Esther Marijnen is a political ecologist working on nature-society relations in areas of armed conflict. She studies specifically the militarisation of nature conservation, processes of environmental change in violent environments and the intersection between geography, authority and war.
In addition to understanding the lingering effects of different forms of violence upon nature-society relations, Esther is interested how these ‘wounded landscapes’ are understood by a range of different international (conservation) organisations, and she critically analyses their interventions in these spaces.
She is currently working on her Veni project - “wounded landscapes” financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) (2021-2024). In this project she investigates how forms of slow violence, colonial legacies of violence and armed conflict is reconfiguration social-environmental landscapes.
Esther has been working with CPAID since 2017, first as a post-doc researcher at Ghent University together with Prof. Koen Vlassenroot, and currently as an Assistant Professor at the SDC group, at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. In CPAID she works on, and co-coordinates, the work on the intersection of the environment, conflict and public authority.
She has been conducting field research in east of the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2013. In her current project she is also planning to conduct field work in Uganda and Burundi, in addition to the DRC.