Just Transitions, Conflict Transformation, Climate Action and Bioregional Peacebuilding

International climate and environmental policy frameworks, established over the last three decades, have thus far failed to avert the planetary crisis. It is now increasingly likely that the earth will pass 1.5 degrees of global warming before 2030. The political theatre of COP and the economic direction of the world’s post-pandemic recovery all point towards the reinstatement of business-as-usual. The situation of climate policy inaction has been exacerbated by war in Ukraine and the Middle East, generating a dangerous narrative in international relations on energy security around the necessity for new oil and gas fields. In so doing, the stage is now set for accelerated fossil fuel extraction to continue unbated, irrespective of the empirical evidence that suggests human civilisation is already passing irreversible ecological tipping points. In the meantime, the opportunity for a just transition, to rapidly decarbonise and democratise our economies and all aspects of our lived existence is quickly fading. Unlike previous historical periods, this paper will argue that a dangerous relational axis has materialised in the present moment, a unique temporality that creates embedded cyclical conditions for permanent conflict. These conditions for contemporary and future conflict are established through a seemingly intractable negative dynamic: the interrelationship between an enduring commitment to a capitalist economic order that ignores biophysical limits creating an uninhabitable planet for millions. Rather than actually facing up to the socio-economic realities that continue to inspire and amplify the climate catastrophe, countries in the over-developed global north have become more repressive towards popular dissent on the climate policy status quo. This paper argues that the demonisation and criminalisation of climate protest is a precarious strategy that degenerates the social contract between democratic institutions, political elites and their respective populations. This in turn could lead to a ratchet effect creating the basis for more civil unrest (escalating to violence possibly) as the planetary crisis inevitably worsens over time. Furthermore, as biophysical conditions get harsher and as the levels of materialisation to sustain societies under current economic models debilitate and become increasingly precarious, humanity may experience moral and cultural shifts toward forms of regional protectionism that may be increasingly racialised. This turn will inevitably involve the final competition on which values, possessions and people prevail; it is a horrific triage. In this regard, the deck is stacked against the global south and the most vulnerable. As a solution this paper will suggest an ambitious return to the concept of a just transition through the ‘radical hope’ of biopolitical peacebuilding. A radical eco-social transformation based on an innovative bioregional model of peacebuilding and conflict transformation. This paradigm implies significant material redistribution and smaller scale eco-social-economic democracies. Ultimately, the paper will conclude that when it comes to initiating bioregional just transitions humanity is faced with a choice between losing everything or being innovative enough to create something completely different to what is about to be lost, since there is no middle ground or ‘greening business as usual’.