Description
Ten years ago, Burundian women’s organisations unsuccessfully framed their advocacy campaign for the right to access land and natural resources as a condition sine qua non for the implementation of the WPS agenda in the country. However, only five years after, UNSCR 2242(2015) recognised the substantial link between climate change, environmental protection and the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda. The same year, the UN Sustaining Peace agenda acknowledges the role of natural resources in driving and sustaining conflict and understands that climate change compounds this, and thus proposes to focus on good governance of land and natural resource management in resource dependent countries to avoid violence and insecurity. Since then, ecological peacebuilding initiatives have focused on centering indigenous women and their knowledge as the solution to environmental protection and resilience against climate change projects. Considering the burgeoning debates on the scope of the Women, Peace and Security agenda and drawing on critical Indigenous and eco-feminist studies on nature and the environment, this paper offers a contrapuntal analysis of these initiatives, their limits and possibilities. It does so by focusing on spatial, temporal and emotional features (Crawford and Hutchison 2016) of ecological security. It argues that indigenous women’s understandings of the spatial, temporal and emotional features of environmental protection reject assumptions on the capacity to govern or to plan for the future that the UN Sustaining Peace agenda seeks to achieve. Those understandings, however, get us closer to a more radical future of the WPS and its transformative potential.
