Crime Scene Planet Earth: Why Peacebuilding Requires Doughnut Criminology

TMS PEACE JOURNALISM, 20 Jul 2026

Koenraad Priels – TRANSCEND Media Service

14 Jul 2026 – Peace journalism has taught us to look beyond spectacle and toward structure. That insight is essential, but today it is no longer enough. Peacebuilding must go further: it must confront the systemic human rights violations embedded in our economic and legal order. That is where doughnut criminology becomes indispensable.

The basic claim is simple. Humanity must live within ecological boundaries while ensuring social foundations for all. Yet our current macro-economic system repeatedly violates both. That is not merely a policy failure or an unfortunate imbalance. It is a pattern of harm that a mature human-rights mindset must recognize as criminal in the deepest sense: as foreseeable, preventable, and institutionally sustained violence against people and planet.

Doughnut criminology matters because it makes these violations visible. It shows that social shortfall and ecological overshoot are not neutral outcomes of development, but systemic rights violations. In a time when such realities are often normalized, the framework restores ethical clarity: if a system knowingly undermines dignity, survival, and ecological integrity, then it is not merely “suboptimal”; it is unjust and criminal.

From crisis to crime

Much peace work begins too late. It responds to wars, riots, ceasefires, or visible breakdowns, while missing the slower violence that prepares the ground: poverty, debt dependence, ecological ruin, dispossession, and institutional neglect. These are not side effects. They are the conditions under which conflict becomes more likely and more enduring.

This is why criminology belongs at the center of peacebuilding. Harm is often legal, bureaucratic, and normalized. Institutions can authorize destruction, protect perpetrators, and call the result “growth” or “progress.” Doughnut criminology cuts through that language and asks the more serious question: who is responsible for the structural harms that keep reproducing violence?

Human rights and maturity

Human rights are not just rules; they express ethical maturity. They require the capacity to respect boundaries, recognize dignity, and accept limits for the common good. That mindset is precisely what is missing when power becomes psychopathic or functionally sociopathic: indifferent to harm, skilled at evasion, and comfortable with degradation as long as profits or status rise.

This matters for academia and policy alike. Neoliberal institutions often reward technical competence without ethical integration. The result is moral immaturity disguised as expertise. Doughnut criminology exposes that gap by insisting that knowledge without responsibility is not enough, especially when the stakes are human rights and planetary survival.

Why peacebuilding needs it

Peacebuilding that does not address social and ecological boundaries is fragile by design. A society that overshoots the planet’s limits and undershoots human needs cannot produce lasting peace. It can only manage instability. The doughnut offers a better compass: social foundations below, ecological ceilings above, and a safe and just space in between.

That is why peacebuilding requires more than mediation and reconciliation. It requires accountability for the legal, economic, and institutional structures that generate harm. It requires a willingness to name systemic ecocide and systemic human rights violations for what they are. And it requires the courage to act on that knowledge, not merely describe it.

The UN dimension

The UN matters because it is one of the few arenas where human rights and ecological limits can still be brought together. Doughnut criminology can help make that link more concrete by showing how rights violations are built into macro-economic structures, not just produced by individual bad actors.

That means the task is not simply to set goals. It is to confront the systems that block the realization of rights and then to intervene legally, politically, and institutionally. If harm is transboundary, then so must be the response. Peacebuilding at UN level should not be content with aspiration; it must confront responsibility.

Conclusion

The central lesson is straightforward: peace cannot be built on structural violence. If we want peace that lasts, we need frameworks that reveal the criminality of systems that violate human rights and ecological limits. Doughnut criminology does exactly that. It restores moral seriousness, exposes institutional harm, and reminds us that ethical maturity means drawing boundaries where destruction has been normalized.

That is why peacebuilding requires doughnut criminology. Not as a slogan, but as a necessary upgrade in our understanding of what harm is, who causes it, and what a civilized response must look like.

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Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher and social-ecological activist from Belgium whose work focuses on the systemic links between financial architecture, systemic violence, ecocide, and global inequality.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Jul 2026.

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