Expanding peace ecology: peace, security, sustainability, equity, and gender

Abstract

This introductory chapter reviews the conceptualization of peace and ecology and the efforts in the scientific literature to link both areas. The authors expand upon the conceptualization of peace since the 1980s and the widening of the ecology concept from the natural to the social sciences, and then discuss linkages between peace and different ecological approaches of deep, human, social, geographic and political geoecology and ecofeminism. They then contextualize from a peace research perspective the expansion of the ecology concept to a ‘political geoecology’ and a ‘civic ecology’, linking security, equity, sustainability, gender and peace. They conclude with an overview of the subsequent eight chapters in this volume.