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<i>Environmental Peacemaking</i> Nominated for Grawemeyer Award

ECSP Director Geoffrey Dabelko and University of Maryland professor Ken Conca are up for a $200,000 prize for Ideas Improving World Order.

ECSP Director Geoffrey Dabelko and University of Maryland professor Ken Conca's 2002 book Environmental Peacemaking is competing for the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

The World Order Award, created through the generosity of the late H. Charles Grawemeyer, is conferred annually and is administered by the University of Louisville's Department of Political Science. Its purpose is to stimulate the recognition, dissemination, and critical analysis of outstanding proposals for improving world order.

Environmental Peacemaking examines the way that environmental cooperation opens channels for peacemaking by enhancing trust, establishing habits of cooperation, encouraging longer-term thinking by decisionmakers, forging cooperative linkages across societies, and creating shared norms and identities throughout regions. Even though environmental degradation is widely recognized as a catalyst for violent conflict, environmental cooperation has gone almost unexplored as a means of peacemaking.

The book looks at initiatives in six regions--South Asia, Central Asia, the Baltic, Southern Africa, the Caucasus, and the U.S.-Mexico border--and concludes that environmental cooperation holds considerable potential for contributing to peacemaking in most regions.

Environmental Peacemaking was published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, and is available through The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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