| dc.description.abstract | The proposal for a Law of Ecocide (LOE) raises some ethical questions. As an amendment to the Rome Statute, it would give the International Criminal Court the mandate to prosecute individuals with superior responsibility for ‘widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment’ in peacetime, and not just in war. Functioning herein as a 5th crime against peace, LOE could effectively improve the protection for ecosystems worldwide, as domestic legislation would follow, yet has been sitting on the desk of the United Nations Law Commission since 2010. In this thesis, I revisit the subject of a Law of Ecocide through empirical, logical, and normative investigations, within the interdisciplinary nexus of environmental ethics, philosophy of law, psychology and peace theory. My approach is based on green criminology or critical environmental studies and a range of corresponding qualitative methods. My objective is to reassess ecosystem harm in the conditions of peace, and address some of the ethical dilemmas of LOE. Through archive analysis of a military ecocide (Agent Orange) compared to a contemporary case of corporate ecocide, I find reasons for a de-differentiation between legal and illegal environmental harm in the face of globalized corporate ‘superpowers’. An ethical analysis of ecosystems’ moral claim to justice is followed by a normative discussion on their legal claim to rights. Within the established debate of ecocentric and anthropocentric arguments, I consider a third option in the form of meta-ethical consequentialism. Using the lens of environmental ethics, I argue that the human rights doctrine establishes an efficient incentive for new legislation which avoids some of the problems of the ‘nonhuman rights regime’. Finally, I draw on peace psychology, wherein ‘the invisible harm’ inherent in the neoliberalist free market adds to the discourse on ecocide as single events. Concluding that ecocide is not as much a crime against peace as it is conducted by peace, I make a basic proposition for a ‘just peace’ which implements ecological justice in a world of relentless corporate pressure on ecosystems. | eng |