Abstract
The environmental crisis is now rightly understood as a security and stability issue. A common approach in Europe tends to see environmental degradation as the source of resource-based violence, and a potential challenge for the state. Europe tends to look at environmental issues with an avowed fear of prospective climate refugees. Neo-Malthusian theories linking population growth with environmental degradation are still widely spread. This approach obscures the fact that the source of environmental loss and displacement can lay in an economic system that uses violence to implement the interests of ruling groups while disfranchising others. Appealing only to state and international negotiations to protect the environment is therefore problematic. India is a case in point: environmental degradation and the destabilization of local communities that cause their displacement often result from a resources mismanagement by the state, enforced with violence on local communities. The state here is not problem-solving but its development is at the source of conflicts. State decisions on building dams, sand mining, and coal extraction are taken without consultations and implemented by force against locals. The state often engages police/paramilitary forces against environmental movements. Unsurprisingly, then, despite the recognition of the urgency of the environmental crisis by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, no major policy has yet been implemented to mitigate the various environmental hazard that that India is facing, neither the smog nor climate change. Rather, efforts are put into fostering further disfranchisement that correspond to an ethnic and economic agenda. European plans of actions and understanding of the environmental crisis is sorely lacking an understanding of the systemic dynamics that are at the roots of the crisis. This paper contributes to this understanding by comparing Indian and European paths to environmental protection and points out at the limits of an international relations approach of the matter.
Panel: Thinking European Security through India
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-2021-peacock-in-a-coal-mine-european-understanding-of-environmental-loss-in-india,
author = {Damien Carrière},
title = {Peacock in a Coal Mine: European Understanding of Environmental Loss in India},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2021},
year = {2021},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2021-peacock-in-a-coal-mine-european-understanding-of-environmental-loss-in-india.html}
}