More than Connecting the Gender Dots: Exploring a Deep Relations Approach in Environmental Peacebuilding

Abstract

This article proposes a paradigm shift in environmental peacebuilding beyond the peaceful distribution of resources, cooperative approaches and integrative frameworks and offers a feminist-relational approach that puts relations between men and women, communities and ecosystems at the centre of peacebuilding. Three disconnects mark environmental peacebuilding currently. Firstly, cooperation remains largely between state or elite actors. Secondly, environmental peacebuilding neglects gender and the differential impacts of climate-induced conflict, where women more frequently experience food insecurity, gender-based violence and increased care work. Lastly, when gender is included, it is conflated with women who are simply added to human rights-based frameworks without addressing power imbalances. In contrast, a deep relational approach foregrounds the historical-political situatedness, quality, effects and pluriversality of relations rather than actors. To challenge the actor-centric nature of environmental peacebuilding, I draw on African and indigenous feminist perspectives and a case study of the Karamoja Cluster (in Uganda and Kenya specifically) to illustrate why contexts where gender roles, cattle-rustling, climate crises and conflict intersect should be read through a deep relational lens.

Introduction

Conflict affects the security of all beings – humans, animals, plants, culture, institutions, the planet and even the spiritual world. However, most of the field of International Relations (IR) ‘has simply taken the environment for granted as the context for the rivalries of states that are its subject matter, and as such ignores the huge transformations of both natural and human systems currently underway’ (Dalby, 2022, p. 3). Similarly, work on human security has been slow in recognizing our changing relationship to the environment in the context of the Anthropocene, although climate change as a security threat paradoxically features high on global agenda.

The relational turn in IR (Escobar et al., 2024; Kavalski, 2023; Kurki, 2022; Trownsell, 2022) is therefore a welcome development, albeit with a mixed uptake – ranging from radical decolonial and cosmological interpretations (e.g. Escobar et al., 2024; Kurki, 2022; Rojas, 2016; Trownsell, 2022) to more conventional reinterpretations in peace and security studies for human actors in conflict-affected contexts (Jarstad et al., 2023; Torrent, 2022). Several other earlier peace and security literatures have had relational underpinnings, although they were not made explicit in the context of relationalism. For instance, hybrid and local peacebuilding scholarship (Mac Ginty, 2010; Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2013) also implicitly engages with relations between locals and external interveners. Recent work on peacebuilding has included a more explicit relational, place-based and indigenous perspective (Brigg et al., 2022). In similar vein, scholarship on gender and peacebuilding has made gender-relational contributions (e.g. Duncanson, 2016; Hudson, 2021) but few have ventured into linking gender, peacebuilding and indigenous contexts (e.g. George, 2017). All feminist work is always already relational, but postcolonial, poststructuralist and decolonial feminist perspectives in particular ‘have always foregrounded relations yet have not been seriously labelled relational’ (Klasche & Poopuu, 2023, p. 2), in the present relational turn.

It is against this backdrop that I look at the relations between gender and environmental peacebuilding. Environmental peacebuilding is a relatively new field with scholars focussing on the evolution of the field (Ide et al., 2021), conceptual pitfalls (Ide, 2020), cooperation (Ide, 2019), integrated conceptual frameworks (Dresse et al., 2019) and lately local and indigenous approaches (Amador-Jimenez et al., 2024; Hachmann et al., 2023; Sändig et al., 2024). Although environmental peacebuilding is a growing field with diverse themes, the link with gender remains underdeveloped. This gap can be explained in terms of three disconnects which mark environmental peacebuilding practice and scholarship currently. Firstly, the field is preoccupied with cooperation between state or elite actors. Secondly, environmental peacebuilding neglects gender and the differential impacts of climate-induced conflict, where women more frequently experience food insecurity, gender-based violence and increased care work. Lastly, when gender is included, it is conflated with women who are simply added in top-down fashion to liberal human rights-based frameworks without challenging structural power imbalances (see Fröhlich & Gioli, 2015). In the same way that gender is grafted on to liberal peace frameworks, nature is relegated to the background as a site for human or intergovernmental interaction.

With these gaps in mind, the article seeks to challenge the actor-centric and narrow humanist nature of environmental peacebuilding, offer a conceptual framework for seeing many worlds beyond the human, and create awareness about the relational ways in which we produce knowledge and experience other ways of knowing. Such an alternative approach could potentially help address hugely complex globally dispersed and locally felt predicaments of climate change, conflict and gender injustice.

I argue that a paradigm shift in environmental peacebuilding beyond the peaceful distribution of resources, cooperative approaches and integrative frameworks is needed to connect gender, peace and the environment in a way that reflects a multi-species justice perspective (Castro Pereira, 2023). This means that peacebuilding practices should be guided by an inclusive ethics of care which pursues justice not only for women or people in general but also for non-human species and the broader natural world. For this purpose, I draw on African and indigenous feminist perspectives to propose a deep feminist-relational approach where the emphasis is not on the actors but on the quality, effects and historical-political situatedness of relations. My theoretical approach builds on the work of Klasche and Poopuu (2023), as it combines critical relationalism with decolonial feminist approaches, in particular indigenous feminism. This feminist commitment to deep relations means that the vision of relations is extended beyond human relations to include the planetary, while at the same time normatively recognizing racialized and gendered inequalities. The feminist-relational approach therefore fills important social justice gaps that straddle human and more-than-human worlds.

I operationalize this theoretical approach through a local African case study of the dynamic gender entanglements of cattle-rustling and environmental conflict in the Karamoja Cluster in East Africa. A deep ‘exploration of the local dimensions of climate-related conflicts and environmental peacebuilding’ (Sändig et al., 2024, p. 3) is necessary because ‘[t]he local environment is a place in which livelihoods, identities and relationships of power are actively made between people, other species and presences not visible to the human eye’ (Nalbo, 2024, p. 106). However, there are many versions of the so-called ‘local’ which should not be conflated with the ‘Indigenous’ – an equally pluralist and contextual concept. Indigenous cosmovisions vary across regions (e.g. Daoist and Buddhist philosophies in Asia; Ubuntu in parts of Africa; Allin Kaway in Peru; and Mauri Ora in New Zealand (Huambachano, 2018; Trownsell et al., 2022)) in how they understand the relationship between humans, non-humans and spirits. That said, most indigenous epistemologies are broadly characterized by an appreciation of ‘holism, interconnectivity, fluidity and multiplicity of sources that includes the nonhuman’ (Nalbo, 2024, p. 109). Knowing involves engagement with both the physical and spiritual worlds where indigenous knowledge helps craft situated holistic understandings of the environment (Nalbo, 2024). Following this understanding, the article deepens this local empirical focus by demonstrating how multiple physical, economic, political, cultural and spiritual worlds co-exist at the local level in the Karamoja Cluster.

The article opens with a discussion of the key features of critical relationalism, highlighting how certain critical feminisms align with these broad normative principles. In the next section I take a critical look at environmental peacebuilding and suggest ways in which the field can move beyond a narrow focus on human cooperation. This is followed by an analysis of the connection between gender, peacebuilding and the environment. Here, I point out various conceptual slippages and highlight how a posthuman umbrella concept can shift the focus away from a Western-Eurocentric humanism towards an appreciation of a more holistic understanding of the entanglement of social and material worlds. In the penultimate section, I illustrate the entanglement of these concepts by looking at a variety of relations in the local context of the Karamoja Cluster (specifically Uganda and Kenya) regarding cattle-rustling practices and beliefs. In the conclusion, I reflect on the value of the deep feminist-relational lens for making sense of pluriversal worlds in the Global South, with some reflection on its policy implications.

Feminist-Relational Ontologies

Feminism in all its forms has always been regarded as a relational theory for its focus on gender power relations and the ways in which the divide between the private and the public sphere of life has been challenged. However, recent debates in the Global North on the ‘relational turn’ have neglected these feminist contributions. I contend that environmental peacebuilding has much to learn from the relational insights of critical Black/postcolonial/decolonial (Crenshaw, 1991; Ling, 2019; Lugones, 2010) and indigenous (Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Inoue, 2018; Ramirez, 2023) feminisms. In this section, I therefore outline the key features of a critical relationalism while drawing inspiration from the above-mentioned feminist-relational scholarship.

Firstly, relationalism is an ontological approach, as it engages with the study of being (Trownsell, 2022). It broadly reflects two opposing approaches. Informed by the principles of the Enlightenment and the celebration of human reason, the first is an actor-centred atomistic and hierarchical way of relating, or a substantialist approach (Kavalski, 2023) where human actors’ sovereignty trumps everything else. The second approach is radically relational and argues that humans have always been interwoven with an infinitely complex web of human and non-human materialities and worlds, thereby suggesting a flatter ontology. A defining factor of a deep relational approach is that relations and not actors take centre stage as relations and processes precede the existence of actors (Klasche & Poopuu, 2023). Actors are therefore not pre-given, discrete, fixed and imbued with an inherent essence like in a substantialist approach, but rather defined by their fluid interrelations to each other. For global politics it means that actors such as states, social structures (e.g. security and economic institutions) and individuals lose their privileged position (Trownsell et al., 2022) to dynamic relations through which actors come into being. These processes of relating involve a thick web (Kavalski, 2023; Kurki, 2022) where human and non-human actors are entangled and mutually constituted.

As already mentioned, many non-Western indigenous philosophies such as Asian, Pacific and African cultures have contributed to relational thinking (Kavalski, 2023; Kurki, 2022) in different ways, but share a commitment to a multi-species community and ecological ethics (Mitchell, 2014). African Ubuntu, for instance, regards ‘personhood as a process of becoming through time and with responsibilities to the living, the dead and the yet to be born’ (Koggel et al., 2022, p. 11). Indigenous feminisms represent the most expansive and radically decolonial understanding of relationalism, associated with indigenous struggles to protect multiple worlds such as lands, forests, water, mountains, knowledge and ways of being through a methodology of creative listening and speaking (Inoue, 2018).

Secondly, relationalism is marked by a commitment to dismantle the society-nature binary, guided by ‘a worldview insisting on our interdependency rather than our independence’ (Klasche & Poopuu, 2023, p. 6). Accordingly, the unmaking of modernist binaries such as idea and matter, agency and structure, culture and nature, theory and practice, and secularism and religion (Kurki, 2022) is necessary since an atomistic or separatist approach leads to ‘ontological reductionism, exclusion and domination’ (Trownsell, 2022, p. 804). A case in point is the separation between the secular and the divine, which imposes a hierarchy of the secular over the non-secular, leading to partial understanding of complex (often gendered) conflicts, especially if women, gender and the sacred are all relegated to the private and so-called ‘cultural’ sphere.

With the entry of climate change, the limits of current environmental peacebuilding thinking are becoming evident. It relies almost exclusively on secular Western science concepts such as mitigation and adaptation, with little attention paid to religion and culture and the cosmological beliefs of local people. Linked to the point above about the reductionist and exclusionary effects of an actor-based approach, peacebuilding interventions and policy formulations then risk overlooking women’s indigenous responses to drought as well as the important role that women traditional healers play during conflict and climate crises, among others. This risk also highlights the fact that although relationalism has its foundations in world views, ontology cannot be separated from epistemology. African cosmovisions vary across countries. For instance, in Zimbabwe the Shona people believe in the existence of multiple worlds – the natural world provides the habitat for spirits and acts as the messenger from the spirit world to the world of humans. In Northern Ghana, these worlds manifest in the form of sacred groves, shrines, crops and animals used in rituals (Naamwintome & Millar, 2015). But what they share is a deep understanding and experience of the connectedness of these worlds at the ontological level and a practical sense that material and immaterial knowledge cannot be compartmentalized, both forming part of an interdependent knowledge system.

Such integrationist African relational worldviews dovetail with feminist-relational theorizing. The latter seeks to break down dichotomies of sex and gender, rationality and emotion, public and private, and personal and international (Butler, 1993; Enloe, 1990; Oyěwùmí, 1997) through the adoption of a gender-relational approach, where the social construction of a gendered world order is challenged. Relational feminisms therefore differ vastly from patriarchal androcentrism’s hierarchical, rational and substantialist stance.

Two theoretical constructs of relational feminism, namely, an ethics of care (Robinson, 2011; Ruddick, 1989) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), serve to bridge the binaries between categories. Firstly, a feminist ethics of care grounded in empathy and an appreciation of difference (David et al., 2024) treat relationships of domination and exclusion as flowing from local (e.g. the household) to global structures such as the global political economy and consequently impacting directly on the practices of care. Care is therefore not only a private matter confined to the family or local community but also a global political issue that is central to the survival and security of people (Robinson, 2020). If we extend the principle of care further, how states ‘care for’ their citizens impacts on the survival and well-being of not only humans but also the planet as a whole. In this reading peacebuilding and security practices are therefore the products of a complex web of shared relations of responsibility and a recognition of collective dependence and interdependence. Secondly, the feminist theory of intersectionality refers to ‘the interaction between gender, race and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power’ (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014, pp. 418–419). Intersectionality, if applied to the Anthropocene, needs to be stretched to include categories beyond the human (David et al., 2024). An indigenous version of intersectionality at once stretches and decolonizes Crenshaw’s humanist concept to include the more-than-human, that is, kinship between humans and all living things (domesticated animals, wildlife and nature). Beyond the familiar humanist identity categories of oppression (e.g. race, class, gender and sexuality), indigenous feminists also identify white supremacy, capitalism and settler colonialism as intersected social structures that severed the connection between indigenous peoples and land (Ramirez, 2023).

Thirdly, with reference to the plurality of African and other cosmovisions, relationalism is therefore also about dealing with multiple and different worlds or ontologies (human, natural, animal and spiritual) and different kinds of relationships (Kurki, 2022; Querejazu, 2022; Rojas, 2016). Because of this multiplicity or pluriversality, knowledge cannot be reduced to one single body of thought. Relationality thus recognizes difference as integral to our existence (Querejazu, 2022). In this way, relationalism offers an alternative to the coloniality of Western knowledge practices, going beyond just arguing that objects and actors are constructed through relations and remembering that relations ‘are constructed through colonial relations of power’ (Klasche & Poopuu, 2023, p. 5). However, my feminist-relational approach is not set up as a replacement for Western atomistic ways of knowing global and local environmental politics. This would risk the recolonization of knowledge through romanticizing relations as something with a particular essence. Instead, it is considered as one of many relational ways of thinking.

Fourthly, my framing of feminist-relationalism challenges anthropocentrism, where the logics of peace and security are framed around human subjects and their interests (Mitchell, 2014) and where human socio-political systems such as civil society, states, international and nongovernmental organizations are viewed as separate and in control of the non-human system (natural environment and technology) (Kavalski, 2023). In contrast, in a more-than-human framework, human actors are decentred to have symbiotic relations with non-human worlds. It follows then that a flat ontology is assumed, referring to a non-hierarchical system where the focus is on openness and exchange and seeing people as but co-producers of environmental peace and security. However, whereas non-hierarchical relations are the ideal, hierarchy and power politics do not disappear – humans will continue trying to control nature and one another. It is in this context that a critical feminist perspective steps in to maintain focus on those enduring power inequalities.

Lastly, the epistemological implications of a pluriversal relational ontology that decentres the human are that independent and universal human thought must make space for position – and context-bound human thought or epistemologies. Feminists such as Haraway (2016) have long claimed the need for situated knowledges. Multiple situated knowledges comprise emplaced knowledge, grounded in the practices, beliefs and rituals of indigenous communities located in specific concrete places. Life – broadly conceived in posthumanist terms – can only be meaningful if constructed from below, embedded in nature as well as local communities. Place in indigenous world views is where relationalism emerges through a process of co-becoming and regeneration. Place therefore has agency and shapes human actors through interactions and shared co-becomings (Bawaka Country et al., 2016), while the interactions between the human and the more-than-human continuously create and re-create space as place.

In sum, the deep feminist-relational approach that I propose for examining gender and environmental peacebuilding in African contexts foregrounds and challenges all oppressive relationships, sees the human self as constituted in and through social relationships with all others, and studies diverse relations, experiences and perspectives in context and through a normative commitment to a comprehensive ethics of care.

Environmental Peacebuilding: How Relational is Cooperation Really?

Environmental cooperation should not be seen as the entry point for environmental peacebuilding. It is narrowly human-centric and at odds with the dynamics of a changing world. Instead, I propose that cooperation should be preceded by a radical paradigm shift where the emphasis is not on who acts, but on the quality and kinds of relations in historical and political context.

Several prominent environmental peace scholars emphasize the importance of cooperation. For instance, Ide (2020, p. 1) defines environmental peacebuilding as ‘efforts aimed at building more peaceful relations through environmental cooperation, natural resource management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction’. Furthermore, cooperation is still largely institutional in nature, focussing on ‘intergovernmental cooperation and the effectiveness of international environmental institutions, such as the United Nations (UN) climate and biodiversity regimes’ (Castro Pereira, 2023, p. 4). Thus, what we see is generally a conservative political science or international relations perspective of human interaction at state level, neglecting to incorporate local knowledge. This way of doing keeps ontological and epistemological hierarchies of human control of/over nature, peace and conflict in place (Amador-Jimenez et al., 2024). All non-human matter and beings are lumped together and recrafted as ‘nature’ to serve as a background, site or stage for history which is the sole prerogative of humans (Lakitsch, 2023).

Moving from first generation environmental peacebuilding, incremental shifts towards more progressive thinking have emerged, but this has been relatively slow in the making. Second generation environmental peacebuilding turned to the intrastate level of analysis, becoming more reflective. Critical perspectives started questioning technocratic approaches and inattention to unequal power relations. Third generation environmental peacebuilding has turned to practice and interdisciplinary engagements (Ide et al., 2021). But, Ide et al. (2021) acknowledge that most of the research has followed top-down approaches. Although Gilmour (2024) claims that local and community-based approaches are becoming the norm, I concur with Dresse et al. (2019) that it is more likely that this shift towards putting the local at the centre has been prompted by pragmatism. Since environmental challenges are closely associated with state security and human survival, a top-down approach to cooperation has become the norm but has proven difficult to implement in specific conflict or post-conflict settings. This therefore necessitates downscaling ‘environmental cooperation to low politics’ (Dresse et al., 2019, p. 112).

A strong problem-solving slant becomes evident when environmental peacebuilding is described as comprising ‘the multiple approaches and pathways by which the management of environmental issues is integrated into and can support conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution and recovery’ (Ide et al., 2021, pp. 2–3). A focus on how communities can manage pooled natural resources implies that natural resource management is grafted onto neoliberal, secular and positivist conflict prevention, mitigation and resolution approaches, seeking technical solutions rather than addressing socio-political root causes (Ide, 2020; Tarusarira, 2022). For instance, the four mechanisms to connect environmental cooperation and peace (Ide, 2019) are strongly reminiscent of liberal-local hybrid peacebuilding. It starts with improving the environmental situation (similar to the stabilization-first principle); then trust around a common environmental challenge is fostered; followed by cultivating interdependence based on mutual gain; and ending with institution-building – a typical Western notion combined with rational actor thinking which assumes that ‘parties will prefer to engage in mutually beneficial cooperation … based on a cost-benefit calculation’ (Dresse et al., 2019, p. 103). Such kind of depoliticization (Ide, 2019, 2020) opens the door to a range of related negative effects, such as gendered and racialized discrimination which often becomes glaring when environmental peacebuilding interventions such as peace parks lead to the displacement of communities. For instance, in Kwandu Conservancy, Namibia, human–wildlife conflict generates direct and indirect effects related to food insecurity and physical safety, with women being more susceptible to these impacts (Khumalo & Yung, 2015).

Both Dresse et al. (2019) and Ide (2019) point out that the outcomes of environmental peacebuilding are context-dependent but the shift towards the local has not been without problems. How local is the local really? There are two kinds of approaches to local environmental peacebuilding – studies on the local dynamics and localization processes of top-down actions and studies on grassroots actions, for example, in Colombia, Ghana and Timor-Leste (Sändig et al., 2024). In the first approach, calling for community cooperation remains actor-oriented rather than deep relational. These actor relationships are often limited to relations between community organizations, the private sector and the state (Hachmann et al., 2023), with no acknowledgement of relations with the more-than-human. Such approaches mask hierarchies of knowledge and how local knowledge is coopted into global scientific agenda. In contrast, the second approach comes closest to a deep relational approach. Grassroots case studies could reveal empirical evidence of the material and spiritual values and knowledge humans attach to or derive from the environment, local power relations and communal narratives of environmental change (Sändig et al., 2024). It underscores that there is a link between plural world views, real-world practices and how the link between conflict, peace and environment is conceptualized (Amador-Jiminez et al., 2024).

Sändig et al. (2024, p. 12) warn against ‘overstating the potential of the local turn’. On the one hand, local communities are neither homogeneous, nor always inclusive – they mirror gender, ethnic, religious and social inequalities found in broader society. Not all local practices are good for the environment; it can be pragmatic – supporting deforestation as it brings economic benefits; using belief systems to explain environmental changes, for example, the Gods are angry; and not always gender sensitive and non-violent. But this is no excuse for not considering local beliefs – a critical deep relational approach is always messy as it engages with difference. On the other hand, the lines between the local and the global are blurred. The instrumentalization of local knowledge to serve global agenda and donor interests go hand in hand with the realization that the local is not ‘pure’, as the global is already imbricated within the local. One way to deal with this entanglement is to drive home the global nature of what people are experiencing locally. At the same time, linking global issues to people’s local everyday (in)security draws attention to the gendered, racialized, colonized and extractivist practices that exacerbate the effects of climate change on those in the Global South who did not cause climate change in the first place. Thus, ‘integrating complementary ways of seeing from above and from below into an interactive and relational practice of knowing’ (Amador-Jimenez et al., 2024, p. 47) also seems like a productive way of thinking through the connection between environmental peacebuilding and gender.

The Triple Nexus of Gender, Peace and Environment and How to Sidestep the Conceptual Traps

Environmental peacebuilding is a fundamentally gendered project where unequal gender relations can exacerbate conflict while fostering gender equity could support the achievement of sustainable environmental peacebuilding. Yet, despite a growing literature on gender, climate change, conflict and peace, what is lacking is a gender-sensitive conceptual framework for environmental peacebuilding where gender is not just a marker of identity but used as an analytical category (see Fröhlich & Gioli, 2015).

Mead and Jacobsson (2023) argue that the gender-peacebuilding and gender-environment nexuses are well established, but the triple nexus of gender-environment-peace/conflict is not. For instance, the Peacebuilding Commission Gender Strategy (2016) connects gender and peacebuilding, but does not mention the environment. The triple nexus is also sparsely included in high-level documents. The UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Resolution 2242 (2015) only makes a brief reference to climate change as a threat to international peace and security (Yoshida & Céspedes-Báez, 2021). UN WPS Resolution 2467 (2019) fleetingly connects illegal trade of natural resources and sexual violence. Despite the existence of a Joint UN Programme on Women, Natural Resources and Peace (Mead & Jacobsson, 2023), at the policy and institutional level, the WPS agenda has neglected the environment, and the environmental peacebuilding agenda has neglected gender, with both operating in isolation from each other (Kronsell, 2019; Yoshida & Céspedes-Báez, 2021).

Gender is inconsistently included in environmental peacebuilding research, while the empirical situation tells a story of glaring gendered impacts because of the combination of conflict and climate stress. Violent conflict affects women and girls proportionally more due to their unequal status and gender roles in many societies, and this situation is compounded by the effects of climate change (Seymour Smith, 2020). Climate change impacts human security in a myriad of interlinked ways, all with gender dimensions. Heatwaves, droughts and climate-related disasters harm agricultural productivity, affect food availability and the price of food. Women become more vulnerable to food insecurity due to their more limited access to basic livelihood resources (Ide et al., 2021). When land becomes inaccessible due to flooding or extreme droughts, as well as peacebuilding interventions such as dam projects, it leads to forced displacement (Cohn & Duncanson, 2020; Ide, 2020). This is made worse by the fact that women often do not have land tenure. During environmental disasters or periods of climate stress, women’s unpaid care work burden also increases. It often becomes their responsibility to cope with these stresses because they are considered the food managers, water procurers and carers for family and the ill (Cohn & Duncanson, 2020; Hakala & Hodges, 2024). UN Women (2023) reports that spending three to six hours per day on these activities takes time away from other employment and education. Walking longer distances to fetch water and firewood or find alternative food sources amplifies the risks for women of sexual and other forms of violence. Pastoralist groups also turn to child marriage as a survival strategy to obtain cattle and money via dowry payments (Ortiz & Ensor, 2023).

Women are simultaneously regarded as vulnerable victims of environmental pressures and resource managers or agents of environmental peacebuilding on the grounds that they possess knowledge and experience that can help to mitigate the effects of climate change (Ide et al., 2021; Seymour Smith, 2020), for example, through early warning. This presents a paradox. Women are excluded from community decision-making about climate change adaptation plans, yet ironically, they are often more knowledgeable about adaptation practices to climate change than men, partly because they have been forced to cope on their own (Hakala & Hodges, 2024) and tend to adopt innovative and preventative measures faster than men (Ortiz & Ensor, 2023). The way this discourse about women as saviours or better natural resource managers is framed, runs the risk of reifying this role of women. Indeed, as Kronsell (2019) points out, there are sex differences linked to climate attitudes and behaviours, but these qualities should not be essentialized. This will invariably place more responsibility on women to solve environmental problems through participating in environmental peacebuilding, in the same way that they are included in the security sector to make it more accountable. Kronsell (2019, p. 729) reminds us that these representations of women do not address ‘the gender and climate power problem’ where women’s access to land and resources is often determined by patriarchal cultural arrangements. The feminization of vulnerability to climate change depoliticizes gender power relations, masking structural injustice as ‘differential vulnerability’ (Kronsell, 2019, p. 727) and diverting attention away from other more deep-rooted causes of women’s precarity.

Thus, when a gender perspective is included in the environmental conflict and peacebuilding field, it is reduced to a narrow focus on women and a law-based approach to women’s rights as human rights, and a concomitant liberal emphasis on the individual (Yoshida & Céspedes-Báez, 2021). An individualist approach is also followed when adaptation and resilience to climate crises and environmental scarcity are framed as building the capacity of women. This approach pays lip service to women’s environmental knowledge and experience – implying that women are only allowed to enter the environmental peacebuilding arena for instrumentalist reasons, namely, to benefit the whole process. The framing of poor grassroots women as both agents and instruments sows the seeds of their disempowerment (Fröhlich & Gioli, 2015). In this way, women are inserted into an untransformed environmental agenda. This liberalist type of integration is what I refer to as shallow relation-making.

Women and gender are therefore conflated, presenting men and women as autonomous and homogenous identity categories, with little understanding of the mutually constructed and fluid nature of these roles. In what follows, I discuss three dimensions of a gender-relational perspective where gender is used as an analytical category and not just an identity marker. Firstly, gender itself is a relational construct, and gender roles are therefore defined in relation to each other – where changes in women’s role impact men’s roles and vice versa. The current lack of scholarly engagement with men and masculinities in the context of environmental peacebuilding is indicative of this gender-relational lacuna. A notable exception is the work of Francis (2024) who examines the role of thwarted masculinities when men are no longer able to perform some of their traditional gender roles, for example, as providers because of climate change (also see Myrttinen et al., 2015). Secondly, an intersectional gender-relational approach works against viewing people as belonging to simple homogenous identity categories. Differences in needs between rural and urban women, poor and middle-class women, women and men ex-soldiers or women and girls matter to ensure targeted funding in the post-conflict recovery period. Lastly, a deep feminist-relational approach also requires that social relations of power and inequality are extended to the relations between humans and other species and/or nature. Schwere’s (2020) analysis of human-camel relationships in the herding process in Somaliland is illustrative. The study found that this kind of interspecies cooperation depends on human-camel sociality and intersubjectivity where each actor uses their skills to interpret and respond to each other through empathy and the recognition of each other’s agency. The willingness of camels to be herded could not be enforced, and had to be negotiated through trust-building, among others.

The implications of expanding intersectionality to other species than the human are two-fold. Firstly, in the case of an environmental or climate-related event a posthuman intersectional lens reminds us that no single factor or actor can be dominant – human and non-human relations and material and non-material (e.g. spiritual) power structures are at once entangled and situated in place, offering us a view of a complex mix of agency and vulnerability. Secondly, a posthuman intersectional perspective reveals hidden spiritual and ecological harms to be considered alongside gendered, racialized and other harms. This implies that a human rights approach is insufficient. For a fuller more-than-human relational approach to take root, we therefore need a posthuman holism that can foreground an ecological rights and environmental justice perspective. Water, for instance, is no longer just a commodity but rather a living entity that has the right to exist, flourish and to be protected for its own sake. This notwithstanding, the rights of nature and the rights of women cannot be separated, because women become custodians of water, through their empowerment and recognition of their rights (see UN Women, 2023).

Thus, sustainable environmental peace is contingent on addressing root causes of conflict, namely, the violence of patriarchy, militarism, climate change and economic greed all at once. And to do that, simultaneously pursuing gender-just goals, economic transformation and a radical climate mind shift is necessary. The entry point for this is a deep feminist-relational approach that reevaluates men and women’s relation to nature. The implications for environmental peacebuilding are that the field should centre the spiritual dimensions of conflict and engage more with indigenous scholarship and take gender analysis beyond the liberal-feminist call for women’s participation in natural resource management. In practical terms it means feminist analysis holds governments and corporations accountable for environmental harm; linking justice to the insecurity of slow violence; and combining liberal-feminist rights education from above with indigenous feminism, traditional practices and joint action from below.

Toward a Deep Feminist-Relational Reading of Cattle-Rustling in the Karamoja Cluster

Although pastoralism and farmer-herder conflicts in parts of Africa are well researched, this article will use a feminist-relational lens to analyze human and more-than-human entanglements in the Karamoja Cluster (commonly known as the cattle corridor) and what environmental peacebuilding can learn from this case. The discussion in this section draws on three pillars of a deep feminist-relational approach, namely that relations are always historically and politically embedded in a specific place; relations rather than actors should be the focus; and foregrounding pluriversal posthuman relations will facilitate a more inclusive approach to peace.

The Historical-Political Situatedness of Relations

The first pillar deals with the fact that in a relational framework knowledge is always situated and embedded in the historical-political practices, beliefs and rituals of indigenous communities located in specific concrete places. The nature of the entanglements in the Karamoja Cluster therefore cannot be generalized to other cases but does point towards a broader sense of the forces at play in similar contexts. The Karamoja Cluster consists of the areas sharing borders between north-western Kenya, north-eastern Uganda, south-western Ethiopia and south-eastern Sudan. These are the Karamoja, Dodoth and Jie regions in Uganda, Turkana and West Pokot counties in Kenya, the Toposa from South Sudan and the Merille from Ethiopia. Communities living there are pastoralists, surviving in a harsh environment that is drought-prone, and marked by desertification, soil erosion and livestock disease (Odary et al., 2020) and because of its remoteness, the area is marginalized from the centres of power. More than 50% of livestock in Africa (mainly cattle, sheep and goats) can be found in East Africa (Okumu et al., 2023). These animals are therefore central to the politics of livelihoods in the Karamoja Cluster, making conflicts about access to water and land for grazing the fulcrum around which all frictional encounters revolve. Superimposed on this struggle for livelihoods, we have the traditional gendered practices of cattle-rustling for restocking of herds, wealth accumulation and marriage which embody a complex web of socio-economic and cultural factors (UNDP African Borderlands Centre, 2022) that not only sustains the practice but also drives the conflict. Added to the mix are changes in weather patterns with more frequent droughts linked to climate change, in Turkana for instance. This puts more pressure on communities (especially women) who are already burdened by conflict between the Turkana and the Pokot (Myrttinen et al., 2015).

Relations Matter More than Actors

This second conceptual pillar becomes clear when read through the contested views about pastoralism. The two opposing positions dovetail with the differences between a substantialist and a relationalist approach. On the one hand, the official government position argues that pastoralism is an outdated practice and blames pastoralism for some of the environmental degradation, calling for a reduction in the size of their herds to prevent overgrazing (Musau, 2021). In this view, the stakeholders are seen as pre-given entities that either fight or collaborate; with the lack of cooperation identified as the key problem. State interventions in the region have therefore included the establishment of peace committees for cross-border dialogue, disarmament and the facilitation of livestock movement through various formal interstate agreements in the name of cooperation (UNDP Africa Borderlands Centre, 2022). However, the structures devised to bring peace are conceived in static, separatist and top-down terms, underscoring why in Karamoja (Uganda), disarmament seems unsustainable in the long term – successful in the immediate post-disarmament period but with the influx of illicit small arms across the borders, seeing an increase in cattle-rustling. Long-term disarmament is further hampered by the fact that both men and women view guns as a sign of manhood and equate disarmament with men being reduced to women (Okumu et al., 2023). On the other hand, those in favour of pastoralism (see Musau, 2021) maintain that it is the best way to deal with the harsh climate, as pastoralism is about mobility and therefore best placed to deal with erratic weather patterns. Historically movement across borders relied on a symbiotic relationship between neighbouring communities who helped pastoralists, but the conflict disrupted these traditional pastoral practices. It not only impacted human survival but also animal health. With free cross-border animal movement curtailed, animals were corralled and overcrowding then led to the breakout of disease. In contrast to a more formal state-centric approach, this perspective represents a much more fluid and relational community-based understanding of cooperation from below where relations co-constitute the stakeholders.

Pluriversal Posthuman Relations

Building on the point that relations matter more than actors, the third pillar emphasizes the quality and types of entangled relations. In this regard I consider three types of posthuman relations, that is, gender-intersectional relations, human-animal-spirit relations and human-object relations. These ‘categories’ are by no means discrete. In fact, we should rather be talking about gender-animal-nature-spirit-object relations in the context of environmental peacebuilding. But for analytical purposes, I discuss them one by one.

Firstly, gender-intersectional relations remain important in a posthuman world as unequal patriarchal relations are an enduring part of the social fabric of the Karamoja Cluster (Kimani et al., 2021; Odary et al., 2020). Among the Pokot there is a strong gendered division of labour (men look after big livestock, women take care of the household including small livestock) (Musau, 2021), leading to gender-differentiated knowledge. In times of climate stress, Pokot women forage for alternative food sources, for example, herbs and wild berries that are seasonal, and only edible through specific preparation methods. During drought men apply their knowledge of the vast landscape to find pasture (Tanyag & True, 2019). The gendered division of labour is so deeply entrenched that strategies to curtail cattle-rustling practices, such as providing alternative non-violent livelihoods through agriculture, have so far not led to a change in gender norms (Kimani & Masiga, 2020). In (post)-conflict situations major changes in people’s material circumstances often lead to some change in gendered behaviour, whereas norms are much slower to change. In Karamoja (Moroto district), men preferred to do nothing rather than help women with agriculture and collecting firewood, as they felt that taking on women’s work would emasculate them (Watson et al., 2016).

As indicated before, intersectionality as a feminist tool highlights the fact that gender categories are not ‘pure’ or homogenous. For instance, women’s roles in the conflict in the Karamoja Cluster are highly ambiguous. They are victims of environmental pressures, patriarchy and cattle-conflicts, yet also play agentic roles in these conflicts and are therefore also (indirectly) complicit in environmental degradation. Women are not allowed to participate in the raid itself but transport and hide guns (Kimani et al., 2021). They use their agency to incite violence or make peace. Women actively encourage their men to engage in raids, thereby reinforcing militarist and hypermasculine gender norms. They do this through dance performances, preparing feasts after a successful raid and adorning men with jewellery for their bravery. Women also shame men who did not participate in the raid. In their capacity as nurturers, they further entrench the warrior culture when they prepare boys to handle firearms (Odary et al., 2020). While they also benefit from the raid as the animals increase wealth and social status, women justify their complicity as necessary to allow their sons to obtain cattle for marriage, as well as secure their daughters’ future in marriage and having children. Among the Turkana, the Pokot and the Karamojong a woman married to a man who cannot raid or does not have enough cows is free to leave him, giving her some power (Kimani et al., 2021; Odary et al., 2020). The paradox deepens when women express fear about retaliation, getting raped or losing their sons or husbands. When a warrior goes on a raid, he asks his mother to wear the belt called Loketio as protection. This belt is worn by women when they are pregnant to protect the unborn child (Kimani et al., 2021). This ritual also symbolizes women’s role as agents of peace. In 2020, women publicly removed the belts, symbolizing that they would not be active participants in the conflict any longer. Women also stopped attending the ceremonies to honour warriors after a raid (Schubiger & Ndunda, 2022). Women’s unique position of straddling different clans (i.e. maternal and marital) means that they can play a double-agent role (hiding warriors of one clan but also acting as spies for another clan warning them against an attack) (Kimani et al., 2021; Odary et al., 2020; Schubiger & Ndunda, 2022).

The intersection of multiple categories of oppression also becomes clearer when the gender-relational lens is stretched to include other forms of oppression, such as age. Only elderly women are allowed to perform rituals to protect warriors or be vocal about peace. Young women in search of husbands and social status tend to support cattle-rustling (Kimani et al., 2021; Schubiger & Ndunda, 2022). Young women therefore often endure more violence from husbands, men in rival ethnic groups and the military, and the environment. In a study among Pokot women, Tanyag and True (2019) found a seasonal correlation between drought, Female Genital Mutilation, child marriages and the perpetuation of cattle-rustling, all to ensure livelihoods.

Secondly, human-animal/interspecies relations are not only deeply gendered (beyond the division of labour where men take care of big livestock and women look after small livestock) but also link the spiritual worlds to everyday life. For instance, men in Somalia revere their camels as much as ‘their’ women, where Somali poetry often compares them to each other. This suggests a spiritual connection that only comes into focus when we use an extended posthuman intersectional lens to examine these relations. (Many other relationships between women and small livestock such as chickens, and the gendered effects and ethics of human-wildlife conflicts are implicated but fall outside the scope of this article). A complex web of relations is created when gender and cultural/spiritual worlds become entangled through human-animal encounters. In this regard Tarusarira (2017) argues that since cattle are part of the spiritual worlds, they need to be respected and not killed unless in self-defence or to provide food or sacrifice. One Pokot elder said in an interview that ‘[i]f you die in the footsteps of the animals, that is a good death’ (Tarurarira, 2022, p. 8). Animals are at the centre spiritually, but also economically as a source of livelihoods, and socially as they define mostly men’s political status in society in terms of wealth and the ability to pay bride-price. ‘Sacred cows’ therefore become sites where heroism, masculinity, kinship, community, rites, rituals and identity are entangled. To complicate matters further, the sacrosanct nature of some animals can exacerbate climate-induced conflict, as owners will protect these animals with their lives. On the flipside though, by being entangled with material issues of livelihoods, the spiritual dimension is integrated into everyday life and therefore loses its abstraction and could therefore serve as a ‘local model for the production and reproduction of human society in an immediate natural environment’ (Tarusarira, 2017, p. 408). African belief systems and indigenous knowledge should therefore form part of pluriversal worlds considered in environmental peacebuilding right from the start, as it will encourage local ownership.

A broadened interspecies understanding of intersectionality also draws attention to the harm inflicted upon cattle in the human conflict over resources, profit and prestige. In recent years, cattle-rustling has become more commercialized and has also been captured by transnational criminal networks. With the influx of small arms replacing spears, bows and arrows, the practice of cattle-rustling is now much more destructive in the Karamoja Cluster (UNDP African Borderlands Centre, 2022). Where livestock held a central position among the Pokot previously, stolen cattle are now traded for guns and money, and large herds are captured with little concern for the well-being of the animals (Kimani & Masiga, 2020). Similarly, as noted before, state attempts in the region to curtail cross-border animal movement meant that the cattle were corralled, and overcrowding caused the breakout of disease (Musau, 2021).

Lastly, the centrality of technologies and objects in this conflict and how they mediate human and human-animal relations underlines the fluid nature of cultural practices as well as gender and more-than-human identities. In the present context of ‘violent entrepreneurship’ (Okumu et al., 2023, p. 6), a gun culture has emerged that is tied to hypermasculinity, as observed by participants of a focus group: ‘The gun is more than a wife. This gun of mine is the reason why I have these cows and through it I can acquire more wealth’ (Okumu et al., 2023, p. 9). The centrality of guns has dislodged many traditions to the extent that the community no longer benefits from cattle-rustling; only the few individuals who participated in the raid share the spoils (Kimani & Masiga, 2020). Objects or technologies have therefore become a new player in this complex situation, displaying a posthuman agency of their own, with pervasive co-constitutive effects on the levels of violence and the quality of relations. Changes in control and ownership of cattle through the new ‘jujus’ of violence have impacted gender relations and the traditional division of labour. Widows and other women have taken up brewing and selling local beer, prostitution and hawking. Men have started building houses and doing gardening. Women have become players in the new business of cattle-rustling – operating as go-betweens, becoming financiers of activities and buying stolen stock (Kimani et al., 2021).

Western frameworks based on human actor collaboration can only take us so far. Under circumstances where both modern and traditional systems are in flux, a lens is needed that has the conceptual dexterity to juggle multiple differing world views alongside each other. Evidence from the East African case study demonstrates that gender as an analytical tool (as it intersects with social structures of exclusion as well as the more-than-human) offers an alternative and reimagined framework for understanding highly complex security and peace contexts on the continent.

Conclusion

The specific aim of this article was to challenge the narrow actor-centric and humanist nature of environmental peacebuilding and to offer an alternative posthuman-feminist reading of diverse relations that are entangled and co-constituted. More generally, my aim was to sensitize scholars and practitioners to the importance of focussing on relations at the conceptual and normative stage as this will invariably determine how environmental peacebuilding practices are enacted.

Throughout the analysis of the case study as well as across the whole article, I emphasized the post-anthropocentric features of deep relationalism. Putting relations between humans, animals, nature, the ancestors and objects at the centre (rather than focussing on the individual actors) was presented as a significant step towards positive peace. Yet, while the human is decentred, vigilance is still required not to pit men against women or Western against indigenous knowledge as this could lead to depoliticization and untransformed power relations. The case study also revealed the many (often conflicting) political economy, gender, cultural and religious vantage points which all should be given a space in a more inclusive analysis of these conflicts in the Karamoja Cluster. This drives home how the peculiar mix of these plural worlds is grounded in a specific place while also having broader significance for other case studies in the Global South.

The value of a deep feminist-relational lens lies in its intersectional elasticity and potential to facilitate a radical mindset change in how environmental peacebuilding is conceived and implemented. The intersectional feature of the lens serves to challenge human and structural injustice but is also flexible enough to trouble environmental (natural and animal-related) injustices while placing these oppressions in a broader historical, cultural and spiritual context. The lens therefore makes one think holistically about these issues. In this respect, the case study of the Pokot in Kenya demonstrates what can happen when nature is instrumentalized and cultural and spiritual beliefs are eroded. Environmental peacebuilders and policy makers therefore could use this relational approach to inform their interventions. One way to implement such a world view is to recognize cultural beliefs from below together with the political economy of conflict from above, as well as consider all the relations involved in climate change conflict – not just the human-to-human. Such a fundamental shift in thinking also implies that the peaceful distribution of resources and cooperative approaches – though useful – become secondary to more deep-seated relational planning and action.

Furthermore, a feminist-relational framework also espouses an ethics of care that extends to other species, nature and the planet. The value of this perspective for policy makers and peacebuilders is seated in the way in which care, caring and careful relations apply from the micro everyday grassroots level to the level of global and even planetary politics. If peacebuilders, practitioners and politicians are sensitized to seeing care as a collective responsibility beyond the home, there may be hope of future worlds where the pursuit of justice for humans does not happen at the expense of our deep relations with other species and entities.

However, changing mindsets do not happen overnight. In practical terms, challenging structural violence should therefore happen in tandem with addressing immediate insecurity and implementing policies that take the well-being of both people and the planet into consideration. Ideally, a deep feminist-relational lens for the planet foresees forms of cosmopolitan democracy, interspecies diplomacy and collaborative networks that transcend human cooperation. But for now, critically minded scholars should work with activists to raise awareness about our planetary interdependencies. The siloed scholarly practices across WPS and environmental peacebuilding fields could similarly benefit from a relational perspective, in the same way that UN, African Union and other regional organizations should more consistently and systematically take relational thinking on board. More grassroots case studies are also needed to show us what relations look like and what they do in specific contexts. But ultimately it starts with each of us and what kinds of relations we value – looking within, walking and talking with all others by including a diversity of relational perspectives, raising awareness about the possibilities and then doing it.