This book is about environmental defenders and the violence, repression, criminalization and assassination they face while seeking to protect their land and the environment.

Mary Menton is a Research Fellow in Environmental Justice with the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme at the University of Sussex, UK. She is a part of the core-team of Not1More, a collective that works to support at-risk environmental defenders.

Philippe Le Billon is Professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of multiple publications, including Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts (Routledge, 2013), and collaborates with human rights and environmental investigation organizations.

1. Introduction Part 1 - On Defenders 2. Conflicts in the Amazon: The Assassination of José Claudio and Maria 3. How young Cambodian environmental activists work under dictatorship 4. Human rights violations in the name of conservation in the Ngorongoro District 5. "Environmental defenders": the power / disempowerment of a loaded term 6. Atmospheres of Violence: On defenders' intersecting experiences of violence 7. Environmental defenders: Killings, perpetrators, and drivers of violence 8. The gendered criminalization of land defenders in Ecuador: from individualization to collective resistance in feminized territories 9. Insurgent ideas from indigenous peoples in Brazil: counter-colonial epistemologies and the defense of life Part 2 - 'Dirty' Projects 10. The Permutations of Poverty 11. Violence and resistance in Ceará Indígena, Northeastern Brazil 12. 'Land defenders' and the political ecology of coal power in Bangladesh 13. Manifestations of violence: Case study of Moolampilly eviction for a development project in Kerala 14. Defenders and land struggles against agro-industrial and mining investment projects 15. How violence is justified in 'democratic countries' Part 3 - 'Green' Projects 16. Resist or comply? Experiences of violence around dams in Cambodia 17. Pacifying autonomous land defenders in Oaxaca, Mexico: Human rights groups as social warfare mechanisms 18. Land defenders, infrastructural violence and environmental coloniality: Resisting a wastewater treatment plant in Eastern Nablus 19. Defending territory from the extraction and conservation nexus 20. BINGOs & environmental defenders: NGO complicity in atmospheres of violence and the possibilities for decolonial solidarity with defenders 21. Defending Territories of Life through Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) 22. Interrogating international cooperation in support of environmental human rights defenders: the Geneva Roadmap 40/11 and the power of connecting solutions