Themes

The Symposium will feature a wide range of issues, approaches, geographies, disciplines, and perspectives. As detailed below, there are five themes, as well as an open theme:

I. Water, Ice, and Hazard. Contributions in this theme may address, for example: cryosphere loss; the reordering of hydrological regimes; hydro-hegemony; dams and basin negotiations that exclude upstream communities; borders drawn along shifting watersheds; glacial lake outburst floods; permafrost thaw; landslides; early warning systems; protection; planned relocation; questions of rights; who is deemed worth protecting; and disaster diplomacy across hostile borders.

II. Frontiers of Conflict: Borders, Militarization, and Extraction. Contributions in this theme may address, for example: high-altitude militarization and its ecological footprint; war remnants and unexploded ordnance surfacing from retreating ice; the toxic legacy of mines and military installations; mining, hydropower, and the energy transition as new waves of extraction; the criminalization of land and environmental defenders; treating mountains as persons rather than deposits; and conservation-based de-escalation in peace parks.

III. Bio-cultural Diversity, Coexistence, and Recognition. Contributions in this theme may address, for example: commons and customary institutions under modern property regimes; autonomy arrangements for conflict resolution; heritage designation for recognition and enclosure; pastoralism and transhumance; grazing rights; the return of large carnivores and conflicts over coexistence between urban and mountain communities; fortress conservation and eviction; anti-poaching enforcement; tourism and overtourism; mega-events and migration as pressures on and commodification of bio-cultural diversity; and depopulation and just transitions at altitude.

IV. Sacred Heights, Memory, and the Arts of Peace. Contributions in this theme may address, for example: mountains as sacred sites and destinations of pilgrimage, from Kailash and Athos to Sri Pada, Kirinyaga and the Qoyllur Rit’i pilgrimage at Ausangate; shared and contested holy places; offerings, processions, and seasonal rituals as practices of reciprocity and peace; commemoration and reconciliation in former mountain war zones; ecological grief, solastalgia, and glacier funerals; and mountain films, literature, art, and curation as peace practices.

V. Doing Mountain Peacebuilding: Methods, Technologies, and Practice. Contributions in this theme may address, for example: access to remote, sensitive, and contested areas; research ethics, safety, and participatory methods; practitioner-researcher collaboration, mediation, and training; financing mechanisms and the conditions attached to them; the use of remote sensing, GIS, modelling, and AI in the production of mountain knowledge and designing interventions; the question of who owns, controls, and benefits from mountain data; the coloniality of mountain knowledge, from survey and cartography to mountaineering and conservation; and conflict-sensitive approaches.

VI. Open. We also welcome other contributions on environmental peacebuilding in mountain areas that do not fit into the above themes, including comparative, theoretical, and experimental work.