WILPF calls for feminism, demilitarisation, decolonisation, and degrowth in environmental peacebuilding
In collaboration with the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), WILPF contributed a white paper to a compendium of lessons learned, visions for, and recommendations towards the future of environmental peacebuilding. The project is ongoing and aims to deliver a strong, cogent message about the future of the field to the Stockholm+50 forum in June 2022. The full project will be available and launched on 1 February 2022 at the Second International Conference for Environmental Peacebuilding. For now, the organisers are sharing the 50 contributions to the compendium in the weeks leading up to the conference.
In their joint submission, WILPF and CEOBS argue that to be sustainable, conflict prevention and transformation would benefit from a structural root cause analysis informed by feminism, demilitarisation, decolonisation, and degrowth economics. The capitalist growth imperative, perpetuated by militarization, is intrinsically colonial, requiring new frontiers from which to extract value, sustaining the dominance of the Global North over the Global South. The degrowth movement focuses on reducing the world’s consumption of energy and material goods in a way that is globally just, while accounting for inequalities created by colonialism and capitalism. Intersectional feminist peace activism is informed by anti-racist and anti-colonial perspectives and complements values of the degrowth movement and the aims of EP. Feminist perspectives to degrowth and EP are essential to preventing women from shouldering the burden of social reproduction in a down-scaling economy. Feminist peace activism also addresses the effects of militarization, linking the political economy of violence with the capitalist growth imperative and global inequalities.