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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
Economic development is considered one of the pillars of international peacebuilding. The mandates of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations often contain the promotion of economic growth as a prerequisite for post-conflict recovery and sustainable peace. However, the relationship between peace and economic growth needs re-examination in light of urgent calls for global sustainability and climate action. To do this, I first review the claims and critiques that economic growth is a precondition for peace. I then revisit past peacebuilding cases where the promotion of economic growth has either corresponded with or led to environmental degradation and unequal distribution of resources, contributing to new or renewed forms of violence. Finally, I explore the prospects of post-growth peacebuilding based on recent efforts to make UN peacekeeping operations more attuned to environmental considerations and the changing climate. Post-growth peacebuilding is not just about reducing the environmental footprint of peacekeeping; it is, more importantly, about breaking away from the linear and growth-driven path of peace and development towards intergenerational and ecological justice.
1 Roland Paris, ‘International peacebuilding and the “mission civilisatrice”’, Review of International Studies, 28:4 (2002), pp. 637–56; Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh (ed.), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).
2 Florian Krampe, ‘Why United Nations peace operations cannot ignore climate change’, SIPRI (22 February 2021).
3 Krampe, ‘Why United Nations’.
4 Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).
5 John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, ‘The Kantian peace: The pacific benefits of democracy, interdependence, and international organizations, 1885–1992’, World Politics, 52:1 (1999), pp. 1–37; Michael W. Doyle, ‘Three pillars of the liberal peace’, The American Political Science Review, 99:3 (2005), pp. 463–66.
6 Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The problem of peace: Understanding the liberal peace’, Conflict, Security & Development, 6:3 (2006), pp. 291–314.
7 Madhav Joshi, Sung Yong Lee, and Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Just how liberal is the liberal peace?’, International Peacekeeping, 21:3 (2014), pp. 364–89.
8 UN, ‘Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development’ (21 October 2015).
9 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), p. 42.
10 UN, ‘Peacebuilding and sustaining peace: Report of the Secretary-General’, A/73/668–S/2022/66 (24 March 2022).
11 UN, ‘Peacebuilding and sustaining peace’, para. 49.
12 Institute for Economics & Peace, ‘Business & peace 2019: Analysing peace as a precondition for a sound business environment’ (September 2019).
13 Vincenzo Bove and Leandro Elia, ‘Economic development in peacekeeping host countries’, CESifo Economic Studies, 64:4 (2018), pp. 712–28.
14 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Aid, policy and growth in post-conflict societies’, European Economic Review, 48:5 (2004), pp. 1125–45.
15 Astri Suhrke and Julia Buckmaster, ‘Aid, growth and peace’, Conflict, Security & Development, 6:3 (2006), pp. 337–63.
16 Matheus de Abreu Costa Souza and Cristiano Garcia Mendes, ‘Building peace through the nexus between security, democracy and development: A critical assessment of the United Nations Mission in Liberia’, Revista de Paz y Conflictos, 13:1 (2020), pp. 73–98 (p. 85).
17 Nicolas Lemay-Hebert and Syed Mansoob Murshed, ‘Rentier statebuilding in a post-conflict economy: The case of Kosovo’, Development and Change, 47:3 (2016), pp. 517–41.
18 Chukwumerije Okereke, ‘Degrowth, green growth, and climate justice in Africa’, in this Forum.
19 Michael Pugh, ‘The political economy of peacebuilding: A critical theory perspective’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 10:2 (2005), pp. 23–42.
20 Tatyana P. Soubbotina and Katherine Sheram, Beyond Economic Growth: Meeting the Challenges of Global Development (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2000).
21 Carla Castañeda, ‘How liberal peacebuilding may be failing Sierra Leone’, Review of African Political Economy, 36:120 (2009), pp. 235–51.
22 Michael Pugh, ‘Employment, labour rights and social resistance’, in Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper, and Mandy Turner (eds), Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 139–56.
23 Soubbotina and Sheram, Beyond Economic Growth.
24 UN, ‘Transforming our world’.
25 As Michael Albert elucidates in this Forum, the political-economic, ideological, and military-strategic drivers of the current international order produce and reproduce ‘growth hegemony’ at global and national scales. Michael Albert, ‘Growth hegemony and post-growth futures: A complex hegemony approach’, in this Forum.
26 UN, ‘Peacebuilding and sustaining peace’.
27 Dahlia Simangan, ‘Reflexive peacebuilding: Lessons from the Anthropocene discourse’, Global Society, 35:4 (2021), pp. 479–500.
28 Lucile Maertens and Malkit Shoshan, ‘Greening peacekeeping: The environmental impact of UN peace operations, International Peace Institute’ (17 April 2018).
29 Maertens and Shoshan, ‘Greening peacekeeping’.
30 Fabini D. Orata, Paul S. Keim, and Yan Boucher, ‘The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti: How science solved a controversy’, PLOS Pathogens, 10:4 (2014), e1003967.
31 United Nations Environment Programme (hereafter UNEP), Destitution, Distortion, and Deforestation: The Impacts of Conflict on the Timber and Wood Fuel Trade in Darfur (Geneva: UNEP, 2008).
32 UNEP, Greening the Blue Report 2021: The UN System’s Environmental Footprint and Efforts to Reduce It (UNEP: Geneva, 2021); UNEP, Greening the Blue Report 2020: The UN System’s Environmental Footprint and Efforts to Reduce It (UNEP: Geneva, 2020).
33 Lucile Maertens, ‘From blue to green? Environmentalization and securitization in UN peacekeeping practices’, International Peacekeeping, 26:3 (2019), pp. 302–26.
34 UN, S/RES/2100, adopted by the Security Council at its 6952nd meeting (25 April 2013).
35 Zorzeta Bakaki and Tobias Böhmelt, ‘Can UN peacekeeping promote environmental quality?’, International Studies Quarterly, 65:4 (2021), pp. 881–90.
36 Bentley Allan, ‘After growth: Industrial policy and the green state’, in this Forum.
37 Paul F. Diehl, ‘Mainstreaming climate change adaptation into peace missions’, in Shirley V. Scott and Charlotte Ku (eds), Climate Change and the UN Security Council (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), pp. 131–46.
38 UN, S/RES/792, adopted by the Security Council at its 3143rd meeting (30 November 1992); Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
39 UN, ‘The situation in Cambodia’, A/46/608 S/23177 (30 October 1991).
40 Ruth Bottomley, ‘Structural analysis of deforestation in Cambodia (with a focus on Ratanakiri province, northeast Cambodia’, Mekong Watch and Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan (2000).
41 Kenneth Grogan, Dirk Pflugmacher, Patrick Hostert, Ole Mertz, and Rasmus Fensholt, ‘Unravelling the link between global rubber price and tropical deforestation in Cambodia’, Nature Plants, 5:1 (2019), pp. 47–53.
42 UN, S/RES/1272, adopted by the Security Council at its 4057th meeting (25 October 1999).
43 Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, ‘Liberal peacebuilding in Timor Leste: The emperor’s new clothes?’, International Peacekeeping, 15:2 (2008), pp. 185–200.
44 Dahlia Simangan and Srinjoy Bose, ‘Oiling the rigs of state-building: A political settlements analysis of petroleum revenue management in Timor-Leste’, Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, 9:1 (2021), pp. 67–89.
45 Samuel John, Elissaios Papyrakis, and Luca Tasciotti, ‘Is there a resource curse in Timor-Leste? A critical review of recent evidence’, Development Studies Research, 7:1 (2020), pp. 141–52.
46 The same can be said for the Global South. See Miriam Lang, ‘Degrowth, global asymmetries and ecosocial justice: Decolonial perspectives from Latin America’, in this Forum.
47 Douglas F. Dowd, Capitalism and Its Economics: A Critical History (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
48 Dowd, Capitalism and Its Economics, p. 2.
49 Lorenzo Fioramonti, ‘Post-growth theories in a global world: A comparative analysis’, in this Forum.
50 John Gledhill, Richard Caplan, and Maline Meiske, ‘Developing peace: The evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping’, Oxford Development Studies, 49:3 (2021), pp. 201–29.
51 Gledhill, Caplan, and Meiske, ‘Developing peace’.
52 Justin McCurry, ‘“A new way of life”: The Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan’, The Guardian (9 September 2022); Kohei Saito, Hitoshinsei No Shihonron [Capital in the Anthropocene] (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2020).
53 Frank Biermann, Thomas Hickmann, Carole-Anne Sénit, et al., ‘Scientific evidence on the political impact of the sustainable development goals’, Nature Sustainability, 7 (2022), pp. 795–800.
54 UN Development Programme (UNDP), ‘Human development report’ (1990).
55 Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, peace, and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6:3 (1969), pp. 167–91.
56 UNDP, ‘Human development report 2020. The next frontier: Human development in the Anthropocene’ (2020), p. 5.
57 UNDP, ‘Human development report 2020’, p. 6.
58 Lorenzo Fioramonti, The World after GDP: Politics, Business and Society in the Post Growth Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), p. 9.
59 For an overview of the various post-growth theories, see Fioramonti, ‘Post-growth theories’.
60 Michael J. Albert, ‘The climate crisis, renewable energy, and the changing landscape of global energy politics’, Alternatives, 46:3 (2021), pp. 89–98 (p. 94).
61 Oliver P. Richmond, ‘A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday’, Review of International Studies, 35:3 (2009), pp. 557–80.
62 Guest editors, ‘Dealing with dangerous abundance: Towards post-growth International Relations’, in this Forum.
63 Simangan, ‘Reflexive peacebuilding’.
64 UN, ‘Climate security mechanism: Progress report’ (2021).
65 UN, ‘Climate security mechanism: Toolbox: Climate risk checklist for political analysis’ (2020).
66 Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Jacob Hasselbalch, and Matthias Kranke, ‘Organization beyond growth: Post-growth in the global political economy’ (SASE Mini-conference on the Political Economy of Climate Change, University of Amsterdam, 2022).
67 Chertkovskaya, Hasselbalch, and Kranke, ‘Organization beyond growth’.
68 Christie Nicoson, ‘Towards climate resilient peace: An intersectional and degrowth approach’, Sustainability Science, 16 (2021), pp. 1147–58 (p. 1155).
69 Fioramonti, ‘Post-growth theories’.
70 On the role of well-being economy in advancing a post-growth agenda, see Lorenzo Fioramonti, ‘Post-growth theories’.
71 UN DPPA, ‘Strategic Plan United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs: 2020–2022’, available at: {https://dppa.un.org/en/strategic-plan-2020-2022}.
72 Fioramonti, ‘Post-growth theories’.
73 Okereke, ‘Degrowth, green growth’.
74 Cedric de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, International Affairs, 94:2 (2018), pp. 301–7; Simangan, ‘Reflexive peacebuilding’.
75 Simangan, ‘Reflexive peacebuilding’.
