The central question of this chapter is how a region like Ottoman Kurdistan comes to explode in violence. I suggest that violence manifests in a cumulative way. To make this argument, I adopt an expanded conception of violence that moves beyond physical encounters or bloodshed between groups to also incorporate smaller acts of property violation, such as animal theft, as well as violence on a larger canvas, such as through state-building strategies and environmental change. Thus, I argue that to understand the roots of the Armenian massacres of 1894–96 requires understanding decades of environmental degradation and the various forms of violence produced.

The preface describes how a chance story about black rain interfering with the traditional drinking water collection from village rooftops, led us to a massive but little-known Palestinian e-waste hub in the southern West Bank, employing a thousand people who work to collect, refurbish, and recycle a large portion of Israeli e-waste, creating livelihoods in a setting of few options after prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank. We describe our efforts to learn with and from these communities about the dynamics and scale of the informal e-waste value chain, and its serious environmental and health consequences, and to forge and test a vision for development that would preserve this precious source of livelihood while eliminating its crippling harms. We overview the intertwined stories we tell in the book about our years of community-based research and advocacy, and their lessons for different audiences.

The framework of environmental violence seeks to address the environmental and human health harms inflicted by the processes of production, especially including climate change and pollution. This paper brings a slow violence and critical knowledge production approach to strengthen the theoretical and methodological foundations in the environmental violence framework. We emphasize the contingent, political processes of the production of scientific knowledge, and how those processes change understandings of both violence and the environment. Our selection of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster as the case study for this chapter illustrates the mutually constructive processes of politics and knowledge production and how understating that mutual dynamic reveals the ways in which the slow environmental harms of Chornobyl were made visible. We aim to accomplish this task by using examples from the social monitoring program of the Department of Social Expertise (of the Institute of Sociology in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) in its tracking of the embodied environmental effects among sufferers of the Chornobyl disaster. Using the Department of Social Expertise’s data on Chornobyl sufferers, we demonstrate how focusing on the processes of knowledge production is a useful tool in assessing the harms of slow environmental violence.

Australian novelist George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer is one of the world’s first climate fiction novels, although James Edmond’s 1911 story, ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’, is a precursor to the genre. The early emergence of Australian climate fiction is not surprising given the country’s vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change. This chapter investigates the 35-year history of Australian climate fiction through an analysis of six novels, contemplating how environment, history and culture shape the use of genre, form and theme. It examines slow violence and flooding in The Sea and Summer; the intertwining of colonisation, environmental destruction and dispossession in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013); the use of the uncanny to explore the impact of ‘settlement’ in Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia (2018); the effect of a changing climate on generations in James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and the psychological ramifications of the 2019–20 bushfires, evident through motifs of missing bodies and an invisible menace in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World (2021). These novels, which are shaped by their production in a country with a fragile environment and a history of colonisation, offer varying visions of hope and despair.

This chapter takes as its vantage points two crucial markers of contemporary Ireland – the Good Friday Agreement and the Celtic Tiger. The chapter focuses on the topic of development and environmental violence as they emerge in Northern Ireland after the peace agreement, and in the Republic during the Celtic Tiger years. While Belfast in the post-Peace Agreement era enticed tourists by reinventing the city as a global “anycity,” “Dublin, along with other southern cities, has been indelibly marked by economic boom and bust: So-called “ghost estates” now dot the country’s landscape, and rapid urban gentrification has exacerbated its homelessness crisis.” In a series of evocative readings of individual poems, Julia Obert and Nolan Goetzinger pay attention to the shifting definitions of violence in the Irish context – from the acutely visible and spectacular tragedies of the Troubles to the invisible or drawn-out calamities in the wake of the Celtic Tiger – and demonstrate an energetic critique of late-capitalist and neoliberal definitions of progress and the good life.

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the book. It sets the scene by providing fundamental background information on the issues explored in the book. It then situates the present study within the existing literature. In so doing, it identifies the novel research questions, methodology, and contribution to debates in international law and beyond. It introduces key concepts that will be further discussed in the book, notably the idea of ‘new wars’ and its relationship to the environment. Further, it outlines two theories that provide the foundations and inform the critique developed in the book. The first is Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and the second is the notion of structural violence, taken from Johan Galtung and adapted to the present issues. Lastly, it offers an overview of arguments made in subsequent chapters.

This chapter begins with a discussion of contemporary critiques aimed at trauma theory, specifically how Lauren Berlant’s and Rob Nixon’s work urges us to attend to systemic and/or slow violence. The chapter argues that, rather than wholly discarding the discourses and applications of trauma theory, we can employ it to attend to the way trauma occurs in contexts of slow or systemic violence. As case studies, it turns to two contemporary narratives of post––Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Dave Eggers’s narrative nonfiction, Zeitoun (2009) and David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s serial television show, Treme (2009––13). These texts dramatize the human suffering that occurs at the intersections of traumatic rupture and ongoing systemic violence. The chapter notes the ways these texts situate New Orleans as a vividly unique American metropolis while simultaneously considering the ways they articulate national and international issues. In doing so, It also attends to the way these texts insist on larger historical contexts for the central moment of rupture –– Katrina –– that is the gravitational force of their narratives.

This chapter approaches Carlos Bulosan’s oeuvre, and specifically America Is in the Heart, through the framework of postcolonial ecocriticism. It provides an overview of Bulosan’s life, works, and critical reception. Additionally, the chapter presents the history of US empire as a crucial context shaping Bulosan’s writing. It argues that Bulosan’s environmental imaginary is central to his political critique and identifies the postcolonial pastoral, described by Rob Nixon as a form of “environmental double-consciousness,” as central to Bulosan’s depiction of the Philippines in America Is in the Heart. This environmental double-consciousness emerges in America Is in the Heart not only in depictions of the ongoing consequences of dispossession and colonialism in the Philippines, but also in representations of US landscapes as themselves haunted by the USA’s colonial investment in the Philippines.