Issues

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Call for Essays: Climate Change and Peace

Under the guest editorship of Richard Matthew, PhD (Director, Center for Unconventional Security Affairs and Professor, Planning, Policy and Design, University of California Irvine), Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice is dedicating part of issue 25(4) to exploring the linkages between climate change and peace. 

Since the publication of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, efforts to define and investigate climate change in relation to security have received significant attention from both the academic and practitioner communities.  For example, in 2009, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon released Climate Change and Its Possible Security Implications. This report identified five ways in which climate change may be linked to international security by: increasing human vulnerability to things like water and food insecurity; obstructing and undermining economic development; increasing the risk of violent conflict; displacing people or posing an existential threat to some states, such as those that could literally disappear under sea level rise; and contributing to international tensions by overwhelming bilateral and multilateral forms of cooperation in areas such as shared water basins. 

While much analysis and debate has focused on whether and how climate change might contribute to insecurity, instability and violent conflict, some thought also has been given to the question of whether climate change mitigation and adaptation can strengthen peace and peacebuilding. In fact, the United Nations report mentioned above suggests that adaptation and mitigation projects might function as “threat minimizers” in places vulnerable to adverse climate change effects. 

This special issue seeks papers that explore the real and potential linkages between climate change and peace. Is developing this linkage desirable, or should the peace community be wary of it? Is there a new nexus for peace that must focus on the complex relationships among climate, food, water, and energy? Should climate change become an explicit focus of peacebuilding and humanitarian operations? If climate change is ignored, is peace at risk? What can peace mean in places experiencing “double exposure:” places where social systems have been devastated by violent conflict and where ecosystems have been affected by climate driven disasters, such as drought? Does climate change affect critical relationships such as between women, war, and peace or between refugees, war, and peace? How should we think about peace and justice for those communities where climate change poses an existential risk—such as many small island states? How do we grapple with the implications of the worse case scenarios of global climate catastrophe? What if climate change effectively restructures the world into largely incommensurable populations of climate change winners and climate change losers? How, in short, does climate science affect peace and our perceptions of peace?

Interested writers should submit essays (2500-3500 words) and 1-2 line bios to Peace Review no later than July 15, 2013.  Essays should be jargon- and footnote-free, although we will run Recommended Readings. Please refer to the Submission Guidelines.

We publish essays on ideas and research in peace studies, broadly defined. Essays are relatively short (2500-3500 words), contain no footnotes or exhaustive bibliography, and are intended for a wide readership. 

Please direction further questions or concerns to:

Special Editor Richard Matthew

Professor, University of California Irvine

Email: rmatthew@uci.edu

SEND ESSAYS TO:

Robert Elias (Editor in Chief)

Erika Myszynski (Managing Editor)

Email: peacereview@usfca.edu



Subject Line: Climate Change & Peace

Recent Peace Review Issues:

Fall 2013 (Vol 25, No 3) From Victims to Occupy Movements    
Summer 2013 (Vol. 25, No 2) The Psychology of Warmaking     
Spring 2013 (Vol 25, No 1) Projecting Peace
Winter 2013 (Vol 24, No 4) Can Cyprus be Solved?
Fall 2012 (Vol 24, No 3) Children in Armed Conflicts
Summer 2012 (Vol 24, No 2) General Issue
Spring 2012 (Vol 24, No 1) Human Rights Education Praxis
Winter 2012 (Vol 23, No 4) Cambodia's Genocide and Tribunals
Fall 2011 (Vol 23, No 3) Prisons, Social Justice, and Peace 
Summer 2011 (Vol 23, No 2) The Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Vanquished War, A Consolidating Peace?
Spring 2011 (Vol 23, No 1) Toward a More Socially Responsible Psychology
Winter 2011 (Vol 22, No 4) Inequalities in the World System
Fall 2010 (Vol 22, No 3) Memorializing Space
Summer 2010 (Vol 22, No 2), U.S. Military Bases Abroad
Spring 2010 (Vol 22, No 1), The New Arms Race in Space
Winter 2010 (Vol 21, No 4) Special Topics
Fall 2009 (Vol 21, No 3) Post-Genocide Rwanda
Summer 2009 (Vol 21, No 2) Imaging War
Spring 2009 (Vol 21, No 1) Hybrid Political Orders and Peacebuilding
Winter 2009 (Vol 20, No 4) North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
Fall 2008 (Vol 20, No 3) Citizenship & Social Justice
Summer 2008 (Vol 20, No 2) Darfur
Spring 2008 (Vol 20, No 1) Literature, Film & Human Rights
Winter 2007 (Vol 19, No 4) Academic Repression & Human Rights
Fall 2007 (Vol 19, No 3) Environmentalism
Summer 2007 (Vol 19, No 2) The Concept of War
Spring 2007 (Vol 19, No 1) Land Rights & Conflict
Winter 2006 (Vol 18.4) Democracy, Torture and Double Standards/ Global Women's Rights Forum/ Art as Witness
Fall 2006 (Vol 18, No 3) Nonproliferation and Disarmament
Summer 2006 (Vol 18, No 2) Military Dissent
Spring 2006 (Vol 18, No 1) Human Rights in the Americas
Winter 2005 (Vol 17, No 4) War and Peace in the Media
Summer & Fall 2005 (Vol 17, No 2 & No 3) Globalization & LGBT (Double-issue)
Winter 2005 (Vol 17, No 1) Psychological Interpretation of War
Winter 2004 (Vol 16, No 4) Underground Youth Movements
Fall 2004 (Vol 16, No 3) Law and War
Summer 2004 (Vol 16, No 2) Asian American Issues
Spring 2004 (Vol 16, No 1) Women and Security
Winter 2003 (Vol 15, No 4) Patriotism
Fall 2003 (Vol 15, No 3) Ubantu - Humane Solutions from Africa
Summer 2003 (Vol 15, No 2) Artists of Resistance
Spring 2003 (Vol 15, No1) Israel and Palestine
Winter 2002 (Vol 14, No 3) Immigration
Fall 2002 (Vol 14, No 3) Forgiveness and Reconciliation
Summer 2002 (Vol 14, No 2) - Utopias
Spring 2002 (Vol 14, No 1)- The Future of Peace Studies
Winter 2001 (Vol 13, No 4) - The Death Penalty
Fall 2001 (Vol 13, No 3) - Social Justice Movements and the Internet
Summer 2001 (Vol 13, No 2) - Literature and Peace
Spring 2001 (Vol 13, No 1) - Contested Society in Northern Ireland

For a list of authors and essays from these and other issues, please look at the list of all essays.

Some Reviews of the Journal:

2007 Utne Independent Press Award Nomination for International Coverage
Peace Review is included in the nominees for the magazine’s 2007 Independent Press Awards, which honors the very best in independent media from the pool of more than 1,300 sources Utne uses to cull its content.

Project Censored Award Winner, 2000
For the year 2000, Peace Review was awarded Project Censored's Top 25 Most Censored Stories for not merely one but two of its essays. Both articles were rated in the Top 14 Stories, and both of which appeared in the June 1999 issue.

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