Description
With the rise of the 'environment' as an issue of post-20th-century politics, human-nature relations have been examined to address ecological ‘crises’. In this context, sustainability and its derivatives have been widely debated in their capacity to deliver social, economic, and environmental benefits, and in their potential to perpetuate environmental business-as-usual, patterns of inequality and marginalisation. At the same time, notions such as 'environmental security', 'environmentally-induced conflicts', 'socioenvironmental conflicts', 'environmental peacebuilding', or 'conflict impacts on the environment' are utilised to describe the intersection between environmental change and violence. This field is also in question, critiqued for essentialist readings of human-environment relations and the obscuring of various knowledges, practices, and imaginaries that comes into play when nature is part of conflict politics.
This paper provides a critical approach to sustainability and conflict-environment narratives. It examines how internationally backed sustainability discourse is reformulated nationally and locally, becoming a tool for socio-territorial control in conflict settings. Forestry, decarbonisation, natural resource use, the 'green' economy, or biodiversity conservation are some examples of these reified 'sustainability' narratives creating the discursive conditions for socio-political and economic security measures on the ground.
Through the case of the Zapatista conflict (Chiapas, Mexico), I explore how governmental actors find reinforce their legitimacy, build political mobilisation, and construct sympathetic external networks as counter-insurgency tools, using sustainability discourses. Drawing on Foucault-inspired environmental discourse analysis, I reflect on how ecological policy-making is entwined with the politics of violence, the governance of the social, and territorial control. I also explore how resistance movements – in this case, the Zapatistas – also find discursive resources in environmental narratives linked to justice, rights, and global-to-local community.
