Environmental Warfare, Counter-Forensics, Human Rights Workshop

Join ISHR and Professor Shourideh Molavi for a workshop on environmental violence and counter-forensic techniques, methods and investigations. Often part of longer legacies of sovereign practice, violent conflict is today a major contributor to environmental changes. Violence against the environment may be slow, indirect, and diffused, but it is enmeshed in colonial and military violence, and forms of domination. This entanglement reveals that far from a static backdrop for human activity, nature and environmental elements are themselves political actors mobilized by the state, thereby deserving analytical attention. With this, the inherent connection between human rights abuses and environmental violence begins to surface, thereby also demanding new research methods, conceptual frameworks and legal forums for their confrontation. In this one-day workshop, we discuss cases of human rights violations where protracted wars are waged on a people through attacks on their environments, and the ways in which open-source and counter-forensic visual and spatial techniques can be interlaced with on-the-ground witnessing and testimony to document violations. With a focus on Gaza, Palestine, alongside other related cases from around the world, we consider new and powerful forms of resistance and resilience that take place at the nexus of nature, landscape, and people.

 

Student Skill Sets 

Professor Shourideh C. Molavi is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Professor Molavi is a writer and scholar specializing in critical state theory, decolonization, migration and border studies, decolonial ecologies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 20 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East—focusing on Israel/Palestine—on the topics of border practices, citizenship and statelessness, militarized landscapes, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence, and power.