Conflict activities produce a complex array of environmental vectors of violence. Environmental violence is excess human-produced pollution that directly harms human health. In conflict, most often all pollution produced is in excess. Beyond the reduction in environmental quality and ecosystem services from degradation, the environment as a vector of violence directly assaults human health, often with impacts lasting well beyond the end of a conflict. This chapter focuses on environmental violence from conflict and highlights the complex and myriad ways in which conflict activities, materials, and damages can directly and indirectly harm human health.

The environment has been leveraged as a tool of control in conflict settings throughout human history. Capturing or enclosing and controlling the resources needed for everyday needs and livelihoods has been a feature of most conflicts. Understanding how this happens and what the implications are for the environment in conflict is critical to addressing environmental and conflict issues. This chapter lays out how this has unfolded in many contexts and highlights critical nuances for different environmental mediums and across space and time.

The environment is almost always a victim in conflict. Conflict activities generally reduce environmental quality, resulting in a loss of ecosystem services that can be cultivated. The environment as degraded covers the range of pathways of environmental degradation from conflict activities, the implications for economic outcomes, and the environmental remediation needed to restore ecosystem functioning.

Chapter 3, ‘The Amazon as a Place for Global Extractivism: Rethinking Extractivism and Infrastructure in Extractive Frontiers,” explores the governance of extractivism in the Amazon by reflecting on IIRSA infrastructure development and how it relates to extractive activities. The analysis of the entanglements between mega-infrastructures and extractive industries also allows a deeper understanding of extractivism. From a scalar dimension, the Amazon becomes an example of global extractivism, a place where infrastructure and extraction coalesce to feed the global economy and the endless transnational circulation of commodities. From material/immaterial dimensions, infrastructure might be a kind of extractivism in itself when its main goal is profit-making from construction, detached from real prospects for connectivity. In turn, its immaterial dimension refers to how extractive logics permeate infrastructure activities, such as the monetarizing of the knowledge and needs of locals to justify the projects’ socio-economic viability. Considering the re-dimensioning of extractivism, the Chapter provides reflections on how it promotes international economic integration while limiting environmental integration in the Amazon. This raises crucial insights on the proper ways to govern internationally extractive activities.

Growing environmental instability around the globe has the potential to contribute to the onset of violent conflict. However, there is rarely a clear, direct causal pathway between environmental change and conflict because these interactions are always mediated by institutions – social norms, governance, and policy. How the environment can be a potential trigger for conflict is a critical part of the environment-conflict nexus. This chapter explores the broad literature on the topic, drawing out where there is more and less consensus and what the implications are for understanding the environment in conflict.

Chapter 4, “The Amazon as a Place for Global Conservation”, unpacks the tensions and conflicts of conceiving the Amazon as a field of global conservation and examines the prospects to scale indigenous politics of conservation and reimagine conservation policies in the local and international spheres. For this aim, this Chapter discusses the theories for decolonizing conservation, how they help to explain environmental conflicts in the Amazon, and their strengths and gaps. Then, it provides an overview of the conservation architecture and associated conflicts in the Peruvian Amazon through three cases that show the international and local interactions around conservation politics and policies. Ultimately, the Chapter provides insights to revisit critical theories on conservation and the importance of international governance for reinventing conservation practices and policies in the Amazon and beyond.

This chapter highlights key findings from the five pillars of the framework and environmental peacebuilding, focusing on future pathways and implications for the environment in conflict, and simultaneously promoting human and environmental flourishing.