Violent Environments: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris

Peluso, N. L.

ISBN 10: 0801487110 / ISBN 13: 9780801487118

Published by Cornell University Press, 2001

About this Item

This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has soft covers. Book contains pencil markings. In fair condition, suitable as a study copy. Library sticker on front cover. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,750grams, ISBN:9780801487118.

Seller Inventory # 2279302

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Violent Environments: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801487110
• ISBN 13: 9780801487118
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Fair
• Weight: 750 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Environment

About this title

Synopsis

Do environmental problems and processes produce violence? Current U.S. policy about environmental conflict and scholarly work on environmental security assume direct causal links between population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. This belief, a staple of governmental decision-making during both Clinton administrations and widely held in the environmental security field, depends on particular assumptions about the nature of the state, the role of population growth, and the causes of environmental degradation.

The conventional understanding of environmental security, and its assumptions about the relation between violence and the environment, are challenged and refuted in Violent Environments. Chapters by geographers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists include accounts of ethnic war in Indonesia, petro-violence in Nigeria and Ecuador, wildlife conservation in Tanzania, and "friendly fire" at Russia's nuclear weapons sites.

Violent Environments portrays violence as a site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and societies, yet connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations. The authors argue that specific resource environments, including tropical forests and oil reserves, and environmental processes (such as deforestation, conservation, or resource abundance) are constituted by and in part constitute the political economy of access to and control over resources. Violent Environments demands new approaches to an international set of complex problems, powerfully arguing for deeper, more ethnographically informed analyses of the circumstances and processes that cause violence.

About the Author

Nancy Lee Peluso is Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology and Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael Watts is Director of the Institute of International Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.