Resource wars in an unequal world: international law and beyond

The growing demand for resource commodities, coupled with the climate crisis, have increased pressures on ecosystems and individuals who are already at the margins of society. Conflicts over natural resources and the environment are considered among the greatest challenges of the 21st-century.

While the link between resource scarcity or wealth and armed violence is increasingly discussed by political scientists, there is still little understanding of how international law operates in this venue of global governance, where power imbalances shape relations among different actors (transnational corporations, governments, international institutions, and peoples).By conducting two case-studies, which focus on the problem of ‘conflict resources’ and the security impacts of climate change, this project will illuminate international law’s role in framing these types of conflicts and finding ways to tackle them, and the place of different actors within legal discourses.

It will demonstrate how distributive concerns may be sidelined and inequalities perpetuated through legal/institutional arrangements.This project will open intellectual spaces to rethink common ‘solutions’ to the international legal order’s most pressing concerns: the ecological crisis, rising civil wars, and their interaction.

It will initiate a more inclusive and much-needed debate about alternative understandings of international peace and security, which reflect the lived-experiences of peoples in the Global South.

Through the integration of other disciplines into the study and critique of international law, this project presents the opportunity to open a new field of knowledge, which will spark the interest of different constituencies (e.g. legal, political, IR scholars), and aligns with the interdisciplinary character of research at the HO.