Nature of Peace

The field of environmental peacebuilding starts from a simple but increasingly urgent insight: environmental issues are not only drivers of armed conflict, but can also serve as foundations for recovery, cooperation, and long-term peace. By bringing together environmental protection, restoration, natural resource governance, and peace processes, environmental peacebuilding explores how sustainable peace can be built and sustained through environmental governance and democracy.¹ Despite its promise, environmental peacebuilding has faced sustained criticism. It has often approached environmental problems as technical issues to be managed by experts, rather than as deeply political questions shaped by power, inequality, and historical injustice.² Thus, rebuilding ecosystems, governing resources fairly, and involving affected communities are not peripheral concerns. They are central to restoring trust, strengthening institutions, and reducing the risk of renewed violence. Yet realising this potential requires political will, as well as legal and institutional frameworks capable of addressing not only environmental degradation, but also the underlying questions of governance, justice, participation, and legitimacy that shape sustainable peace. These frameworks should not be understood as technocratic fixes, but as part of broader political and social processes through which environmental recovery and peace are negotiated and sustained.³

Although international law cannot by itself resolve the structural causes of environmental conflict, it may contribute by providing normative and institutional frameworks for environmental protection, participation, reparation, and accountability. However, it has been widely criticised for being state-centred and anthropocentric, prioritising state responsibility and human interests while often overlooking the relational, ecological, and community-based dimensions of harm.⁴ It has also traditionally understood post-conflict environmental harm in narrow terms, either as collateral damage of war or as a driver of conflict over scarce or valuable resources. As a result, it is ill-suited to address the slow, cumulative, and structural environmental degradation that characterises many conflict-affected settings.⁵ At the same time, such framings may obscure the everyday socio-ecological practices through which communities continue to sustain relationships with land, water, and territory even amidst armed conflict. In many contexts, these practices contribute not only to survival, but also to forms of collective identity, care, and local peacebuilding. This blogpost therefore argues that international law can support environmental peacebuilding by providing normative and institutional frameworks for post-conflict environmental governance. Its transformative potential depends not on imposing universal solutions, but on how international norms are reinterpreted, adapted, and combined with local legal practices and emerging institutional arrangements to address broader dimensions of environmental harm.

In this context, international law should not be understood simply as a fixed body of rules agreed upon by states. It is also a dynamic and contested field shaped through interpretation and practice by states, courts, international organisations, administrative authorities, civil society actors, and affected communities. International law therefore develops not only through top-down processes, but also through engagement with national and local legal orders in concrete political and social contexts, although it is only states that have the mandate to create law.

What can international law do in its current state?

International law does not provide a single, unified framework for environmental peacebuilding. Instead, it consists of a fragmented set of legal regimes, including international humanitarian law, human rights law, international environmental law, and international criminal law. These regimes are limited but taken together, however, they offer a diverse set of tools that can support post-conflict (environmental) recovery. The International Law Commission’s Principles on the Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflicts (PERAC Principles) represent an important effort to connect these regimes. By addressing environmental protection before, during, and after armed conflict, the principles encourage a more integrated understanding of the conflict cycle and its environmental consequences.

International law contributes to environmental peacebuilding through three interrelated dimensions: substantive norms, procedural guarantees, and institutional mechanisms.

First, at the level of substantive norms, international law defines what should be protected and restored. International humanitarian law and international criminal law address environmental damage during armed conflict, but they do so at a very high threshold. Their focus on “widespread, long-term and severe” damage means that much of the environmental harm that occurs in conflict settings falls outside their scope. However, once the threshold is met, these legal fields can be used to hold states as well as individuals accountable for environmental harm occurring in armed conflict.⁶ At the same time, international humanitarian law also affords the environment indirect protection through rules protecting civilian objects, insofar as parts of the natural environment do not constitute military objectives. The 2020 Guidelines of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) further elaborate how these protections apply to the natural environment during armed conflict. In general, international humanitarian law and international criminal law remain primarily concerned with exceptional and acute forms of environmental destruction.

International environmental law and human rights law are in general better equipped to address the types of harm that characterise post-conflict settings. Environmental legal principles such as prevention, precaution, and sustainable use provide a framework for managing environmental degradation over time, including harm linked to governance failures and resource exploitation.⁷ At the same time, human rights law connects environmental protection to fundamental rights, including the right to health, food, housing, property and family life. Recent international developments, including UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 and the ICJ’s 2025 Advisory Opinion on Climate Change, reflect a growing recognition of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. In this way, environmental harm is increasingly understood not only as ecological degradation, but also as a matter connected to human rights violations, unequal exposure to harm, and questions of accountability and redress.

Procedural guarantees form a second key dimension of international law’s contribution. These rules govern how decisions are made and who participates in them. International law increasingly recognises that legitimate environmental governance depends on access to information, public participation, and access to justice as set out in Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration and later incorporated in binding instruments such as the Aarhus Convention and the Escazú Agreement. These procedural rights are particularly important in post-conflict settings, where decisions about land, natural resources, and reconstruction are often highly contested. When affected communities are excluded, such decisions risk reinforcing grievances and undermining fragile peace processes. These procedural rights ensure that local participation is conducted having influence over decisions that affects environmental matters that concern them.

Procedural norms also play a critical role in recognising the rights of Indigenous peoples, whose relationships to land and territory are often central to both conflict dynamics and recovery processes. Legal requirements of consultation and, in some contexts, free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) provide mechanisms through which these communities can influence decisions that affect their environments and livelihoods as provided in the ILO Convention No. 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). At the same time, these procedural frameworks face significant challenges in practice. In fragile contexts marked by weak institutions and unequal power relations, participation can become formalistic or even instrumentalised.⁸ This highlights that procedural rights alone are not sufficient; their effectiveness depends on broader conditions of transparency, accountability, and political will.

A third dimension of international law’s contribution lies in its institutional mechanisms. Environmental peacebuilding depends not only on legal norms, but also on the institutions that implement, monitor, and enforce them. In post-conflict settings, where domestic, regional as well as local institutions are often weakened, international mechanisms can play an important role in supporting environmental governance and recovery. Reparation processes can address environmental damage and contribute to restoration efforts,⁹ while monitoring and reporting mechanisms help document harm and enhance transparency.¹⁰ International organisations, environmental treaty bodies, financial institutions, as well as international and local civil society organisations, may support environmental recovery through technical assistance, coordination, monitoring, and funding. In many conflict-affected settings, however, international actors may be viewed with mistrust by local or national authorities, making locally embedded or ad hoc institutional arrangements particularly important. Through such diverse institutional configurations, international legal norms may become operational by being adapted and implemented in ways that shape post-conflict recovery in specific political and social contexts.

The limits of international law and re-thinking environmental harm

Despite these contributions, international law is not without its limitations. It remains largely state-centred, often prioritising the interests and responsibilities of states over those of communities. It is also predominantly anthropocentric, focusing on human interests rather than recognising the intrinsic value of ecosystems or the relational dimensions of environmental harm, even though there are increasing attempts, particularly within international environmental law, to incorporate local and Indigenous knowledge and practices.

Much of the environmental harm associated with armed conflict does not take the form of clearly identifiable violations. Instead, it often unfolds over time through processes such as deforestation, pollution, resource exploitation, and institutional breakdown. These forms of harm are deeply intertwined with social, political, and economic dynamics, affecting not only ecosystems but also livelihoods, cultural practices, and identities. These often falls outside the scope of international law.

Addressing these limitations requires a broader understanding of environmental harm. Armed conflict can disrupt the connections between people and their environments, undermining cultural practices, spiritual relationships, and ways of life. From this perspective, environmental degradation produces not only ecological damage, but also social and psychological harm. Experiences such as solastalgia, understood as the distress caused by environmental loss, illustrate how environmental change affects identity and well-being. Repairing ecosystems alone is therefore insufficient.¹¹ Sustainable peace requires repairing relationships between communities and their environments, as well as recognising different knowledge systems and understandings of harm.

A new legal approach in practice: Colombia

One of the most innovative examples of this shift can be found in Colombia’s peace process, particularly in the work of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). The JEP has taken a significant step by treating environmental harm not as incidental to conflict, but as part of its structural violence.

Through its jurisprudence, the JEP has recognised territories and other non-human entities as victims of the Colombian armed conflict and has interpreted environmental destruction as both ecological and cultural harm. It has incorporated Indigenous and Afro-Colombian knowledge systems into its legal processes, expanding the understanding of territory beyond land as property to a living relationship between communities, ecosystems, and identity.¹²

Importantly, this does not suggest that international law operates in isolation from domestic or local legal frameworks. Rather, institutions such as the JEP illustrate how international legal norms are interpreted, adapted, and developed in practice through their interaction with national and local contexts, Indigenous legal ontologies, and intercultural forms of participation. In this sense, environmental peacebuilding reflects not only the application of international law, but also its ongoing transformation through situated and legally pluralistic practices.¹³

This approach reshapes the legal understanding of environmental harm. It moves beyond a narrow focus on physical damage to encompass relational harm, shifts attention from isolated events to structural processes, and complements technical assessments with lived experience.¹⁴ Although rooted in the Colombian context, these developments offer broader insights into how international law might engage more seriously with community-based and relational understandings of environmental harm in other post-conflict settings.

Such an approach may strengthen the recognition of communities as active agents rather than passive victims, support the integration of local and Indigenous knowledge systems, and reinforce the connection between ecological restoration and social recovery. In this way, international law may evolve through its interaction with domestic, local, and hybrid legal practices into a more transformative framework for environmental peacebuilding, in which environmental protection becomes a central dimension of sustainable peace.

* This blogpost builds on the findings of the book chapter ‘Environmental Peacebuilding: New Paradigms’ in Second Edition of the Research Handbook on the International Law of Peace (Edward Elgar forthcoming) edited by Cecilia M. Bailliet. A pre-print of the full chapter is available at SSRN

1. Tobias Ide and others, ‘The Past and Future(s) of Environmental Peacebuilding’ (2021) 97 Interna^*tional Affairs 1 <https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa177>. ↩︎
2. Tobias Ide, ‘The Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding’ (2020) 127 World Development 104777 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104777>; Judith Verweijen and Kasper Hoffmann, ‘Dangerous Environments: Environmental Peacebuilding’s Technomoral Imaginary and Its Power-Knowledge Effects’ (2024) 29 Ecology and Society art23 <https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15391-290323>. ↩︎
3. Daniëlla Dam-de Jong and Britta Sjöstedt, ‘The International Legal Dimensions of Environmental Peacebuilding’ in Daniëlla Dam-de Jong and Britta Sjöstedt (eds), Research Handbook on International Law and Environmental Peacebuilding (Edward Elgar Publishing 2023) <https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789906929.00007> ↩︎
4. Eliana Cusato, The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law (1st edn, Cambridge University Press 2021) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108939812> ↩︎
5. Britta Sjöstedt, ‘Protecting War’s Unseen Environmental Damage’ (2025) 94 Nordic Journal of International Law 24 <https://doi.org/10.1163/15718107-94010003>. ↩︎
6. Karen Hulme, War Torn Environment: Interpreting the Legal Threshold (Brill | Nijhoff 2004) <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047405344>. ↩︎
7. Britta Sjöstedt and Karen Hulme, ‘Re-Evaluating International Humanitarian Law in a Triple Planetary Crisis: New Challenges, New Tools’ (2023) 105 International Review of the Red Cross 1238 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383123000449>. ↩︎
8. Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’ (2013) 34 Third World Quarterly 763 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.800750>. ↩︎
9. Cymie R Payne, ‘The Norm of Environmental Integrity in Post-Conflict Legal Regimes’ in Carsten Stahn, Jennifer S Easterday and Jens Iverson (eds), Jus Post Bellum (1st edn, Oxford University PressOxford 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685899.003.0026>. ↩︎
10. Karen Hulme, ‘Assessing the Contribution of Human Rights Actors to Environmental Peacebuilding’ in Daniëlla Dam-de Jong and Britta Sjöstedt (eds), Research Handbook on International Law and Environmental Peacebuilding (Edward Elgar Publishing 2023) <https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789906929.00019>. ↩︎
11.  Glenn Albrecht and others, ‘Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change’ (2007) 15 Australasian Psychiatry S95 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288>. ↩︎
12. Belkis Florentina Izquierdo Torres and Lieselotte Viaene, ‘Una Im-Posibilidad Legal. El Territorio-Ser Viviente, Víctima Del Conflicto Armado Colombiano. Algunas Reflexiones Desde Un Diálogo Colaborativo Interdisciplinar’ [2024] EUNOMÍA. Revista en Cultura de la Legalidad 72 <https://doi.org/10.20318/eunomia.2024.9001>. ↩︎
13. Britta Sjöstedt, ‘From Environmental Harm to Ecological Reconciliation: Rethinking Environmental Peacebuilding through International Law’, (2026) Ecology and Society. ↩︎
14. Belkis Izquierdo Torres, and Abello Jiménez, A. E. 2024, El impacto del pluralismo jurídico en la calificación jurídica de la JEP. In La JEP vista por sus jueces. Bogotá: Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz. ↩︎