Critically engaging human-environment interactions, green criminology is concerned with the study of transgressions against environments, non-human animals and humans that arise in the human-environment nexus. Not only has green criminology extended and deepened the criminological tradition thematically; it is also assuming a critical role in challenging strictly legalistic definitions of crime, engaging a broader focus on ‘harm’, thus studying a wide variety of acts and omissions that seriously impact on human, non-human and ecological well-being. Among the themes thus examined from a green criminological angle are vital issues like global warming, deforestation, animal trafficking, and biopiracy, to name but a few.
In Colombia, as in Latin America more generally, the discipline of criminology as it existed in the 1970s and 80s for various reasons came to a halt. Currently there are only a few, albeit outstanding, Latin American contributions to the field. Consequently, notwithstanding the existence of criminological studies of environmental issues and an extensive knowledge about these themes in Latin America, there is no endogenous body of knowledge in the region that seeks to use criminological tools to understand matters related to environmental crime and harm. As such, taking further the initiative of the International Green Criminology Working Group, Universidad Antonio Nariño is organizing an International Green Criminology Conference that seeks to unite activists, students, politicians, environment agencies, and national and international experts, with the aim of exchanging ideas and knowledge around environmental matters and advance the development of instruments to better understand, prevent and respond to the production of environmental crime and harm.
The call for papers is now open, and we invite participants to submit abstracts along the following thematic lines:
Urban environmental challenges
- Water supply/access
- Noise and visual pollution
- Waste
The legal framework as an instrument of change
- Specialist environmental courts
- Environmental law
- Constitutional rights and rulings
The meaning of ‘green’
- Activist scholarship
- Juridical understandings of environmental harm and crime: strengths and weaknesses
- Corporate discourses around environmental protection
- Cultural expressions as a form of promoting environmental awareness
- Constructions and representations of environmental harm, crime, and disaster in news media, fiction, film, and popular cultural forms
- The production of knowledge from the epistemologies of the South
Extractivism
- The role of the State vis-à-vis the extractive industries
- Social mobilization against extractivism
- Strengths and weaknesses of the legislative and regulatory framework related to extractivist activity
- Social and environmental impacts of mining, agroindustries, fracking and oil exploration and exploitation
Species justice
- Animal abuse
- Habitat destruction
- Wildlife trafficking
Post-accord (i.e. peace agreement) challenges for environmental and social justice
- Armed actors, violence and environment
- The environment as victim
The dangers of researching and exposing environmental crime
- Activism, protest and resistance
- Repression of community leaders
- Violence against environmental and human rights activists
Food security and sovereignty
- Genetically modified Food and organisms
- Seed privatization
- Biopiracy
Technology and environmental crime/harm
- Global warming
- Waste
- The limitations and injustices of technological ‘fixes’ to environmental problems
The abstract length is limited to a maximum of 250 words. The title, author(s) and institutions are excluded from the word limit. Please indicate preferred stream/session.