Research, part of a special feature on The Nature of Peace: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and its Implications for Environment and Livelihoods

INTRODUCTION

Environmental peacebuilding holds a simple but powerful premise: the environment provides a basis for building peace (Conca 2002). This holistic idea moves beyond a securitized view of the environment as a source of conflict, instead seeing it as a means to address problems of structural violence and social inequality (Conca 2002, Ide 2019). However, much existing environmental peacebuilding (EPB) literature focuses on addressing physical manifestations of environmental conflicts, i.e., social conflicts relating to, for instance, access to or control over the environment or from environmental processes (Le Billon 2015). Physical violence is part of a larger problem; deeper roots of environmental conflicts manifest as structural and cultural violences against humans and more-than-humans (Verhoeven 2011, Ide et al. 2021, McNeish and Shapiro 2021). Herein, we propose that to realize the true potential of EPB, the field necessitates a transformative approach that accounts for these different types of violences.

Environmental peacebuilding remains limited by rational choice and neoliberal paradigms (Dresse et al. 2019). Existing research demonstrates that EPB builds on discourse that reduces peacebuilding processes to the economic potential of natural resources, and in this view, peace is sustained through generating market value and revenue, securing economic livelihoods, and promoting trade and development (Bruch et al. 2016, Dresse et al. 2019). Symptomatic of this logic, EPB theory and practices largely promote peace through global capitalism and its doctrine of infinite economic growth. Research shows that this logic in peacebuilding only further contributes to climate change and re-produces violence in conflict-affected countries (Bliesemann de Guevara et al. 2023).

We build on these critiques within EPB by using conflict transformation as a theoretical tool for addressing root causes of environmental conflict and building peace. We deepen investigations in EPB with the concept of climate resilient peace (CRP). This brings together human and environmental well-being by addressing imbalanced power and resources and fostering positive, intersectional peace without further contributing to climate change (Nicoson 2021). Using this concept, we argue, provides a holistic understanding of the “what” for which EPB might aim, while conflict transformation theory offers the “how” (Rodríguez and Inturias 2018). Guiding this study, we ask: how can anti-extractivist movements transform environmental conflicts toward climate resilient peace? Empirically focusing on extractivism as a driver of environmental conflicts, we illustrate a system of violence that contributes to climate change and constitutes broad threats to the well-being of both humans and more-than-humans (e.g., Gudynas 2018, Krausmann et al. 2018, Krause et al. 2022). Using case studies of two anti-extractivist movements, we analyze how power of agency can tackle and transform a system of violence toward CRP. The empirical cases presented stem from qualitative fieldwork conducted in Puerto Rico and Brazil in 2022–2023. Although not comparative, the combination of these cases allows exploration of a diverse spectrum of extractivist activities and anti-extractivist practices. Both cases exist in countries colonized at the periphery of the global capitalist system, with modern economies dependent on extractive models. In addition, the concept of CRP initially orients toward the Global North; we go beyond this by troubling simplified, dichotomous views of what constitutes the Global North and Global South in addressing complexities of violent systems and peace processes (Magalhães Teixeira 2024).

Through this exploration of how anti-extractivism advances transformation toward CRP, we contribute to the field of EPB with both empirical and theoretical rigor. We respond to calls for empirically grounded theoretical development in more bottom-up approaches to environmental peacebuilding, departing from a focus on international organizations and state-led effects (Ide et al. 2021), understanding of peace “events” beyond war and violent conflict (Sharifi et al. 2020), and focus on underlying social inequalities and political struggles of environmental conflicts (Le Billon and Duffy 2018, Temper et al. 2018). Scholars further call for pluralizing the concept of environmental peacebuilding in terms of the actors involved (Hsiao et al. 2022) and broadening the cases studied. Critiques point to “street-light” biases in EPB literature, in which research repeatedly over-studies a small number of cases and focuses on countries in Africa (Adams et al. 2018), while “hotspots” direct political responsibility toward those in vulnerable situations, rather than to root causes of this suffering (Hardt and Scheffran 2019). Our case studies, located in Latin America and focusing on anti-extractivist movements, respond to these empirical gaps in EPB and adjacent studies.

EXTRACTIVISM AND THE UNFULFILLED POTENTIAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING

Peace and conflict research increasingly considers the environment as part of a peace agenda. Within this field, EPB explores how environmental issues offer opportunities for peace at different stages of a conflict, from peace negotiations to state-building projects with a focus on managing the environment toward conflict resolution or prevention (Conca and Beevers 2018). Frameworks for EPB comprise three core aspects. First, cooperation between parties over environmental issues considers the environment as a less contentious entry point for dialogue and an opportunity for confidence and trust building (Conca 2002). Second, management of environmental issues presents an opportunity to address root causes of conflict by addressing structural inequalities in access and power related to natural resources (Bruch et al. 2016, Krampe et al. 2021). Third, EPB promotes sustainable development to enhance human well-being, negate insecurity, and remedy inequalities (Upreti 2013). Much of this literature rests on rational choice and neoliberal paradigms, i.e., on logic of global capitalism and its doctrine of infinite economic growth that suggests natural resource extraction as a helpful, even benevolent, mechanism for environmental peacebuilding (Dresse et al. 2019). For instance, environmental governance reform in extractive sectors or the reactivation of extractive industries in a post-conflict context features prominently in peacebuilding efforts (e.g., Jensen and Lonergan 2012, Lujala and Rustad 2012).

However, critical scholars argue that such logic serves to fuel global challenges such as Global North-driven climate change while continuing to inflict violence on those supposedly benefiting from peacebuilding projects, primarily low- and middle-income, conflict-affected countries (Bliesemann de Guevara et al. 2023). Despite claims of peaceful intentions, such extractivist projects used in peacebuilding efforts contradict and undermine peace. Extractivism entails the appropriation of natural resources, usually tied to mining and oil exploration, but extends also to large agricultural projects and knowledge (Glaab and Stuvøy 2021). Research shows that extractivist projects at most lead to a partial or temporary peace, while potentially even serving to exacerbate conflict. For instance, in Sierra Leone and Liberia, mineral extractivist projects have been shown to escalate tensions, spark violence, negatively influence livelihoods of local communities, further environmental degradation, and entrench power imbalances (Johnson 2017, Beevers 2019). In Colombia, extractivist agricultural projects exacerbate tensions and violent struggles over land and resources because these industrial projects encroach on Indigenous territories and protected areas, and degrade biodiversity and human well-being, thus posing major challenges to ongoing peacebuilding efforts in the post-peace agreement context (Krause et al. 2022). Moreover, extractivism as an economic strategy renders national governments hostage to global markets and international demand, and it intensifies ecological breakdown and social conflicts (Svampa 2012, Acosta 2013).

In practice, extractivism threatens the goals of environmental peacebuilding, presenting symbolic as well as material violences of persistent capitalist logic that undermines peace by (re)producing situations of vulnerability. Peacebuilding agendas that turn to extractivism present inherent challenges to peace because they are based on violent structures of colonization and capitalist expansion. The extractive nature of capitalism often focuses on progress or development as positive forces, while its destructive nature remains hidden, leaving the violence unnoticed and taken as natural in the current structures (Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2020, Magalhães Teixeira 2024). Although extractive industries may promise peace through development, these models and activities have led to destruction of environments, extinction of species, human displacement, human rights violations, land dispossessions, and killings of environmental and land defenders (Paarlberg-Kvam 2021). For instance, a study on environmental injustices in South Africa demonstrates that mega-extraction-based projects perpetuate structures and cultures of colonial and apartheid violences (Karmakar and Chetty 2023). The state of the field thus presents a lacuna in EBP scholarship as well as challenges in practice.

TRANSFORMING ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING

We bring conflict transformation theorizing into an EPB framework to illustrate and advance understanding of how peacebuilding can be a process toward climate resilient peace (CRP). The concept of CRP entails that peace should be experienced by all people and that conditions of peace do not contribute further to climate change, bringing together human and environmental well-being through addressing imbalanced power and resources to foster positive, intersectional peace (Nicoson 2021). Guided by this normative concept of peace, we argue that EPB must be guided by a goal and process of transforming environmental conflict, as theorized in the conflict transformation literature. Existing research identifies extractivism as underlying an overwhelming majority of environmental conflicts: a global assessment of environmental conflicts shows that over three-fourths of conflicts and a wide host of injustices faced by Indigenous peoples result from extractive and industrial development projects (Scheidel et al. 2023). From this empirical starting point, we identify extractivism as a system of violence that both contributes to climate change and has negative effects for human and environmental well-being.

Based on this, we take extractivism as our empirical reference point for environmental conflict and analyze anti-extractivist movements as transformative processes by which groups can subvert power dimensions in environmental conflicts so as to work toward CRP. Figure 1 presents these components together, showing extractivism (referent of study) as a system of violence on a continuum from more to less visible beside power dimensions in which we see the possibility for agency (conflict transformation theory) in subverting these different types and layers of violence within the extractivist system.

First, our framework positions extractivism as violence in both symbolic and material terms. Drawing on feminist and other critical peace literatures that understand violences as interconnected and beyond physical harm (e.g., Cockburn 2004, True 2020), we visualize extractivism as a system of violence in Figure 1. Concentric circles of personal, structural, and cultural violence are connected and embedded such that one type of violence reinforces and (re)produces the others. Within the circles, we give examples for each type of violence. Although not meant to present an essentialized or exhaustive list of impacts, these examples illustrate various violences manifesting from the core, i.e., extractivism, on a spectrum of less to more visible.

In the outermost circle of Figure 1, personal violence (or physical violence) manifests as visible against human and more-than-humans in nature, including land dispossession, health hazards, species extinction, environmental degradation, human displacement, armed conflict, human rights violations, and so on. In the second circle, extractivist practices produce a number of inequalities such as those in health and land rights in the local communities, constituting structural violence. Finally, the third circle presents cultural violence in which political ideas of extractivism organize societies around hegemonic norms and values of, for instance, colonialism, racism, control over nature, and infinite economic growth. Because this cultural violence underlies the other types and is more easily thought of as “natural” in society, we argue that it is impossible to tackle different manifestations of extractivism in isolated terms. Rather, understanding violence in systemic terms calls for addressing deeper roots of environmental conflicts to not only deal with the outer layer, but also to break down structures as well as ideas, norms, and values that sustain personal violence.

Second, we situate conflict transformation as a tool for disrupting these violences through the power of agency. Conflict transformation seeks to shift interactions and relationships between parties from violent to constructive conflict (Kriesberg 1989, Lederach 1995, Lederach and Maiese 2009). This approach goes beyond goals of managing or resolving conflict, instead offering the potential for social change and looking toward long-term infrastructure of peacebuilding to support reconciliation in societies. In part, this approach seeks to understand the local, relational, and historical patterns of conflict, acknowledging and addressing injustices in society. We draw from Rodríguez et al. (2015) and Rodríguez and Inturias (2018) in centering processes of conflict transformation on impacting hegemony through the power of agency: “the ability to do things and change your circumstances” (Rodríguez and Inturias 2018:96). Here, agency exercised by those who experience violence holds power to transform environmental conflicts through means of exercising material resources, solidarity, information control, human resources, and cultural resources toward their goals (Rodríguez and Inturias 2018). Importantly, this power impacts not only the personal level, but also structural levels via institutions and frameworks as well as cultural levels via discourses, narratives, values, and world views. Without addressing power at these different levels, peacebuilding processes may reinforce conflict by “reproducing conditions of domination” (Rodríguez and Inturias 2018:96).

Though peacebuilding research and practices that address personal violence are critical, they target symptoms of extractivism. Instead, understanding extractivism as the core of a system of violence, broadens peacebuilding efforts to break patterns of violence and chains of oppression and domination connected to environmental conflicts. In this framework, the power of agency across structural, personal, and cultural levels holds transformative potential to disrupt extractivist systems and processes of environmental and social violences. Through this model that holds different manifestations of violence together with types of power, we envision transformation of environmental conflicts toward climate resilient peace.

METHODS

The empirical cases presented draw on fieldwork conducted by the authors in sites of Adjuntas, Puerto Rico and Brasília, Brazil. We use a nominal, illustrative case study approach that involves “casing a study” (rather than studying a case) to explore how particularities might be differently understood through different kinds of knowledge (Soss 2021). We selected these sites to study two instances in which extractivist logics perpetuate a continuum of violence: colonial histories set up extractive industries as a means to boost development by overcoming poverty, generating employment, and promoting fiscal revenues (Gudynas 2018). The cases in Adjuntas and Brasília show a diverse spectrum of extractivist practices, including mining, agribusiness, and logging. Both Puerto Rico and Brazil experience histories of early colonization by European powers (Spain and Portugal, respectively) and exist relatively peripheral to the global capitalist system. Here, periphery is understood through the work of Emmanuel (1974), Wallerstein (1974, 1992), and Amin (1976) and points to conditions generated by strategies of economic growth and development transformations through appropriation of land and resources: dependency on extractivism of raw materials for international demand, a context of underdevelopment, vulnerability to climate change and environmental breakdown, as well as a range of different types of conflicts and violences related to the protection of the environment (Magalhães Teixeira 2021). Anti-extractivist movements at both sites demonstrate actors’ conscious efforts to prevent violence and to foster peace through alternatives. Although the ongoing colonial occupation of Puerto Rico by the USA is an important distinction between the two cases, we combine these distinct cases as illustrative of a wide range of extractivism and violence in the Global South to help us understand the different types of strategies and approaches resisting these systems of oppression. Guided by feminist reflexive positionality, our site selections also depend on practical considerations like language skills and travel prospects, as well as personal relations to each site based on factors such as familiarity and identity (Nagar 2014). Our positions and standpoints influence our experience of knowing that contextualize findings. For example, our researcher experiences impact how we interpret stories and navigate space as well as our reflection on assumptions and what knowledges lay at hand.

Fieldwork consisted of in-depth site visits and use of tools such as semi-structured interviews and participant observation (Ackerly and True 2020, Cadaval Narezo 2022). Nicoson conducted fieldwork in Adjuntas with the community organization Casa Pueblo primarily during July 2022 and throughout March–June 2023. Magalhães Teixeira conducted fieldwork in July 2022 with members of the Movimento Bem Viver in and around Brasília and with the Agroecological Communities of Bem Viver. Each author worked in deliberative collaboration with partners, embedding ourselves in on-going efforts of each group. Participants in semi-structured interviews joined through purposive and snowball sampling (Plesner 2011), carried out with activists involved in community work, those working closely related to climate change and environmental questions, and citizens organized in the work of transformation. The tool of observing participation involves generating, collecting, and analyzing data from the researcher’s personal experiences; these subjective experiences complement other data to aid in understanding subjectivity of orientation (Johnson et al. 2020, Haverkamp 2021, Valencia-Tobon 2021).

The following empirical presentations highlight stories of anti-extractivism in each site, analyzed through the framework of environmental conflict transformation (Rodríguez and Inturias 2018) in reference to our concept of interest, CRP (Nicoson 2021). For each case, we share narratives about the context of extractivism at each site and about the resistance(s) that formed, and we discuss each through a lens of the above framework: how these efforts tackle different types of violence and build peace(s). We present each case in turn and identify the different types of violences of extractivism and the actions that constitute the anti-extractivist resistance. In a subsection of each case, we then analyze actions of the different movements (Casa Pueblo and Movimento Bem Viver, respectively). We separate action by the type of power the actors mobilize and the level of violence they aim to transform. As a result, each analysis reveals findings that agency enacted in the different dimensions of power constitute transformative peacebuilding tools. By presenting the case studies through this analysis, we illustrate the theory in action, showing how anti-extractivism holds power at different levels to break with different forms of violence in a process toward CRP.

“Sí a la vida, no a las minas”: mining resistance in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico

The town of Adjuntas lies in the central part of Puerto Rico’s largest island, amidst a region famous today for coffee production. Beneath land characterized by dense forests and looming mountains, the region is also known for rich mineral deposits. Extraction of minerals stretches back centuries in a territory considered one of the world’s oldest colonies to date, invaded first by the Spanish in 1494 and ceded to the United States in 1898; occupied today as an unincorporated territory of the U.S. Extractivism intensified for U.S.-interests after World War II. In the 1980s, the Puerto Rican government unveiled a plan to make the archipelago into an international mining and mineral processing center (Jedamus 1983). As part of “Plan 2020”, the government proposed to allow multinational corporations to pursue mining across the central region of the big island, covering more than two million acres of land (Jedamus 1983). One proposal planned an open-pit mine to span nearly 35,000 acres, affecting Adjuntas and neighboring towns (Massol González et al. 2008).

Against this landscape, opposition from grassroots and political actors increased over concern for social harms and environmental degradation such as damage to biodiversity and depleted water resources, as well as protests against a shift to mining from a primarily agricultural economy and unfair land acquisitions (Concepción 1995). Beginning in 1981, a group of students, teachers, engineers, artists, and other concerned residents from the town of Adjuntas organized the Taller de Arte y Cultura to gain more knowledge about the situation, develop a grassroots policy, and plan a strategy (Massol González et al. 2008). Studying plans for the mineral extraction, the group educated themselves and others about risks to the environment and humans. Using cultural tools for resistance and to build support, they wrote bulletins and hosted conferences, and organized theater, music, and dance performances (A. Massol González 2022, personal communication). The group grew from around 10 initial members and a single audience member at their first demonstration to thousands of people joining in-person at events and sending signatures and other forms of support from around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Their campaign took on the slogan “Sí a la vida, no a las minas” (Yes to life, no to mining; Massol González 2022) and in 1986, they celebrated the government’s decision to reject the plan for mining (Valle 1986).

Amidst the celebrations of this success, Taller members and supporters began asking, if not the mine, what instead? Their work grew from protest against the mine and its environmentally damaging impacts toward propositions for their desired future. Thus began their work toward community self-governance, both defending the land and proposing alternatives. They continued resistance against environmental degradation, protesting mining prospects until another victory in 1995, when the government outlawed open-pit mining in Puerto Rico (Massol González et al. 2008). They fought in Washington D.C., protesting the Vía Verde or Northern Gas Pipeline that proposed to send natural gas from the southern to northern coast of Puerto Rico, through the central region; the project was indefinitely stalled in 2012 (Massol Deyá 2018).

Casa Pueblo’s work toward alternatives takes many shapes, integrating culture in efforts for self-sustainability. Ongoing since the 1990s, they develop and operate models of renewable energy. Solar energy installations both generate energy at the point of consumption and feed energy into the national electricity supply, which currently depends on fossil fuels (Massol Deyá 2019). These efforts in Adjuntas join others around the archipelago in a so-called energy insurrection: calling not only for a move to renewables, with solar power as the primary source of energy, but moreover for energy independence.

Transformation through power contestations in Puerto Rico

During the initial protests against the mining plan in the 1980s, the group that would become Casa Pueblo used cultural tools to produce and disseminate knowledge. The early days of the movement saw few supporters beyond the core group of organizers. They transitioned to focus their efforts through theatrical, musical, and dance performances; this re-oriented the messaging so that Sí a la vida connected more tangibly and powerfully to the community’s values and ways of living (A. Massol González 2022, personal communication). Efforts today use these tools in bringing together citizens as well as groups of committed organizers. In 2023, the group organized the Marcha del Sol (March of the Sun), a day centered around a march through town featuring speeches, educational and cultural activities, tours, artistic performances as well as marching bands, cabezudos (costumed figures with oversized heads), zanqueros (stilt walkers), film screenings, and more. These varied ways of communicating messages and information also necessarily connect and bring together different groups, from engineers to theater collectives. The process impacts individual power through expression and performance, connections, and capacity.

Casa Pueblo contests with structural power in ways such as protest and cultural performances to resist the mine and gas pipeline. The shift to renewable energy and the innovations in technology facilitating this further interrupt import dependencies and hierarchies of production and consumption (A. Massol Deyá 2022, personal communication). For instance, new solar technologies developed through collaboration between Casa Pueblo and university partners provide efficient, effective, sustainable, and economical models of electricity, drawing solar energy, rather than fossil fuels and with means produced within Puerto Rico, instead of imported (Marquez 2014). New social models further facilitate this shift. For instance, one project in Adjuntas involves a community network of both social ties and technological systems: batteries and photovoltaic panels connect the local grocery store with residences in a microgrid, and a locally organized management system that sets transparent prices, invests in a community fund for emergency and maintenance, and facilitates access to energy for low-income residents (Estrada 2023). This case illustrates that the anti-extractivist efforts did not end with the victorious rejection of open-pit mining, but rather continues in the ongoing work to move away from extractivist structures and material manifestations, such as reliance on imported fossil fuels.

Regarding cultural power, several new and alternative means of management and demarcation shift inclusion and structures. For instance, on the land threatened by the mining plan, they created Bosque del Pueblo (People’s Forest), the archipelago’s first forest reserve via community initiative and managed by a self-governing organization. Forest protection work has also led to an ecological corridor that connects 250,000 acres of forests from north to south across the island and a forest school consisting of outdoor classrooms to study science, math, agriculture, and art amidst protected forest that simultaneously purifies the air, produces water and oxygen, and sustains biodiversity (Massol González 2022).

Cultural power is also contested through social consensus of collective identity and desired future, taking different shapes over time. For instance, an early strategy of the Taller specifically avoided connecting the movement with politics. Participants or members who spoke more directly about Puerto Rico’s colonial status or wanted the movement to push for independence were either quieted or eventually left. According to actors in today’s Casa Pueblo, this was necessary in the 1980–90s to unite the community around a cause for betterment of their environment and well-being, lest they be perceived as radical communists, a label at the time that carried a great stigma and marginalized many (A. Massol González 2022, personal communication). Today, the discourse at Casa Pueblo centers around autonomy. Although still not engaging in party politics about the status question (referring to Puerto Rico‛s political relationship with the U.S.), actors specifically use terms such as insurrection, decolonialization, or independence around questions or materialities of well-being (Massol Deyá 2022).

For instance, actors deliberately prioritize using their Spanish first language in formal settings where English might otherwise be expected; a property connected to the headquarters, formerly a U.S. English-instruction school, now houses community-led and -oriented music and science classrooms. In presentations or performances around solar installations, energy insurrection demarks the efforts as a move away from dependence on the national centralized and privatized fossil fuel-reliant system and demands democratic access to energy for all people: “the power of the community in the struggle to democratize the energy sector in Puerto Rico has been named in Adjuntas as the energy insurrection, which strongly advances toward building an alternative country of its own” (Glattard et al. 2022:16). This growing discourse promotes a sense of place and identity in building autonomy against a colonial power, connecting material resources and the geographic territory itself to social, environmental, economic, organizational, and affective dimensions (Massol González 2022).

“Plantar água regenerar a vida”: agribusiness resistance in Brasília, Brazil

Brasília, the capital city of Brazil, was built in the geographic heart of the country, amidst the ecoregion cerrado, a tropical savanna recognized for its rich soil and diversity of animal and plant species (CEPF 2021). Construction of the city in 1960 spurred development of the cerrado frontier; large scale deforestation made way for road networks and infrastructure, as well as for agricultural land and production (da Silva 2018). Although the conflict in the cerrado was not created by direct colonization, the contexts and situations that allowed for it are very much based on colonial norms, strategies, and structures of capitalist expansion and accumulation of natural resources. As a solution to the challenges of development (Prado 2020), agribusiness promoted the “conquest of the cerrado” by using Green Revolution technologies to convert supposedly weak and infertile areas into land suitable for large-scale agriculture (Pereira 2012, Sauer 2010). This form of extractivism entails intensified use of soil and water along with chemical fertilizers for production of monoculture crops, mainly corn and soybeans, to meet demands of international markets (da Silva 2017).

This transformation of the rural areas around Brasília generated both socioeconomic and environmental challenges. Mechanization of the rural areas and financialization of agriculture marginalized the workers that originally built the city, who were dispossessed from the land they cultivated with subsistence farming to make way for agribusiness (Rocha 2021). The expansion of monocultures and cattle ranching required continual deforestation, detrimental to the soil’s ability to retain water (CEPF 2017). For instance, correntão tactics cleared the land by dragging a huge chain stretched between two tractors through natural vegetation to clear large tracts of land at once (Greenpeace Brasil 2022). This practice particularly prepared the land for privatized eucalyptus farms. Nonnative to the cerrado, eucalyptus roots reach deep, pulling vast amounts of water, degrading the soil, and stripping the land of its social function for speculative commodification. Combined with socioeconomic pressures such as privatization and commodification of water, this destabilized the ecosystem, creating longer periods of intense drought as well as socioenvironmental conflicts over access to both land and water (Rocha 2021).

In 2011, 300 families organized under the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement, MST) occupied the unproductive lands that lay fallow after the eucalyptus plantation. By occupying that land, the farmers under MST aimed to restore the “social purpose of the land,” a provision within the Brazilian Constitution to guarantee national development, eradication of poverty, and reduction of inequalities. The MST works toward building a more equal and just society based on decentralizing access to land to fulfill its social purpose and to guarantee the rights of the traditional communities that live off of the land; they do this by pushing for a Popular Land Reform throughout the whole country (MST 2021).

Since 2016, 70 families of the initial 300 that occupied the former eucalyptus farm have formed the Canaã Settlement. For the farmers trying to regenerate the dried-up land, the struggle for their agricultural livelihoods is inseparable from that against environmental degradation, making cerrado restoration their primary goal. Using agroecology, the farmers describe not only planting vegetables and trees, but they also “plant water.” By using agroecological methods, they reforest the region while planting food, combining different types of plants that thrive together and help each other. Together in an agroforest, each plant provides water, nutrients, and organic matter to the ecosystem, while producing food for the farmers and the local population as well as regenerating the cerrado (V. Ribeiro 2022, personal communication; V. Bruno 2022, personal communication).

Some of the families from the settlement eventually joined with Movimento Bem Viver. Founded in 2021, the movement combines “1000 struggles” from three different territories: the city, rural area, and forest. This creates connections and synergies between groups based on an understanding that different social, political, economic, and environmental issues faced by each of them are inseparable. Combining strengths between these communities at the margins of agricultural expansion and capitalist development, they follow a philosophy of bem viver, which loosely translates to “living well” or the “society of good living,” aiming to create a society free of all forms of oppression, exploitation, and destruction of nature.

Transformation through power contestations in Brazil

The people, groups, and organizations that build the Movimento Bem Viver represent different struggles from the city, the rural area, and the forest that experience and resist different types of violences. To break with these structures of violence and oppression, they mobilize power at different levels.

At a personal level, the main work of the Movimento connects the 1000 struggles of the peoples from the different territories. The idea of territory is central to their struggle, crucially enacted through re-territorializing. The Movimento re-connects people from the city to forest and rural areas. These people have been used for cheap urban labor and dispossessed and de-territorialized through years of colonization and expansion of capitalist markets (Krenak 2020). Doing so exceeds individual impact; the re-connection also disrupts cultural violence by breaking with Anthropocentric and Eurocentric views of the world that hold humans separate from nature, and in which people in the cities have no connection to the land and the people that grow the food they consume. For members, once they create connections to other people and to the place and territory that they care about, they will be more willing to join the struggle to defend that territory.

The Movimento creates connections and relationships at a personal level through organizing agroforestry planting events based on the idea of a mutirão, a Tupi word that reflects a collective mobilization for mutual aid. These events center around different farmers’ tasks during specific harvest periods, like creating new garden beds, planting seeds, weeding, covering the beds, and building bioconstruction projects. Volunteers eat food grown by this community effort, learning also about the history of struggle for the peasant families and about the agroecological methods and strategies (T. Ávila 2022, personal communication). By working together toward a common goal and learning about the process of growing healthy and ecological food, people develop relationships of care and friendship both with the people and with the territories, which helps strengthen the Movement’s actions beyond the individual.

At the structural level, the actions of the Movimento Bem Viver focus on creating space for contestation of institutional, legal, economic, and political power. For example, the group organizes different social struggles, i.e., peasants, farmers, Indigenous groups, collectors of recycling materials, and informal street vendors, under one organization. Instead of remaining in silos, the group recognizes their shared experience at the margin of the capitalist system and the need for a complete systemic transformation. Facing struggles on multiple fronts from a place of solidarity, in 2022, members of the Movimento organized into two collectives of nine people each to run for office at the national and local level, to democratize power and create political space for historically marginalized groups.

Members argue that their participation in the institutional struggle combats structural violence of economic and political marginalization that the groups within the movement face. Creating space for a radical alternative within the political system disrupts violence of the agribusiness model that corrupts political institutions. Currently, the members of the rural caucus (politicians forming the parliamentary front that defends land-owner interests) hold 300 seats out of 513 in the lower house, and 47 out of 81 seats in the upper house of the National Congress of Brazil (Souza 2023). By organizing themselves to take a seat among these interests of agribusiness and large landowners in political institutions, Movimento Bem Viver provides a radical alternative on all fronts, including within the system.

This initiative also disrupts cultural power by transforming current narratives and social imaginaries of possible alternative futures away from the capitalist and extractivist model. For MST, the fight for land rights is entangled with the ideological “dispute over the agricultural model” (MST 2021). Members engage cultural power to interrupt violence at the level of norms, values, and ideologies. By disrupting the discourse of infinite growth and extractivism that underly current structures of the society in which they live, members organize under an alternative system. For example, everyday actions of the group connect with calls for bem viver through promoting a society free from oppressions against humans and more-than-human nature. Under the registration for the two collective mandate candidacies, they create new ties between land, territories, food, and people that both produce and consume food, as well as those who defend the territories, i.e., (re)producing alternative norms and values that prioritize well-being for all in relation to one another rather than individually.

CONCLUSION

The examples from Adjuntas, Puerto Rico and Brasília, Brazil show that extractivism exists in layers, manifesting violence at personal as well as structural and cultural levels: toxic pollution and inequalities are sustained through historic and ongoing colonial policies and planning, corruption, and neoliberal austerity. Through mobilizing agency at different dimensions of power, Casa Pueblo and Movimento Bem Viver disrupt extractivist systems of violence and provide illustrations of how environmental peacebuilding can be transformative. The analyses demonstrate how a transformative approach to environmental peacebuilding can foster human and more-than-human well-being while tackling symptoms and causes of violence. Herein, anti-extractivism provides a tool for CRP-building. Through a framework that holds both social and ecological dimensions together, we show how environmental peacebuilding can promote CRP by breaking from systems that drive climate change and regenerating degraded ecosystems. We echo calls from critical scholars that urge EPB theory and practice to incorporate perspectives such as political ecology that engage not only with the causes and symptoms of conflict, but also emphasize the transformative and emancipatory power of challenging cultural and structural forms of violence against people and nature (Le Billon and Duffy 2018, Temper et al. 2018, Nicoson 2021, Magalhães Teixeira 2024). In addition, we provide concrete examples of how this looks in practice, highlighting two instances in which such processes are already taking place, and conceptually and empirically broadens what counts as environmental peacebuilding.

Based on these findings, we see potential avenues for EPB research to investigate beyond traditional realms of extractivism. For instance, the expanding frontier of green technology demands ever-more mineral and territorial resources (Jerez et al. 2021). Rampant developments in blockchain and cryptocurrencies depend upon tax havens that enable profits through massive consumption of energy and space in new forms of settler colonialism (Crandall 2019). In rising resistance to exploitation of new mineral, intellectual, or crypto-technologies that may be seen to facilitate a green transition, EPB literature can push the understanding of how to prevent reproducing violent extractivism.

Future research on transformative EPB must prioritize deeper theorization around structures of domination and power between the Global North and South. Dependencies in agribusiness, mining, and other exports from countries in the Global South to markets in the Global North manifest in personal, structural, and cultural violences that exceed hard geopolitical borders. Scholars and practitioners of EPB alike necessitate better understanding about how to resist and transform these structures toward peace to stem environmental and human harm. As the field of EPB grows and increasingly undertakes and encourages more critical approaches, we find immense value in research on entanglements of power and colonialism that underly environmental conflicts and that centers strategies to tackle, resist, and emancipate from these violences.

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