Grants and residencies

Research

Toxic Crimes: Human Rights, Legal Activism, and the Destruction of the Environment during Conflict

Application summary

War often destroys the environment – either when armies poison foliage as a strategy or when toxins leak from undetonated explosives. While the United Nations and International Criminal Court have grown more attentive to the destruction of the environment during a war, courts seldom hold states and individuals accountable for the damage done to human health and ecosystems. While climate change justice, climate litigation, and environmental human rights are growing fields, we know less of how rights advocates – lawyers, experts, and activists – promote the idea that the environment can be a victim and subject separate from the harm done to people. Without a clear understanding of how these rights advocates work, we risk undervaluing two issues: first, their impact on a new branch of international legal restrictions under "crimes against the earth." Second, we risk undervaluing how they employ a range of strategies: monitoring polluted areas, representing victims at human rights courts, and making new connections between overlapping fields of international law. Drawing on interviews and multi-sited fieldwork, the "Toxic Crimes" project examines how legal experts and lawyers (a) monitor and limit the spread of pollution in areas of wartime environmental destruction, (b) help victims in polluted conflict zones by aiding them in their claims at regional human rights courts, and (c) seek to expand the rights of the environment by holding individuals accountable.

The “Toxic crimes” project has expanded the debate on armed conflict and environmental impacts by providing analytical insight on the policy-making and international law dimensions on how war destroys the environment, how experts can collect environmental data during a violent war while facing many practical and violent obstacles, and how experts have pushed for the expansion of legal norms to protect the environment during war. With the Russian war of aggression and the genocide in Gaza, the discussion on how war harms our environment and public health over decades to come has become all the more important, with a great deal of academic contributions emerging into the scene as well as a dire need for insight in the policy-making side. The “Toxic crimes” project provided perspectives on both fronts, with the ultimate aim of making the academic and policy fields more understandable to one another and for a wider public.

By 2025, the protection of the environment in armed conflict has become a mainstream policy concern, as well as a known issue for the general public. Through our involvement with policy makers, the media, intergovernmental organizations as well as academia, the Toxic Crimes Project has pushed alongside others to this growing momentum during a time when the environment was still treated as a silent victim of war. Our project, among other actors and factors, paved the way for the further exploration of certain pressing issues, such as the topic of holding Russia accountable for wartime environmental damage or the matter of granting compensation for the causation of environmental harm in times of armed conflict.

Between 2019 and 2025, the project employed two postdoctoral researchers, two research assistants, and a PI. The project resulted into various public events on ecocide and the development of the PERAC principles (protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict), involvement in UN processes, and participation in debates in the media.

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