The scale of the problem is enormous. Global deforestation runs at roughly 10 million hectares per year, and the net loss of forest area between 2015 and 2020 was 4.7 million hectares annually, according to the FAO. Forests shelter 80 percent of amphibian species, 75 percent of bird species, and 68 percent of mammal species, yet in 2023 alone more than 1.4 million hectares vanished within forested Key Biodiversity Areas. Agriculture drives 73 percent of tropical forest loss, with international demand for beef, soybeans, and palm oil pushing frontier expansion across Africa and South America. But these headline numbers conceal a deeper complexity: the drivers of forest loss shift dramatically depending on the political and territorial context, and nowhere is that more true than in zones of armed conflict.

The review’s most counterintuitive insight concerns what researchers call gunpoint conservation. Armed actors sometimes function as de facto environmental regulators. In Colombia, the FARC-EP controlled vast stretches of Amazonian forest for decades, imposing measures that proved effective in conserving trees, restricting megaprojects, and deterring extractive activities through the threat of extortion and intimidation. Similar dynamics have been documented elsewhere: forced displacement of populations can reduce pressure on forests or even allow them to recover, as studies from Colombia to the Polish Carpathians have shown. War, in other words, is not uniformly bad for forests, and peace is not uniformly good for them.

The Colombian case provides the starkest quantitative evidence. After the 2016 peace agreement, deforestation in municipalities where the FARC-EP had been present surged by 177.4 percent, compared with 90.8 percent in municipalities without that presence. Overall, Colombian deforestation rose by 44 percent following the accord. Once the guerrillas demobilized and abandoned their forest strongholds, private investment flowed in, previously controlled forests became freely accessible, and governance vacuums opened across the landscape. In the Catatumbo municipality of Tibú, coca cultivation drove deforested areas up by as much as 709 percent. The pattern is not unique to Colombia: in the Iran–Iraq War borderlands of the Zagros forests, agricultural expansion increased deforestation between 1976 and 1984, and then accelerated again during the post-conflict period from 1988 to 1998.

To map the field, the authors conducted a PRISMA-guided search of Scopus covering 2002 to 2026, combining Boolean terms for deforestation, resilience, and peace, then filtering by document type and excluding sixteen irrelevant subject areas such as medicine, mathematics, and chemistry. The final corpus of 349 records was analyzed in VOSviewer, which builds networks where node size reflects keyword frequency and link thickness reflects co-occurrence strength. The resulting network is highly connected, with climate change and deforestation acting as central hubs, and the largest nodes being climate change, deforestation, biodiversity, sustainable development, and environmental protection. Resilience links directly to climate change, sustainable development, and biodiversity, but no direct link between resilience and armed conflict appears anywhere in the network.

That absence is the review’s central alarm. Armed conflict appears in the literature mainly as a bridge node connected to conservation, protected areas, and land use change, not to resilience thinking. Even more telling, the exact keywords peace, peacebuilding, postconflict, and peace agreement are barely represented among indexed keywords; peace-related concepts often appear in abstracts and full texts but are rarely formalized as author keywords, making the entire peacebuilding dimension nearly invisible to bibliometric searches. The literature, in short, discusses war’s environmental effects but has not built a coherent framework for assessing how forest social-ecological systems absorb, adapt to, or transform under the disturbances that conflict and peace processes create.

Conceptually, the review leans on the distinction between general and specific resilience. General resilience describes a system’s capacity to cope with any disturbance, including novel ones; specific resilience asks resilience of what, against what, in the formulation of Carpenter and colleagues. The authors frame forests as Forest Social-Ecological Systems, or FoSES: tightly coupled human-nature systems characterized by self-organization, the ability to spontaneously reorganize structures and functions through internal dynamics rather than external control. Resilience here is not a simple bounce back to a pre-disturbance state but an emergent property encompassing absorption, reorganization, adaptation, and transformation. Existing assessment methods, from remote sensing of vegetation optical depth in the Amazon to hierarchical frameworks of principles, criteria, and indicators, mostly measure generic resilience rather than the specific resilience of forests to deforestation in conflict-affected territories.

The publication landscape mirrors this fragmentation. The 349 records appeared across 173 sources, with a classic long-tail distribution: 113 journals published only one relevant article each, while the five most productive outlets, Ecology and Society, Forest Policy and Economics, Forest Ecology and Management, Ecological Indicators, and Trees, Forests and People, together accounted for just 14.3 percent of output. Geographically, the Global North dominates: the United States leads with 114 documents, followed by the United Kingdom with 62, Germany with 42, and Canada with 34. Colombia is the striking exception from the Global South, with 41 publications, a direct reflection of its half-century of internal armed conflict and its globally significant post-2016 peace experiment. Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, and Indonesia contribute smaller but meaningful shares, each at different stages of forest transition from accelerated loss to reforestation.

From the corpus, the authors extracted a preliminary set of candidate indicators spanning eight dimensions: annual forest loss rate and forest fragmentation on the ecological side; effective institutional presence under governance; dependence of livelihoods on forests as a measure of social vulnerability; land tenure security; historical presence of armed actors as a conflict variable; changes following peace agreements or demobilization; and community organization as a marker of adaptive capacity and collective action. Each indicator draws on identifiable data sources, from Landsat and Global Forest Watch to cadastres and conflict event databases. The authors are careful to stress that these are candidates, not a validated composite index; operational definitions, weighting, sensitivity analysis, and validation with experts and local communities remain future work.

The stakes extend far beyond academic taxonomy. The reviewed literature proposes adaptive multilevel governance, community participation, territorial planning, restoration, and sustainable livelihood alternatives as responses to post-conflict forest loss, and recent work introduces concepts such as Protective Pathways to connect environmental peacebuilding with territorial recovery. But without an integrated, indicator-based framework for assessing the specific resilience of forest social-ecological systems, planners cannot identify which components of a landscape have the lowest response capacity or where interventions should be prioritized. The authors argue that resilience assessment should be built into peace agreements themselves, so that land abandonment, the removal of access restrictions, and expected deforestation surges are anticipated and negotiated in advance rather than discovered afterward. As peace processes unfold from Colombia to Ukraine, the review’s message is clear: ending a war is only the beginning of a second, quieter struggle, this one between accelerating human pressures on forests and the scientific tools we have to understand and manage them. Right now, the tools are lagging behind, and the forests are paying the price.

Subject of Research: Social-ecological resilience of forests to deforestation in armed conflict and peacebuilding contexts

Article Title: A systematic bibliometric review of social-ecological resilience to deforestation in conflict and peacebuilding contexts

Article References: Cortés, Y., & Toro, J. (2026). A systematic bibliometric review of social-ecological resilience to deforestation in conflict and peacebuilding contexts. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101530. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101530

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: deforestation, social-ecological resilience, armed conflict, peacebuilding, Colombia, FARC-EP, forest governance, bibliometrics, VOSviewer, post-conflict, FoSES, environmental peacebuilding

The research, published in SN Social Sciences by Ayamn Abdoun Nazal of the University of Diyala, analyses a corpus of 847 texts produced between 2003 and 2021, spanning parliamentary debates, executive speeches, party communications and official state documents. Using corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, the study tracks how Iraqi political actors deployed four recognised legitimation strategies: authorization, which appeals to authority and law; rationalization, which appeals to utility and purpose; moral evaluation, which appeals to shared values; and mythopoesis, which legitimates action through narrative, storytelling and shared social myths. The findings reveal a striking transformation in how power was justified in post-conflict Iraq.

Methodologically, the study is notable for treating language as something that can be quantified over time. Nazal divided the corpus into nineteen annual sub-corpora and calculated what the study terms legitimation density, a measure of how frequently legitimation strategies appear per unit of text. The corpus was then grouped into four historical phases mirroring Iraq’s political trajectory: the reconstruction period under the Coalition Provisional Authority and early transitional governments, the consolidation years, the crisis years dominated by the fight against the Islamic State, and the post-crisis period from 2018 to 2021 marked by protest movements and institutional exhaustion.

The headline result is a dramatic reversal in the dominant legitimation strategy. In the reconstruction period of 2003 to 2006, authorization-based legitimation dominated, registering 18.4 instances on the density measure, reflecting an era in which obedience was demanded primarily by appeal to occupation decrees, transitional law and the imprimatur of international authority. By the post-crisis period of 2018 to 2021, that figure had fallen to 9.1. Mythopoetic legitimation moved in precisely the opposite direction, rising from 3.3 to 14.7 across the same interval and overtaking all other strategies in the final phase. Statistical testing across the four phases returned log-likelihood ratio statistics, or G² values, of 2247.1 for authorization and 5241.0 for mythopoesis, each on three degrees of freedom and each with p less than 0.001. Effect sizes, measured with Cramér’s V, stood at 0.16 for authorization and 0.30 for mythopoesis, indicating an especially strong association between the crisis and post-crisis periods and narrative-based legitimation.

The interpretation offered is that as Iraq’s institutions matured nominally but remained fragile in practice, their leaders found appeals to formal authority progressively less persuasive. The occupation-era habit of legitimating decisions by citing legality and command gave way to storytelling: narratives of martyrdom, national sacrifice, resistance and historical destiny. This shift tracks Iraq’s political reality closely. In the years after 2003, institutions such as the constitutional drafting process and the electoral commissions derived whatever legitimacy they had from external sponsorship and legal procedure. After the rise of ISIS in 2014 and the mobilisation of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the most powerful justification available to political actors was the narrative of a nation defending itself, in which clerical calls to arms and the martyrdom of fighters supplied a moral story that no legal instrument could match.

The study also examines speech act distribution across institutional arenas, drawing on the speech act theory framework of Searle and Vanderveken. The quantitative picture is one of functional differentiation. Directive and commissive acts, the speech acts of command and promise, concentrated heavily in executive discourse, from prime ministerial addresses to ministerial statements. Parliamentary debate, by contrast, sustained a higher proportion of assertive acts, statements of fact and claim, throughout all four phases. This division of pragmatic labour persisted even as the content of discourse transformed, suggesting that the formal architecture of Iraq’s political institutions shaped how language functioned within them, even while the strategies of legitimation flowing through those institutions changed beneath.

Perhaps the most analytically rich finding emerges from co-occurrence analysis of key legitimation terms, using Mutual Information scores to identify words that cluster together more often than chance would predict. The analysis identifies a persistent semantic tension between the vocabulary of constitutional order and the vocabulary of religious duty. Terms associated with the constitution, elections and the state repeatedly co-occur with terms associated with faith, obligation and the sacred. Crucially, Nazal argues, this pairing does not resolve the central dilemma of Iraqi state-building, namely constructing a sovereign polity under conditions of dependency and fragility. Instead, it enacts that dilemma at the lexical level: every invocation of religious duty alongside constitutional language simultaneously strengthens and undermines the claim that the state’s authority rests on secular, procedural foundations. The tension is not a rhetorical accident but a structural feature of the discourse itself.

Framing analysis adds a temporal dimension to this picture. In non-crisis periods, sovereignty discourse was organised around frames of electoral mandate and economic development, presenting the state as the product of ballots and budgets. During crises, most notably the ISIS occupation of large swathes of territory, the framing reconfigured rapidly around external threat and martyrdom narratives. The study’s framing data thus show discourse responding elastically to security conditions, with the vocabulary of sovereignty bending toward survival narratives whenever the state’s territorial integrity was challenged, and snapping back toward developmental and procedural frames when relative calm returned. This oscillation, the study suggests, reflects a sovereignty discourse that never settled into a stable register during the entire 2003 to 2021 period.

For scholars of post-conflict state-building, the study’s contribution lies in connecting macro-political narratives to measurable linguistic behaviour. The literature on fragile states has long debated whether institutional weakness stems from design flaws, external intervention or local political settlements. Nazal’s findings imply that legitimation is itself a variable in that equation, one that can be tracked empirically. The decline of authorization and the rise of mythopoesis suggest that the social contract in Iraq was renegotiated not in constitutional texts but in stories, and that the state’s ability to command obedience by citing its own laws weakened even as its institutions multiplied. The study is careful to remain within its evidence, noting that no datasets were generated or analysed beyond the textual corpus, and its claims concern discourse rather than causal political outcomes.

The implications nonetheless extend well beyond Iraq. Post-conflict states from Afghanistan to South Sudan have experienced similar sequences: externally sponsored institutions, legitimacy problems, and the eventual ascendancy of narrative and identity-based justification over procedural authority. If legitimation density can be measured and tracked, it offers analysts a leading indicator of institutional health, detectable in political language before it manifests in constitutional crisis or street protest. The Iraqi case, as documented here, suggests that when a state stops being able to legitimate itself through law and starts needing myths to hold itself together, that shift is not rhetorical decoration. It is the political story of the state itself, written one speech, one debate and one communiqué at a time, and now, for the first time, counted.

Subject of Research: Legitimation strategies and institutional development in post-2003 Iraqi political discourse

Article Title: Legitimation and institutional development in Iraqi political discourse from 2003 to 2021

Article References: Nazal, A. A. (2026). Legitimation and institutional development in Iraqi political discourse from 2003 to 2021. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01751-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01751-8

Keywords: Iraq, political discourse, legitimation strategies, Critical Discourse Analysis, state-building, fragile states, mythopoesis, speech acts, sovereignty, corpus linguistics, post-conflict, framing analysis