- Convenors:
-
Devrim Eren
(Humboldt University of Berlin)
Luis Rubén González Márquez (Tulane University)
Malika Chatterji (Blue Moon Law Liberation Collective)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
Traditional panel with 4–5 presentations, followed by moderated discussion and audience Q&A to foster interdisciplinary dialogue.
Long Abstract
This panel explores environmental justice (EJ) within the ongoing realities of settler colonialism and environmental destruction. While EJ has traditionally focused on inequities in pollution and access to resources, such frameworks often underplay the colonial structures that produce environmental harm and dispossession. Settler colonialism is not a historical backdrop but an enduring structure that shapes land governance, extraction, and environmental policy, often under the guise of sustainability or conservation.
We invite contributions that critically engage with how Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities resist environmental violence through land defense, place-based knowledge, and alternative ecologies. What does justice look like when land is not property but kin? How do environmental struggles expose the intersections of racial capitalism, colonial governance, and ecological degradation? Themes may include Indigenous sovereignty and land defense, extractivism and green colonialism, conservation as colonial practice, more-than-human justice, and abolition ecologies. We also welcome reflections on art, narrative, and speculative approaches to imagining decolonial environmental futures. This panel aims to foster dialogue between scholars, activists, and practitioners committed to centering anti-colonial politics in political ecology. Together, we ask: how can environmental justice account for and challenge the enduring structures of settler colonialism?
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
This essay critiques colonial conservation through the Traffic Light Displacement Model, advocating Indigenous-led, relational, and ethical futures. It challenges dominant narratives and calls for political ecology rooted in justice, story, and sovereignty.
Presentation long abstract
This essay introduces the Traffic Light Displacement Model (TLDM) to critique how colonial conservation practices continue to displace Indigenous peoples from their lands under the guise of environmental protection. Drawing on global case studies and Indigenous scholarship, it exposes how protected areas often reproduce red (exclusion), amber (conditional access), and green (symbolic inclusion) forms of displacement. The manuscript challenges dominant conservation narratives that erase Indigenous sovereignty and relational worldviews, arguing that ethical conservation must be Indigenous-led, place-based, and grounded in justice. By weaving together stories of resistance, policy critique, and decolonial alternatives, the essay contributes to political ecology’s commitment to pluralism, accountability, and transformation. It calls for conservation futures that honour Indigenous knowledge systems, uphold land rights, and foster reciprocal relationships with Country. This work speaks to the conference’s theme by foregrounding the diverse origins of conservation conflict and imagining multiple futures rooted in Indigenous resurgence and ecological care
Presentation short abstract
Our presentation seeks to reconcile two often-fractured understandings of Israeli settler colonialism: its intrinsic drive for elimination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and its ongoing expansionist strategy which fosters dependency and ensures its gradual integration in the region.
Presentation long abstract
Our presentation seeks to reconcile two often-fractured understandings of Israeli settler colonialism: its intrinsic drive for elimination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its ongoing expansionist strategy, which fosters dependency and ultimately ensures its gradual integration within the broader region. Using the water-energy infrastructural nexus in Jordan as a focal point, the presentation introduces a new analytical framework centered on three pillars—settler-colonial power, Washington-led international interventionism, and regional diplomacy. It argues that taken together these enable Israel to extend its colonial project beyond territorial borders, and to capture more far-flung territories and populations through energy and water infrastructure deals, thereby reshaping regional power dynamics in ways that have been underexplored in prior scholarship. The study is based on an examination of three intertwined infrastructural projects: the water arrangements established under the 1994 Wadi Araba Peace Agreement, the 2014-16 Israeli-Jordanian gas deals, and the 2021 so-called Prosperity Project.
Presentation short abstract
Green colonialist renewable energy production entails aggressive land-grabbing schemes over marginalized territories and protected areas. This presentation examines the motivations and conditions driving indigenous resistance to these environmental injustices, using the case of Honduras after 2008
Presentation long abstract
After the 2008 world economic crisis, renewable energy production has become a new area of financialized territorial expansion. This has translated into renovated expressions of green colonialism that push for aggressive land-grabbing schemes over marginalized territories and protected areas across the globe. Usually, those same territories constitute the material and cultural base for the reproduction of indigenous communities. In the shadow of a push for capitalist decarbonization structures, the growth of renewable energy production has translated into displacement and dispossession for these groups. However, indigenous communities and their allies have placed resistance against it. This presentation addresses the case of indigenous communities' opposition to these projects in Honduras. For this, I integrate the insights of statistical and geographic data of renewable energy expansion (compiled by national and international organizations which sought to document these processes) after 2008, on one hand, and fieldwork conducted in 2023-2024 that engaged in dialogue with Lenca communities that mobilized against these forms of environmental injustice. Based on this, I reflect on the motivations and conditions for indigenous resistance against green colonialist speculative decarbonization projects, and the experiences and consequences of those who are currently mobilizing against them for their cultural and material survival.
Presentation short abstract
The struggle against settler colonialism through the occupation of urban spaces in a plurinational manner represents a milestone in rethinking urban political ecologies.
Presentation long abstract
In peripheral areas of global capitalism such as the Ecuadorian Amazon or the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, infrastructure projects are catalysing the white fence characteristic of settler colonialism processes. This presentation aims to show how these processes occur in contemporary times through complex processes involving new infrastructure that formally seek to involve local populations. At the same time, these infrastructures generate a process of space-whitening, which deepens the mechanisms of settler colonialism by shaping new forms of urban spaces around the accumulation of oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon or global tourism in mexican Riviera Maya. In these urban interstices, new subjects are emerging who demand a plurinational space in which to practise their ways of life in central locations close to infrastructure. New collectively owned neighbourhoods in the Ecuadorian Amazon and new forms of dispute over tourist symbolism in the Mayan ceremonial centres of the Yucatan Peninsula represent a theoretical transgression. Political ecologies have tended to analyse these processes far from their traditional corpus, where racialised populations have been reified to rural and jungle spaces. However, a task of decolonising political ecology involves considering the long histories and memories of indigenous peoples against the dispossessions of settler colonialism, while at the same time reformulating more broadly the tensions between urban proposals and social metabolism.
Presentation short abstract
The paper examines how indigenous smallholders in the Amazon secure land in a commodity frontier moment. Adding to the debate of indigenous land claims in Peru, it shows the micro-processes of how families rely on social networks to safeguard farming livelihoods and can thereby reshape land access.
Presentation long abstract
The North-Eastern Peruvian Amazon has long been subject to commodity frontier expansion driven by state interventions and international agricultural markets. Increasing shortage and commodification of land has put the livelihoods of marginalised indigenous smallholders at risk. While there are rich accounts on how indigenous people oppose the state and demand forest rights on a collective level in Peru, this paper follows family histories from two villages to explore their micro-level efforts to find land for farming in a changing socio-economic context. Empirically, the paper draws on in-depth household studies using semi-structured interviews, participant observation and transect walks. The Findings show that individuals and households juggle between market- and non-market ways of finding land, with the former becoming increasingly important in a commodity frontier. It explores and discusses the centrality of social networks in acquiring land and lays out how respondent households safeguard farming livelihoods while customary and traditional access to resources is challenged. The paper thereby lays out how local actors reshape land relations in a commodity frontier moment. These land relations deviate from those envisioned and deployed by the state (private property) and assumed in relation to agricultural commodity markets. The paper particularly draws on access analysis to address what it means to find and have land for these indigenous smallholders and pays attention to the spatial, social and temporal dynamics of land access in a commodity frontier. Forests and particularly secondary forests as traditional land use practices is part of this complex picture on access.
Presentation short abstract
The UNESCO World Heritage Convention was established in 1972. Since then, “World Heritage” status has been associated with sites that are regarded as of “outstanding universal value”. But, who decides what “value” means, and what kind of “evidence”, motivations and worldviews inform this?
Presentation long abstract
The UNESCO World Heritage Convention was established in 1972 and came into effect in 1976. Since then, “World Heritage” status has been used as a symbol that legitimizes the quality of conservation in sites that are regarded as of “outstanding universal value”. But, who gets to decide what “value” means in this context, and what kind of “evidence”, motivations, discourses and worldviews are taken into account in decision-making processes that inform nomination and inscription processes? There is no clear definition of what “outstanding universal value” means, which results in ambiguity in the implementation processes. It also makes one question how the intangible forms of heritage that are richly found within the African continent are accounted for in the definition of “heritage”, as the one used by UNESCO focuses on tangible, man-made artefacts mostly found in the global North.
This paper uses the lens of iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa’s very first UNESCO World Heritage Site, to critique governance processes underpinning natural world heritage sites. Within iSimangaliso, conservation authorities seek to “re-wild” the site by re-introducing previously occurring plant and animal species to give tourists an experience of the wild. It is not clear how one can create or re-enforce a wilderness in an area that has been occupied by customary people since pre-colonial times. There is ambiguity about whether “outstanding universal value” is really about focusing economic value and/or conservation benefits; rather than about human-environment interactions on the ground.