Description
Despite rising interest in the criminalisation of ecocide on the part of states in the Global South, international organisations and global civil society, as well as prominent claims of ecocide by the Ukrainian government, the concept has received little sustained attention in International Relations. Drawing on debates in international law and genocide studies, this paper theorises the role the international plays, as a generative structural context, in producing ecocidal formations. Where contemporary accounts of ecocide have often explored its dynamics in particular cases, the international relations of ecocide opens the possibility of exploring the complex relationship between ecocide’s distinct historical expressions. To substantiate these claims, the latter half of the paper then turns to the origins of ecocide in the Vietnam War, arguing that international conditions were central in the emergence of two key trajectories of ecocide. By examining the strategy of herbicidal warfare employed by the US as well as the emergence of the concept of ecocide, first used by scientists in protest against herbicides’ use and proliferation, I show how transformations in international politics simultaneously drove a globalisation in awareness of ecological harm as well as attempts by successive US administrations to limit ecocide’s moral and legal force.
