The following literature review critically examines the intersection between environmental peacebuilding and reconciliation processes in the settler-colonial context to identify frameworks and practices that facilitate sustainable, just, and inclusive processes. Reconciliation is an ongoing process of addressing historical injustices and transforming relationships to build and maintain a mutually respectful framework for living together. In the Canadian context, reconciliation is deeply intertwined with land, treaties, and Indigenous peoples’ rights for self-determination and self-governance. Environmental peacebuilding, as the collaborative management of natural resources, focuses on cooperation between conflicting parties around shared natural resources and offers a potential pathway for fostering meaningful engagement and repairing relationships. However, environmental peacebuilding has primarily focused on inter-state cases with heavy involvement of external actors, such as UN agencies, government agencies, and transnational NGOs, thus having limited explanatory power with very few studies on bottom-up processes. There is a need to focus more on bottom-up environmental peacebuilding to gain insight into how communities create environmental peace on their own terms. The literature review identified key challenges related to power relations that dominate environmental peacebuilding and the disparity between Western and Indigenous knowledge, reinforcing worldviews that produce socioecological injustice, especially in reconciliation processes. The environmental cooperation must be rooted in decolonial practices and recognition of Indigenous land rights to support reconciliation meaningfully.

North Central Nigeria continues to grapple with banditry and security crisis that has been traced to escalating conflicts between sedentary farmers and nomadic Fulani herders. Many communities have recently come under recurring cycle of violent attacks by organised criminal groups thereby elevating the conflicts to the level of a security crisis. The crisis has led to loss of many lives and livelihoods, and the destruction and displacement of communities in ways that signify serious depletion in the value of human lives. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the nexus between farmer herder conflict and the banditry crisis in the region and demonstrate how these twin problems constitute a major barrier to achieving the future we want- in which human lives are highly valued. Qualitative data were generated from in-depth interviews with farming and herding communities in three states of Benue, Plateau and Nasarawa. Findings revealed that multiple socio-economic, political and environmental factors are at the roots of the farmer-herder conflict and the current security crisis. These include perceived or real political and economic marginalization of groups, explosive growth in human and cattle population, scarcity of grazing lands, and deep seated ethnic and/or religious animosity between farming communities and Fulani herders. This implies that a major relationship that matters to both farmers and herders is relationship to land, water, and the environment more broadly. To end the crisis, there is the urgent need for the government and civil society to address the underlying socio-economic, political and environmental triggers.

One of the factors for development disparities can be traced to limitations on knowledge cooperation. At the international level, knowledge cooperation is manifested in the forms of collaborations, interactions, transfer, exchange etc. The extent of knowledge cooperation has been shaped by the rise of populist political regimes. The emerging collusion between the political and corporate actors appear to redefine and redraw the contour of interests and possibility of cooperation among nations. The shift in understanding of public good as inherent characteristic of a commodity (Samuelson) to dependent on policy (Marginson), adds another layer of complexity in our understanding of political economy of knowledge cooperation.

Such networks and power dynamics influence the production and distribution of knowledge through financing and modalities of cooperation. Considering political economy approach, universities and academic institutions appear important actors in knowledge cooperation as the producer of knowledge. The academia, corporations/industry and political actors acts as nodes of network spread across nations. The linkages among the actors stem from their interests and systems-legal, economic and political. The implementation of new public management (NPM) in functioning of universities and collusion between the industry and political regimes give rise to the practices leading to particular kinds of production and dissemination of knowledge. These practices under the influence of market-like management within universities, set norms and standards for market oriented research. Academic capitalism which gets strengthened with such practices lead to distortions in knowledge cooperation in the international networks. With the rise of populist governments, such distortions are supposed to be more severe in limiting counter hegemonic cooperation and emboldening power structures. This paper seeks to understand these developments and utilizes network externalities as theoretical framework to analyze the political economy of knowledge cooperation.

In his first visit to Russia after the start of the War in Ukraine Xi Jinping called Vladimir Putin his “dear friend.” An extensive narrative of historical “Close Friendship” underlies the Sino-Russian rapprochement and alliance. In my paper, based on local archival and fieldwork data I explore how and why the forgotten local monuments of the October Revolution have been recently rediscovered in Russia’s Ural region as new destinations for the Chinese “Red Tourism.” Since 2004 the Beijing authorities have developed a broad program of Red tourism in order to inculcate “red values” through popular visits to the heritage sites of the Communist Revolution but scholarship has not looked into these initiatives beyond Chinese borders. International experts have mostly focused on Moscow’s attempts to overcome the recent sanctions with import substitution programs, while much less attention has been paid to the attempts to export oriented development. Analyzing six monuments to Chinese soldiers of the Russian Civil War in Perm and Yekaterinburg regions, I argue that (a) the “Red Tourism” has recently become a memory export to Russia and resonated with Moscow’s attempts to facilitate export-oriented development, (b) it serves to (re-) invent Russia’s Communist tradition, and, thus, support the overarching narrative of the “Close Friendship,” (c) the “Red tourism” and the “Close Friendship” narrative are taking root in Russian regions, where (d) the bilateral memorial diplomacy and the (re-) discovery of the “red monuments” is supported by a variety of local actors (regional authorities, impoverished local intellectuals, local tourist entrepreneurs, chapters of the weakening Communist Party and the Society of the Russian-Chinese Friendship, and dwellers of gentrifying settlements) pursuing their own interests and preferences.