Power to the peatlands! Cross-border solidarity as a unifying force in academia and beyond

In this blog, Prince Claus Chairholder (PCC) Dr Helena Varkkey reflects on how academic solidarity transcends disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on her experience at the ‘Power to the Peatlands’ conference and work with the WASABI research group at ISS, she explores how genuine collaboration can unlock new intellectual pathways for addressing complex challenges like Southeast Asia’s recurring transboundary haze crisis. 

About five months ago, I delivered my Inaugural Speech as the Prince Claus Chair 2025-2027 at ISS. In my speech, I discussed transboundary haze, the near-annual air pollution that spreads across Southeast Asia and affects public health, the economy, the environment, community life, and even diplomatic relations between neighbours. I began researching the politics and governance of the haze about 20 years ago. Unfortunately, after all these years, the haze remains a major regional headache. In fact, Southeast Asia is currently suffering from severe transboundary haze.

In Malaysia, my home country, many cities have been recording ‘unhealthy’ air pollution levels since mid-August. In September, a haze emergency was declared for three days in the district of Serian in East Malaysia when air quality breached ‘hazardous levels’, shutting down schools, workplaces, and non-essential services, and halting all outdoor activities. And just this week, a royal decree from the King abruptly shut thousands of schools during the final exams.

Malaysia has some local fires that, because of their smaller scale, cause localized haze. However, most haze-causing fires in Malaysia occur across the border in Indonesia’s Kalimantan and, to a lesser extent, Sumatra. Fires on both sides of the border mainly occur in peatlands. Pristine peatlands are usually waterlogged, but when drained for commercial agriculture, as is increasingly the case, they dry out quickly and become highly fire-prone. Because peat soil is carbon-rich, fires often burn deep underground and can spread over vast distances. This year, conditions are especially dire because it is shaping up to be a Super El Niño year, provoking drier and hotter conditions across the region. This means fires tend to grow larger more quickly, and limited water supplies further complicate firefighting.

Amid the haze crisis, I came to the Netherlands to continue my work with the WASABI (Water, Securitisation Anxieties, and Border Imaginaries) team at ISS. I also came to share my research at a conference called Power to the Peatlands, held in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

During our conference presentation, someone in the audience asked, ‘How are tropical peatlands different from temperate peatlands’? At first, I was taken aback. How could someone attending a peatland conference not know this? My colleague gave a descriptive answer – tropical peatlands are dense forests, while temperate peatlands are more often open landscapes.

On day three of the conference, we took field trips to various peat sites across the Netherlands and Belgium. This was not my first time in temperate peat, but it was a first for my Malaysian colleagues and many other Southeast Asian attendees.

That day, I saw my Malaysian and Southeast Asian colleagues encounter temperate peatlands for the first time, and their reactions made me appreciate how different the two types of peatlands really are. While both serve the same function in the carbon cycle by keeping carbon in the ground and out of the atmosphere, the processes that enable this storage are different.

Tropical peatlands rely on oxygen deprivation through flooding to prevent decay, while temperate peatlands rely on cold temperatures and complex plant ecosystems that prevent rot. The vocabulary around peatland conservation was different here: cations, phenols, tannins, and so many types of mosses. I then understood that the person asking the question could not even imagine what peatlands and their storage processes in the tropics could look like.

However, many similarities emerged, especially in governance challenges. In both tropical and temperate peat, land-use conflicts, economic policies that incentivise commercial agriculture, and indeed, fire are perennial issues. In fact, one of the worst peat fires in Belgium’s history occurred in mid-August this year, the same time fires belched haze across Southeast Asia.

Even though tropical peatlands may seem quite alien to many temperate peat researchers, I was touched that many of them knew about the fires ravaging our part of the world. Some even expressed their sympathy and solidarity directly and sincerely. This experience made me reflect on my work with WASABI thus far, about halfway into my PCC tenure. When I first joined WASABI, I was amazed to see how each member had such different areas of expertise, which at first sometimes even seemed totally unrelated to water!

Instead, I felt solidarity was the main glue holding WASABI together – solidarity with marginalised groups, the environment, and a better future for all.

As academics, we are expected to know a whole lot about one specific thing. But it can also harden into scholarly silos, where each discipline becomes a container for its own questions and methods. However, these boundaries are not necessarily barriers to collaboration. With genuine solidarity, differences can shrink, and the scope for solutions can grow.

I know much more now about irregularised migrant labour, ocean securitisation, water policy, and border politics. And I am sure the WASABIs know much more about peatlands. But what I feel is most important is that I now have the knowledge and inspiration to see peatlands through new lenses I didn’t have before I joined WASABI.

After twenty years dealing with this recurring problem, I was running out of answers within my own discipline. Now, I prepare to return to hazy Malaysia with these new intellectual lenses. For example, WASABI’s overarching water focus has inspired me to reframe my analysis from a ‘presence of fire’ problem to an ‘absence of water’ problem instead.

In return, I believe my peatland perspective has broadened WASABI’s analytical lens on cross-border movement, extending beyond people to, in this case, smoke. Bringing our different areas of expertise together in a novel, tangible way is still a work in progress, and it is not easy. Yet this is exactly where interdisciplinary work pays off.

I am hopeful that our discoveries will benefit not only academia but society at large. For example, I am part of CERAH, a Malaysian civil society movement advocating for the right to clean air. In the Netherlands, I am inspired by initiatives such as Re-Peat, a youth-based collective focused on peatland conservation.

As I embark on year two of my Chair position here, I look forward to seeing where this collaboration takes us!

About the author

Dr Helena Varkkey is an Associate Professor of Political Ecology at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. She is also the 2025-2027 Prince Claus Chair based at the International Institute of Social Studies, attached to the Water, Securitisation Anxieties and Border Imaginaries (WASABI) research group.