Armed Conflict and the Environment

Abstract

Conflict over scarce resources, such as minerals, fish, water, and particularly territory, is a traditional source of armed struggle. Recently, wide-ranging claims have been made to the effect that environmental degradation will increase resource scarcity and therefore contribute to an increase in armed conflict. So far, there has been much controversy and little relevant systematic study of this phenomenon. Most scholarship on the relationship between resources, the environment, and armed conflict suffers from one or more of the following problems: (1) there is a lack of clarity over what is meant by 'environmental conflict'; (2) researchers engage in definitional and polemical exercises rather than analysis; (3) important variables are neglected, notably political and economic factors which have a strong influence on conflict and mediate the influence of resource and environmental factors; (4) some models become so large and complex that they are virtually untestable; (5) cases are selected on values of the dependent variable; (6) the causality of the relationship is reversed; (7) postulated events in the future are cited as empirical evidence; (8) studies fail to distinguish between foreign and domestic conflict; and (9) confusion reigns about the appropriate level of analysis. While no publications are characterized by all of these problems, many have several of them. This article identifies a few lights in the wilderness and briefly outlines a program of research.6.1 War, Resources, and the Environment 'Nations have often fought to assert or resist control over war materials, energy supplies, land, river basins, sea passages and other key environmental resources.'

Conflict on the urban fringe: Urbanization, environmental stress, and urban unrest in Africa

“…Buhaug et al 2014;Gleditsch 2012;Hsiang et al 2013). A simplified narrative suggests that climate change affects rural, agrarian societies through erratic precipitation and weather patterns and protracted droughts, pushing rural inhabitants towards cities where 1 Research on resource scarcity and conflict has focused on the interaction between growing population pressures, scarcity, and degradation of renewable resources like arable land, forests, and freshwater, and the distribution of resources (for pioneering contributions, see Homer-Dixon 1991, 1994Gleditsch et al 1997;Kahl 1998). The literature on the security implications of climate change concentrate on weather patterns, especially precipitation patterns, temperature variation, and droughts (e.g.…”