By Deborah Martinez
At the heart of contemporary conflicts lies an often-overlooked reality: Environmental resources are unevenly distributed and governed. As climate change accelerates and ecological limits tighten, struggles over land, energy, water, and biodiversity increasingly shape global politics, revealing the sustainability–peace nexus as a strategic mechanism used to stabilize extraction.
The recent operation of the United States (U.S.) in Venezuela, where former president Nicolás Maduro was captured and extradited, did more than expose that the international order is broken. It thrust a vital, yet long-silenced, conversation into the heart of sustainability discussions: imbalance. Beyond the familiar asymmetries between the Global North and South, or the divide between developed and underdeveloped nations of the center and periphery, lies a more consequential structural imbalance of resources—one often glossed over in diplomatic discourse, but standing at the core of contemporary sustainability politics, shaping who sets the rules, who bears the costs, and who reaps the benefits of environmental governance.
For decades, the United Nations (UN) has maintained that sustainability and peace are inextricably linked. The underlying logic is that, for a balanced relationship between humanity and nature to exist, a state of peace must prevail. At least, that is the core claim of Goal 16 of the 2030 Agenda, which frames justice, non-violence, and strong institutions as enabling conditions for sustainable development.
Yet, despite the UN’s insistence, today’s world seems to be retreating from this ideal. From coercive diplomacy, such as the weaponization of water rights in the Indus River basin, to resource conflicts driven by rare earth extraction in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, global politics is increasingly shaped by competition and nationalism over land, energy, and critical resources, dynamics intensified by a deepening climate crisis. This escalation raises a critical question: Can sustainability ever truly be realized without peace? Or was the link always more fragile than we cared to admit?
The Environmental Imbalance
For decades, sustainability has been conceptualized as a balance between three dimensions: economy, society, and environment, with political partnerships and peace serving as the foundation. Yet while international discourse often acknowledges social and economic asymmetries, environmental asymmetries, particularly in the distribution of natural resources and ecological burdens, remain largely ignored, if not actively silenced.
From the perspective of world-systems theory, as articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein, the global order is structured around a center-periphery relationship in which peripheral regions, such as Latin America, are systematically positioned as suppliers of raw materials, energy, and ecological services, including carbon absorption or biodiversity reserves, to hegemonic economies. This structure ensures that power and capital remain concentrated in the center, while extraction and environmental degradation are externalized to the periphery.
Under this logic, hegemonic nations, shaped by centuries of industrialization and overconsumption, face a chronic domestic shortage. Having depleted much of their own ecological reserves, their stability and prosperity increasingly depend on continuous, uncontested access to resources located elsewhere. This context helps explain why nations positioned at the periphery have long been labeled as “underdeveloped” or “in development.” By defining them primarily through socioeconomic and political indicators, the global order has effectively deferred their extraordinary environmental richness, reducing it to mere predetermined conditions that acquire value only once they are exchanged.
It is within this logic that capitalism and diplomacy have become handy as intertwined mechanisms to guarantee hegemonic nations’ access to resources of the periphery, whether through free trade agreements, sanctions, or dependency-building. As theorized by critical theorists such as Theotonio Dos Santos, or Arturo Escobar, the hegemonic global order has historically been maintained by keeping the periphery in a state of “permanent development,” in which liberalism and sustainability function as promises of collective future welfare that never fully materializes. Yet the very idea of progress, in turn, serves to convince peripheral nations to keep their borders open and their natural resources and landscapes readily available for exploitation.
The problem for hegemonic nations arises when the so-called underdeveloped world seeks to restrict access to its resources. When access is curtailed, despite sustained “diplomatic” and market efforts, the global order shifts from persuasion to pressure, with coercion and, at times, violence emerging as instruments to discipline the periphery and reopen blocked channels of extraction.
Peace Exposed
It is a silenced but still valid truth that “peace” is often defined by those in power and treated as valuable only insofar as it serves the interests of hegemonic powers. As scholars such as Mark Duffield have argued, global powers promote a form of “liberal peace” in which stability is interpreted less as a condition for local welfare than as a mechanism to ensure the smooth operation of global political and economic systems. Viewed through the lens of environmental imbalance, this helps explain why, when the prosperity of the center is threatened by a nation attempting to govern or protect its own natural resources, the very peace that allows for such sovereignty is perceived as a barrier.
Peace endures only as long as access to strategic resources remains guaranteed. Once that access is threatened, it is quickly discarded, and violence re-emerges as a strategic mechanism to “reopen” the borders of the periphery.
Peace, therefore, does not function as a universal ethical condition. From an environmental perspective, it often signifies the stabilization of extraction. Peripheral regions do not need to be peaceful in a substantive sense; they need only be governable enough to ensure an uninterrupted supply of resources. This creates a cynical double standard in which conflict, repression, or instability are tolerated, and sometimes even encouraged, so long as material flows remain intact, while these same conditions would be condemned as intolerable in a hegemonic nation. This reveals how, within the current global architecture, “peace” is a luxury reserved for hegemonic nations, while the periphery is merely managed for its output.
Venezuela and Trump’s “Peace”
Acknowledging the global dynamics of peace does not grant ethical superiority to peripheral regimes, nor does it absolve them of responsibility. Venezuela offers a stark example of how violence operates at the national level, given the scale of devastation produced by the Bolivarian regime. According to humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations, more than 7.9 million people had fled the country by late 2025, creating one of the largest displacement crises worldwide, while over 2,200 cases of arbitrary detentions, alongside reports of extrajudicial killings and torture, had been documented.
Even as the global order rightly condemns this local violence, it often ignores its own role in shaping the conditions under which it unfolds. Beyond debates over direct involvement in the conflict, what remains insufficiently acknowledged is that, beneath the veneer of humanitarian concern, key international actors often seek to re-establish “favorable conditions,” not primarily for the peace or welfare of Venezuelans, but to guarantee uncontested access to the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
As Donald Trump explained in his public remarks following the capture of Maduro, the U.S. would effectively assume control over Venezuela until a transition he described as “safe, proper, and judicious” could be arranged. Framing the intervention in explicitly managerial terms, Trump portrayed the operation less as a political act than as a transactional arrangement, insisting that the American role in governing Venezuela “would not cost anything,” since U.S. oil companies would be invited to rebuild what he characterized as the country’s “broken infrastructure.”
Thus, by invoking the language of development, Trump transformed environmental asymmetries into a justification for intervention, recasting coercive power as a technocratic necessity rather than a political choice.
The Sustainability Wars
The exploitation of “peace” as a rhetorical shield, coupled with the structural environmental imbalances of the global order, gives rise to a pressing question: Can sustainability be achieved under conditions of structural environmental asymmetries?
When peace is invoked as a rhetorical shield and environmental inequalities are treated as background conditions, sustainability ceases to function as a shared global project. Instead, it becomes embedded in a political order that manages ecological resources through hierarchy rather than cooperation. The central question, then, is not whether sustainability is desirable, but whether it is achievable in a system structured around asymmetrical ecological power.
This question invites a post-structural reading of sustainability, which treats it not as a neutral objective but as a politically contested and overdetermined discourse. When peace is defined by those with the power to impose order, it ceases to be an ethical horizon and instead becomes a governing strategy. Under these conditions, sustainability no longer points toward harmony between society and nature; it is reconfigured as a project of stabilization, oriented toward the management of extraction rather than its transformation.
Under this rhetoric, sustainability no longer operates as a shared global project. Instead, it functions as a hollowed-out discourse, invoked in the name of peace while being pursued through law, finance, and diplomacy, and, at times, mobilized to legitimize military intervention. By binding sustainability to peace, the discourse masks conflict as stability, concealing the material struggles through which ecological resources are governed, contested, and enforced.
This suggests that the future of our planet is currently being shaped less by the balance of sustainability’s three pillars than by the raw exercise of power: the dawning era of the Sustainability Wars.
Deborah Martínez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University studying how populist discourses frame sustainability. She was an OSUN Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and serves on BYU’s OPUS Steering Committee. Before academia, she worked as an international journalist for Nikkei, Russia Today, and TV Azteca.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
