THE ‘ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS OF ARMED CONFLICT’: RETHINKING INTERNATIONAL LAW, JUSTICE, AND REMEDIES

Abstract

Until now, international law and scholarship have paid little attention to the environment-conflict relation, through a focus on egregious environmental damage caused by means and methods of warfare and natural resource plunder. This narrow focus leaves unaddressed the more indirect ways in which violent conflict entails environmental harms, thereby exacerbating vulnerabilities and insecurity. The present dissertation claims that a broader theoretical perspective should be engaged and that, accordingly, the role of international law and institutions should be reassessed. This analysis will illuminate some of the assumptions about the environment and its relation to armed conflict that have shaped extant approaches and expose the value and constraints of available doctrines and processes for legal accountability. In so doing, this study will enrich current understandings and suggest ways of rethinking the discipline’s engagement with the environment-conflict nexus, including through a reconceptualization of remedies and a renewed attention to the root-causes of conflict.