Kolloquium

The Political Ecology of Violence is the first century-long examination of the slow violence between social groups resulting from climatic fluctuation. It employs an interdisciplinary historical approach to complicate interpretations of violence emerging between pastoralists and peasants as inevitable and rooted in the desert-sown dichotomy. I argue that understanding the roots of the ethno-religious violence between social groups requires understanding decades of environmental degradation and the various forms of violence produced. During the late nineteenth century, current and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and Christian Armenian peasants in the late Ottoman Kurdistan. The Ottoman state’s shifting responses to the mounting tensions transformed slow violence into accelerated, state-sponsored violence.

Foto: van Bruinessen

Zozan Pehlivan, Associate Professor of History, and the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities