The Socio-Environmental Crises Studies. An Emerging and Polycentric Field of Research (1998–2024)

Recently, some systematic reviews have been published criticizing the results of studies on socio-environmental conflicts, claiming that they are vacuous and unscientific, labeling them as deeply ideological and constituting only a genre of “scientific journalism.” In this context, this study aims to reconstruct the landscape of socio-environmental conflict studies and the academic production networks underlying the field between 1998 and 2024. It is evidently a transdisciplinary field that combines in an unprecedented way generally qualitative research and socio-environmental activist struggles. For this purpose, a sample of 274 articles in the field was analyzed from the WoS and Scopus databases. The results indicate that the academic production of socio-environmental studies is fundamentally polycentric, which is an unusual situation considering the general panorama of publications in indexed journals. On the other hand, it is noted that studies on socio-environmental conflicts lack solid collaborative networks in terms of their structure, which could mean that there is little transnational perspective on the problems addressed in each article. However, the solid and defined intellectual roots are striking, which shows a self-organization of the field around works and concepts such as ecological and political economics, radical geography, anthropology of development, and neo-Marxism, among others.