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VIOLENT ENVIRONMENTS: A
SUMMARY
By Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts
Violent Environments both provides a critique of the standard narrative of relationships between violence, resources, and environment put forth by writers in the field of environmental security and suggests alternative ways of understanding these connections. In the introduction to the book, Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts define violence as a site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and social relations, yet connected to larger networks of power relations and processes of material transformation. The volume’s contributors—an interdisciplinary collection of anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and historians—draw on rich bodies of literature not normally included in many policy, political science, or economics-driven debates over environment and security—namely, political ecology, agrarian studies, STS-studies, and the anthropology of violence. In contrast to more standard approaches, these contributions are not intended to merely identify the “environmental triggers” of violent conflicts; nor do the writers start from a presumed “resource scarcity.” Rather, Violent Environments accounts for ways that specific resource environments (such as agricultural lands, tropical forests, or oil reserves), environmental processes (deforestation, conservation, or resource abundance), and cultural politics are constituted by, and in part constitute, the political economy of access to and control over resources.
We start with the entitlements by which different and differentiated individuals, households, and communities possess or gain access to resources within a given political economy. Our approach places great weight on how these entitlements are distributed, reproduced, and fought over in the course of shaping, and being shaped by, patterns of accumulation. We examine the changing contexts of nature transformation, who performs the labor, who bears the burdens, and how benefits are claimed, distributed, and contested. Transformations and instabilities in the conditions and characteristics of nature, environment, or natural resources produce concomitant “shiftings” of the positions of resource users, whether the poorest peasant or the most powerful transnational corporations. To begin to understand the complexities of violent environments, we argue, it is necessary to understand not only the actors—farmers, indigenous peoples, workers, the state, transnational capital— but also to locate them and their relations to each other in particular historical moments or conjunctures. Violence, as such, is thus best understood through examining the social relations within specific systems of accumulation and fields of power. The forms of violence, who engages them, and their dynamics are accordingly expanded, deepened, or contracted analytically.
We see the strength of this book as its contributors’ rejections of automatic, simplistic linkages between “ìncreased environmental scarcity,” “decreased economic activity,” and “migration” which purportedly weaken states and cause conflicts and violence (Homer-Dixon 1994: 31). While these factors may certainly be present in situations where environmental violence emerges, the authors in this book argue that they need to be both contextualized and theorized; in other words, they can not be viewed as unilateral causes of violence. Many times, such factors work in concert or are produced by violence.
We strongly disagree with the heavily Malthusian cast Homer-Dixon (1999) and others have given to what they call “environmental scarcity” and “violence.” In our view, and as other authors have argued (see, e.g., Ross, 1999, also Fairhead 2001), it is not simply shortage but also abundance that can be, and often is, associated with violence. Moreover, state or internationally sponsored processes of environmental rehabilitation or amelioration can have negative effects on competing users and produce violence as well—in conditions of both scarcity and abundance. Scarcity and abundance are historically (and environmentally) produced expressions of the kinds of social and political relations we mention above, and as such, should not be the starting point of an analysis. The case studies presented in the volume demonstrate time and again the great variation in forms of scarcity, abundance, and appropriation where violence occurs.
The authors in Violent Environments focus on the specific institutions and processes of production, accumulation, and resource access as well as the forms that nature and social relations take in aiming to understand the nature of resource conflict. This perspective ties all of our case studies together, although there is not a unity of vision imposed on the authors. Though most of our contributors, and we as editors, start from this approach, we all engage a variety of theoretical insights and grapple with the strengths and weakness of a political ecology model. Political ecology represents a huge body of work, nearly 25 years in the making by geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists, working on resources, environment, culture and politics (see, for example Tim Forysth’s review in Critical Political Ecology, 2003).
Violence as a set of social acts and relations ultimately stands awkwardly in respect to environmental concerns. The environment is increasingly present and yet frequently hidden by both the perpetrators and observers of violence alike. When Violent Environments came out (2001), very little work had explored explicitly the ways that environmental violence reflected or masked other forms of social struggle. In general, the ways different forms of violence systematically figured in environmental struggles was seriously under-theorized, despite the fact that global trends toward economic and political liberalization have brought an explosion of new property claims and protectionist strategies. Oftentimes, the resources and environments providing the fuel for capitalist expansion were kept out of view, as was the violence of their production. Some forms of resource development, including conservation, augment existing local tensions deriving from religion, ethnicity, gender, and class conflicts. Violent forms of surveillance and compliance are often used to enforce naturalized structures of resource control, but these are often obscured or hidden. As a result, the geographic and historical shifting of zones of peace and tension (Keane, 1996), and the manner and media of their representation, seem basic to an understanding of the changing contemporary landscapes of conservation and environmental management.
The papers in VE are organised in three sections, to suggest and illustrate three dynamic modalities of violent environments: (a) the forms, periodicities, and repertoires of environmental violence; (b) the intersection of violent extraction with resource and environmental characteristics; and (c) the normalization of environmental violence. The first set of papers examines the patterns, tactics or rhythms of violence and their associations with particular environmental relationships, particularly, but not limited to, those involving land. Authors in this section include Paul Richards, Nancy Peluso and Emily Harwell, James McCarthy, Iain Boal, and Aaron Bobrow-Strain. The second set examines changing technologies of extraction and the changing loci of resource control in relation to the biophysical characteristics of resources or the environments within which they are found. The authors in this section include Michael Watts, James Fairhead, Valerie Kuletz, Susan Stonich and Peter Vandergeest, and Paula Garb and Galina Komarova. The final set of papers examines the coercive capacity of changing institutions of green governmentality and the normalization of violence. In this section are papers by Roderick Neumann, Nandini Sundar, Amita Baviskar, and Ravi Rajan. Betsy Hartmann, in the introductory section, presents a systematic critique of the Project on Environment, Population, and Security.
Violent Environments has been deliberately constructed so that there are important continuities, overlaps, intersections and conversations amongst the authors. In particular, three themes cut across nearly all the papers: the direct and indirect roles of state agencies and actors in creating the conditions for and/or for mobilizing violence; the complex dialectics between resources and identities (individual and collective) and the ways such identities are violently defended or contested; and the ways that community can be created from, maintained, and protected by violence. There are no automatic innocents in any of these relations and networks, nor is there necessarily a hope that some abstract state or force. We simply argue for better understandings of the specific ways in which history, memory, and the practices of people, states, and the forces of capitalism have come together violently.
Contact:
Professor Nancy Peluso
Department of Enviromental Science, Policy
and Management, Division of Society and
Environment, University of California
137 Mulford Hall MC #3114
Berkeley, CA 94720
USA
E-mail: npeluso@nature.berkeley.edu
The book Violent Environments is available in paperback or hard cover from Cornell University Press. (ordering information in publications)
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