, Burke and colleagues established that for every 1-degree Celsius increase in temperature there is a 2.4% increase in conflict between individuals (e.g., assault, murder) and 11.3% increase in conflict between groups (e.g., riots, civil war).2
The UN Secretary-General, in his address at Columbia University: “The state of the planet” emphatically stated that “…the state of the planet is broken. Humanity is waging war on nature”.3 He emphasized the role of climate change in impeding efforts towards peace by perpetuating poverty, food insecurity, water scarcity and the associated political instability, displacement, and conflict. How will climatological changes impact conflicts across the globe?
As the editors of Conflict and Society we acknowledge the need for urgent action to address climate change. We join the global climate change action by availing space in the journal to publish scholarly work addressing the complex association between conflict and climate. As in our past special issues, we are specifically interested in submissions that draw from anthropological perspectives and critically assess larger structures of inequality across the globe. As previous research has already established that the poorest communities are often those that contribute the least to climate change but are disproportionately affected by its consequences including conflict in its diverse forms.
We, therefore, would like to make a call for a special section in our forthcoming issue (2023) that focuses on the diverse forms of conflict in the context of climate change. We welcome ethnographically informed contributions that explore diverse ways that specific forms of climate change (in)directly trigger or perpetuate conflict as well as the diverse ways of coping, adapting, and mitigating the effects. Some of the guiding questions include but not limited to:
» As threat multipliers for instability, how do climate change effects amplify pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities as well as intensify existing conflict patterns?
» In what ways does conflict harm the ecosystems people rely on to survive and impede the efforts to address climate change?
» What are the everyday efforts to adapt to climate variability in conflict-affected areas?
» What could be the role of climate adaptation (mitigation) in reducing the effects of climate on conflict?
» How is our environment and efforts to ‘save’ it used (instrumentally) in conflict and/or in the suppression of groups of people?
Submission
Abstracts of 500 words and a short bio of max. 200 words should be submitted by 1 May 2022 to l.musariri@uva.nl. The selected contributors will be invited to submit full papers of approximately 8,000 words by 1 August 2022. The special issue will be published in 2023.
More information, including the style guide, can be found at www.berghahnjournals.com/conflict-and-society
Conflict and Society is part of the Berghahn Open Anthro subscribe-to-open pilot. Articles in this volume will be published Open Access with no Article Processing Fees (APCs) or other fees pending continued support for the BOA-S2O initiative. Learn more on the publisher's website: berghahnjournals.com/boa
Notes
1. Marshall Burke, Solomon M. Hsiang, Edward Miguel. (2015). Climate and Conflict. Annual Review of Economics 7:(1)577-617.
2. Marshall Burke, Solomon M. Hsiang, Edward Miguel. (2015). Climate and Conflict. Annual Review of Economics 7:(1)577-617.
3. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2020-12-02/address-columbia-university-the-st....
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