E (Esther) Marijnen
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Esther Marijnen is a political ecologist working on nature-society relations in areas of armed conflict. She in particular studies the militarisation of nature conservation, processes of environmental change in violent environments and the intersection between geography, authority and war.
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.
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 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.
Before Esther joined the SDC group in September 2021, she was an Assistant Professor at the Conflict Research Group (CRG), at Ghent University, and a Postdoctoral research fellow at Sheffield University. She obtained her PhD at the Free University in Brussels, and has a MA in Conflict Studies and Human Rights from Utrecht University.