DURHAM, N.C. – Erika Weinthal, Lee Hill Snowdon Professor of Environmental Policy at 51’s Nicholas School of the Environment, was honored today with a Women Peacebuilders for Water Award at an international conference in Milan, Italy.

The award recognizes Weinthal for her pioneering scholarship on global environmental politics and governance, particularly her focus on the role water resources can play in post-conflict peacebuilding.

She was one of three women who received the high honor, which was presented under the auspices of the Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015, an Italian foundation dedicated to promoting sustainable development and resource management in developing countries worldwide. 

The foundation presented the awards today to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the enactment of the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 1325, which recognizes the role of women as peacemakers as well as the disproportionate impact violent conflict has on them.

Weinthal’s research on water and post-conflict peacebuilding spans many geographic regions, including the Soviet successor states, the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa and North America. 

Her most recent , published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed journal Security Dialogue, provides extensive new evidence that attacks on essential civilian infrastructure – such as water, sanitation, waste and energy systems – is an increasingly prevalent form of war in the Middle East and North Africa, with long-term implications for conflict resolution and peacemaking there. 

In addition to publishing nearly 50 peer-reviewed papers on the role of natural resources in conflict and peacebuilding, Weinthal is also the author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She co-authored Oil is not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States (Cambridge University Press 2010) and co-edited Water and Post-conflict Peacebuilding: Shoring Up Peace (Routledge/Earthscan Press, 2014). 

She is a member of the United National Environment Programme’s Expert Group on Conflict and Peacebuilding, and an editor at Global Environmental Politics.

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