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Crawford School of Public Policy · ANU College of Law, Governance and Policy
This course is available for on-campus & remote (online) learning. All students participate in interactive, real-time classes. This course explores the drivers and effects of environmental and resource conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia. The course develops a critically informed toolkit, which has applications for conflict avoidance and resolution, as well as for transformative change. Students will engage with classic debates on whether cases of environmental violence are best understood as connected to the dynamics of resource degradation, poverty and scarcity, or the mechanisms of extraction and unequal distribution of resource-based wealth in a globalised economy. Notions of environmental conflict and violence are situated as a “... site-specific phenomenon deeply rooted in local histories and social relations, but also connected to transitional processes of material change, political power relations and historical conjuncture” (Peluso and Watts, 2001). The insights of environmental security are used to situate how environmental conflicts can become critical threats to human well-being, while also understanding the limits of "securitisation" discourse. The course also engages in people's responses to environmental degradation and injustice, through a sustained engagement with environmental social movements and resistance. The course applies these ideas to a series of case studies around the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia. The cases explore conflicts that mobilise Indigenous rights, minority rights, states, and resource industries; inter-state conflicts over resources; and conflicts over regional or global commons. Finally, the course positions how the prospect of disruptive anthropogenic climate change has ushered in a new discourse of systemic or multiplying threats, raising concerns over the security of critical resources, ecosystems and infrastructure. In this context, the course explores how progressive actors and civil society institutions are attempting to counter trajectories towards intensified resource conflicts, in pursuit of environmental justice.
Blog (800 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2
In-Class Small Group Presentation (15 minutes)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4
Short Essay ( 1,500 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Final Essay (3,000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The standard workload for a 6 unit course is 130 hours including class time and independent study.
The weekly readings consist of curated academic articles, book chapters and selected grey literature reports. Preliminary Reading Homer-Dixon, T, (1994). “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases.” International Security. 19(1): 5-40. Peluso, N. L. and M. Watts (ed.’s) (2001). Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Watts, M, and N. L. Peluso (2014). “Resource Violence.” Chapter 19 In Carl Death (Ed.). Critical Environmental Politics. Oxon: Routledge. Le Billon, P. and R. Duffy (2018). “Conflict Ecologies: Connecting Political Ecology and Peace and Conflict Studies.” Journal of Political Ecology. 25(1): 239-260. Le Billon, P. (2015). “Environmental Conflict.” pp. 598-608. In T. Perrault, J. McCarthy and G. Bridge (ed.’s) The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge. Le Billon, P. (2010). “The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts.” Political Geography.20(5): 561-584. Dalby, S. (2002). Environmental Security. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dalby, S. (2013). “Environmental Dimensions of Human Security.” pp. 121-138. In R. Floyd and R. Matthew (Ed.’s) Environmental Security: Approaches and Issues. Taylor and Francis Dalby, S. (2014). “Security.” Chapter 23 In Carl Death (Ed.). Critical Environmental Politics. Oxon: Routledge. Floyd, R. and R. Matthew (Ed.’s) (2013). Environmental Security: Approaches and Issues. Taylor and Francis. Barnett, J. (2015). “Environmental Security.” In A. Collins (Ed.) Contemporary Security Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barnett, J. (2020). “Global Environmental Change II: Political Economies of Vulnerability to Climate Change.” Progress in Human Geography. 44(6): 1172-1184. Pichler, M, and A. Brad (2016). “Political Ecology and Socio-Ecological Conflicts in Southeast Asia.” ASEAS- Austrian Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 9(1): 1-10. Spratt, D. and I, Dunlop. (2018). What Lies Beneath: The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk. Melbourne: National Centre for Climate Restoration.