Toward a Criminology of Environment-Conflict Relationships 1

This collection includes chapters that range across a variety of forms or examples of conflict related to environmental matters. ² This is deliberate in order to achieve several goals. First, we wished to pull together such disparate examples to provide a baseline resource for a criminology concerned with environment and conflict relationships. Although well explored in fields like political ecology, political science, geography and conflict studies, this is not a topic that has received much attention within criminology, despite the fact that crimes and harms of considerable seriousness and significance are intertwined with these conflicts. Second, we wanted to continue to highlight the international compass of a green or environmentally sensitive criminology (South and Brisman 2013; White 2010, 2011; White and Heckenberg 2014). The contributors to this volume exemplify this global engagement and they bring to bear on their chosen topics a keen intellectual interest, academic rigour and passionate concern. Finally, we wanted to explore our own thinking about a typology of environment-conflict relationships. In this introductory chapter, we start by outlining and filling out in a preliminary way what such a typology might look like. We then move to an overview of the chapters that follow.