Conflict Shorelines: History, Politics & Climate Change
November 12-14, 2015
School of Architecture, Betts Auditorium
This event will be streamed live at this link.
A three-day conference presented by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) exploring the relations among colonial history, contemporary conflicts, and climate change.
This conference takes its point of departure from the growing number of conflicts that today unfold in complex relation to climatic and environmental transformations. On a global scale, some of these conflicts take place along environmental threshold conditions (“conflict shorelines”) in which climate transformations aggravate existing political tensions. Conflicts over land resources now take place along the threshold of the tropical forests of Central and South America, and of Central Africa and East Asia. Other conflicts are located along the ebbing threshold of deserts, in relation to the drying out of the Sahel and other places across the Middle East. And others are situated across the shorelines of melting glaciers, rising seas, and coastal cities, urban and natural environments increasingly vulnerable to climate instabilities. These conflict shorelines are not simply determined by climatic factors, but are instead deeply complex historical and natural processes that bring together political developments, urban transformations, colonial histories, and patterns of city growth and migration in relation to changing climatic conditions.
Conflict Shorelines will bring together international scholars, climate scientists and activists, architects, geographers, engineers, visual artists, and theorists from around the globe to think about the entanglement of political conflicts along environmental thresholds by examining the political, legal, epistemic, and aesthetic challenges this kind of conflict initiates. It aims to provide a “forum” in which multiple and apparently distant disciplinary fields and modes of cultural production can think together about some of the most urgent challenges of our time.
More information at www.princeton.edu/piirs/conflictshorelines
Conflict Shorelines: History, Politics & Climate Change is sponsored in part by the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities.
