This book presents peer-reviewed texts from the International Peace Research Association’s Ecology and Peace Commission: M.I. Abazie-Humphrey (Nigeria) reviews “Nigeria’s Home-Grown DDR Programme”; C. Christian and H. Speight (USA) analyse “Water, Cooperation, and Peace in the Palestinian West Bank”; T. Galaviz (Mexico) discusses “The Peace Process Mediation Network between the Colombian Government and the April 19th Movement”; S.E. Serrano Oswald (Mexico) examines “Social Resilience and Intangible Cultural Heritage: Case Study in Mexico”; A. F. Rashid (Pakistan) and F. Feng (China) focus on “Community Perceptions of Ecological Disturbances Caused During Terrorists Invasion and Counter-insurgency Operations in Swat, Pakistan”; M. Yoshii (Japan) examines “Structure of Discrimination in Japan’s Nuclear Export” and finally, S. Takemine (Japan) discusses “‘Global Hibakusha’ and the Invisible Victims of US Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands”.

This book aims to initiate among students and other readers critical and interdisciplinary reflections on key problems concerning development, gender relations, peace and environment, with a special emphasis on North-South relations. This volume offers a selection of the author's research in different parts of the world during 50 years of contributing to an interdisciplinary scientific debate and addressing social answers to urgent global problems. After the author's biography and bibliography, the second part analyses the development processes of several countries in the South that resulted in a dynamic of underdevelopment. The deep-rooted gender discrimination is also reflected in the destructive exploitation of natural resources and the pollution of soils, water and air. Since the beginning of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, the management of human society and global resources has been unsustainable and has created global environmental change and multiple conflicts over scarce and polluted resources. Peace and development policies aiming at gender equity and sustainable environmental management, where water and food are crucial for the survival of humankind, focus on systemic alternatives embedded in a path of sustainability transition. • This book reviews multiple influences from Europe, Africa and Latin America on a leading social scientist and activist on gender, development and environment aiming at a world with equity, sustainability, peace and harmony between nature and humans.• This pioneer volume analyses social and environmental conflicts and peace processes in Latin America, with a special focus on Mexico, by addressing the development of under-development, global environmental change, poverty, nutrition and the North-South gap.• This volume focuses on environmental deterioration with a special emphasis on food and water and proposes systemic changes towards a sustainability transition with peace, regional development and gender equity.• This pioneering work offers alternative approaches to regional development, food sovereignty and holistic development processes from a gender perspective.

In this book 60 authors from many disciplines and from 18 countries on five continents examine in ten parts: Moving towards Sustainability Transition; Aiming at Sustainable Peace; Meeting Challenges of the 21st Century: Demographic Imbalances, Temperature Rise and the Climate–Conflict Nexus; Initiating Research on Global Environmental Change, Limits to Growth, Decoupling of Growth and Resource Needs; Developing Theoretical Approaches on Sustainability and Transitions; Analysing National Debates on Sustainability in North America; Preparing Transitions towards a Sustainable Economy and Society, Production and Consumption and Urbanization; Examining Sustainability Transitions in the Water, Food and Health Sectors from Latin American and European Perspectives; Preparing Sustainability Transitions in the Energy Sector; and Relying on Transnational, International, Regional and National Governance for Strategies and Policies Towards Sustainability Transition. This book is based on workshops held in Mexico (2012) and in the US (2013), on a winter school at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand (2013), and on commissioned chapters. The workshop in Mexico and the publication were supported by two grants by the German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF). All texts in this book were peer-reviewed by scholars from all parts of the world.

Addressing global environmental challenges from a peace ecology perspective, the present book offers peer-reviewed texts that build on the expanding field of peace ecology and applies this concept to global environmental challenges in the Anthropocene. Hans Günter Brauch (Germany) offers a typology of time and turning points in the 20th century; Juliet Bennett (Australia) discusses the global ecological crisis resulting from a “tyranny of small decisions”; Katharina Bitzker (Canada) debates “the emotional dimensions of ecological peacebuilding” through love of nature; Henri Myrttinen (UK) analyses “preliminary findings on gender, peacebuilding and climate change in Honduras” while Úrsula Oswald Spring (Mexíco) offers a critical review of the policy and scientific nexus debate on “the water, energy, food and biodiversity nexus”, reflecting on security in Mexico. In closing, Brauch discusses whether strategies of sustainability transition may enhance the prospects for achieving sustainable peace in the Anthropocene.

This book provides insight into Anthropocene-related studies by IPRA’s Ecology and Peace Commission. The first three chapters discuss the linkage between disasters and conflict risk reduction, responses to socio-environmental disasters in high-intensity conflict scenarios and the fragile state of disaster response with a special focus on aid-state-society relations in post-conflict settings. The two following chapters analyse climate-smart agriculture and a sustainable food system for a sustainable-engendered peace and the ethnology of select indigenous cultural resources for climate change adaptation focusing on the responses of the Abagusii in Kenya. A specific case study focuses on social representations and the family as a social institution in transition in Mexico, while the last chapter deals with sustainable peace through sustainability transition as transformative science concluding with a peace ecology perspective for the Anthropocene.

Recent, unpredictable incidents in diverse locations – Paris, Nice, Ankara, Sinai, California, Manchester and London – reinforce how governments and scholars must look beneath the surface for understanding of the turbulent post-9/11world. In particular, what does ‘expertise’ mean in this new era? This book answers that question? The volume is about a particular kind of expert – a type suffering from ‘bad press’ for a long time – namely, scholars who carry out area-based research. The term ‘expert’ itself even comes in for some humor about how it might be defined – someone who knows more and more, about less and less, until eventually they know everything about nothing. Behind the old joke is a grain of truth: Expert standing becomes unimpressive to us, in both intellectual and practical terms, when it is seen as parochial and lacking in vision. This volume will explore Area Studies (AS), a prominent type of expertise, along a range of dimensions. As we move towards the third decade in the new millennium, attention shifts to the somewhat unexpectedly positive future of NewArea Studies (NAS) as a resurgent intellectual movement. NAS has departed from what the editors have dubbed Traditional Area Studies (TAS) – commonplace till the millennium. Both the editors of this volume, and its contributors, are leading scholars in area-based work across continents. Together they have participated and observed as area-oriented research struggled to overcome protracted and intense criticism since the Cold War. Thus, the volume marks the resurgence of area-based research in its new guise as NAS – the crux – understanding increasing complexity around a shrinking globe. Taken together, the contents of this volume make the the case for a New Area Studies grounded in necessary travel, using new and wider methodologies involving reflective practice and production of knowledge with local people. It argues the necessity of such broad and deep approaches in order to appreciate what is going on in the world in the 21st century and to help us see off the arrival of more and increasingly nasty unpredictable shocks.

Earth at Risk in the 21st Century offers critical interdisciplinary reflections on peace, security, gender relations, migration and the environment, all of which are threatened by climate change, with women and children affected most. Deep-rooted gender discrimination is also a result of the destructive exploitation of natural resources and the pollution of soils, water, biota and air. In the Anthropocene, the management of human society and global resources has become unsustainable and has created multiple conflicts by increasing survival threats primarily for poor people in the Global South. Alternative approaches to peace and security, focusing from bottom-up on an engendered peace with sustainability, may help society and the environment to be managed in the highly fragile natural conditions of a ‘hothouse Earth’. Thus, the book explores systemic alternatives based on indigenous wisdom, gift economy and the economy of solidarity, in which an alternative cosmovision fosters mutual care between humankind and nature. • Special analysis of risks to the survival of humankind in the 21st century. • Interdisciplinary studies on peace, security, gender and environment related to global environmental and climate change. • Critical reflections on gender relations, peace, security, migration and the environment • Systematic analysis of food, water, health, energy security and its nexus. • Alternative proposals from the Global South with indigenous wisdom for saving Mother Earth.