Emmanuel H.P.M. Kreike, born in Oosterhout, the Netherlands, in 1959. Ph.D. from Yale University and Wageningen University. Professor of History at Princeton University.
Fellow (1 September 2012 – 30 June 2013)
Environmental Warfare, Humanitarian Disasters, and Indirect Genocide
Environmental destruction in war may result in severe humanitarian crises and even genocide. Yet the impact of war on the environment has been little studied. The main cause for this neglect is that the “environment” continues to be narrowly defined as a natural environment, i.e., it is identified with Nature within a Nature-Culture dichotomy. Thus, environmental warfare is perceived as tragically destructive of Nature, but the destruction of Nature is ranked lower than acts of violence that directly target humans, human society, and Culture. An interdisciplinary and comparative study with case-studies on the European conquest of the Americas, the 1560s-1640s Dutch Revolt, the Dutch 19th-century conquest of Aceh, and 20th-century warfare in Southern Africa sheds new light on the processes through which war affects human societies and the environments they shaped.
Selected Publications
Architects of Nature: Environmental Infrastructure and the Myth of Natural Resources Management (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2012).
Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia: The Global Consequences of Local Contradictions (Brill and Markus Wiener, 2010)
Re-Creating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia (Heinemann, 2004)