The Violences of Sustainability: Power and Hierarchies in the Strive towards Justice in the Social-Ecological Transformation

This Research Topic focuses on literature that combines discussions of sustainability, conflict, and violence. The aim is to create scholarly and research dialogue toward understanding conflictual contemporary dynamics within sustainability and how power structures and forms of violence create and manifest barriers to social-ecological transformation in the long term. Understanding the underlying causes, processes, and impacts of dynamics such as inequalities, environmental injustices, lack of participation, or colonial continuities, will be necessary to overcome these barriers.

We invite theoretical elaborations, conceptual approaches, specific and (comparative case) studies, and actor-focused contributions that speak to the questions of violence, power, and hierarchies as well as strategies and radical alternatives in the social-ecological transformation from local, cross-scale, decolonial, and/or intersectional perspectives. The call is open to scholars from all disciplines, and we encourage perspectives from peace and conflict studies, transformation and sustainability research, environmental sciences, geography, political sciences, sociology, history, ethics, Indigenous Studies, and education or pedagogy. Particularly, we invite authorship and co-authorship by Indigenous scholars and researchers. If your contribution contains Indigenous content, or if Indigenous communities and materials are discussed, we especially wish for Indigenous co-authorship. Specifically, we invite constructive contributions that discuss alternative thoughts and approaches and open new pathways to overcome manifested forms of violence in human and human-nature interactions, e.g. suggestions of new pathways for interspecies justice.

Articles will be published in English. However, if you feel more comfortable writing in another language, please contact the corresponding topic editor Rebecca Froese to discuss how the guest editorial team can support you.

Contributions are invited but not limited to the following questions:

Theoretical and conceptual perspectives

• Which conception of power and violence is suitable for the analysis of conflictual dynamics around sustainability? How can we distinguish between forms of power and violence in the social-ecological transformation? Where is the connecting line and which new insights do we gain through this distinction for the debate about justice?


• Which conception(s) of justice in the social-ecological transformation are suitable and how could these inform approaches to conflict transformation?


• Which ontological and epistemic inequalities and forms of violence are prevalent in the discourses around the social-ecological transformation?


• Which concepts and perspectives do discourses on sustainability gain through decolonial or intersectional approaches?


• How could a relational approach to the social-ecological transformation inform conflictual transformation processes?

• Which concepts of sustainability are incorporated into global agendas and how are mismatches of global and local agendas of sustainability negotiated? Which conflicts over interpretive power exist across scales and regions and between the Global North and the Global South?


• What are (different) roles of the state in its legislative, executive, and judicative functions in the social-ecological transformation?


• How are normative decision-making and interpretative powers on sustainability and the social-ecological transformation distributed across international, national, and/or local levels? How do these distributions hinder or support justice in the social-ecological transformation?


• How are power inequalities or violence reflected across scales in the entanglements between the ecosystems and the social, cultural, and economic fabric of society? How do they (re)produce exclusion, polarization, systemic power asymmetries, or conflict?


• How is modern Western academia shaping knowledge-based interpretive power in the sustainability discourse and how does this manifest in power relations and hierarchies?


• How can individual and collective consumption behavior be understood as reproducing settlements of structural and cultural violence? How could radically different consumption be reimagined in relation to justice?

• How do environmental movements in the global South mainstream and highlight the concerns of just transitions?


• How do protest and resistance initiate or address conflict dynamics, both constructively and destructively? How do they challenge or manifest existing power structures and hierarchies in the social-ecological transformation? What could be the specific roles of protest and resistance actors in the strive towards justice in the social-ecological transformation?


• Which creative and radical alternatives are emerging to strengthen justice in the social-ecological transformation?


• Which strategies, alternative organization, or counter proposals can we observe in local sites of protest and resistance? How could they inform or hinder social processes for the transformation?


• Which intrinsic dynamics of cooperation and participation can be observed trans-locally and how could they inform or hinder conflict transformation processes, as well as start forms of social-ecological transformation?

Frontiers Article Types Page.

Keywords: sustainability, justice, violence, conflict, resistance, power, decoloniality

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.