Beyond scarcity: Rethinking water, climate change and conflict in the Sudans

Abstract

This article develops a new framework for understanding environment-conflict relations, on both theoretical grounds and through a qualitative historical analysis of the links between water and conflict in the states of Sudan and South Sudan. Theoretically, the article critiques the dominant emphases on 'scarcity', 'state failure' and 'under-development' within discussions of environmental security, and proposes an alternative model of environment-conflict relations centring on resource abundance and globally-embedded processes of state-building and development. Empirically, it examines three claimed (or possible) linkages between water and conflict in the Sudans: over trans-boundary waters of the Nile, over the links between internal resource scarcities and civil conflict; and over the internal conflict impacts of water abundance and development. We find that there exists only limited evidence in support of the first two of these linkages, but plentiful evidence that water abundance, and state-directed processes of economic development and internal colonisation relating to water, have had violent consequences. We conclude that analysts and policymakers should pay more attention to the impacts of resource abundance, militarised state power and global political economic forces in their assessments of the potential conflict impacts of environmental and especially climate change. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Using a novel climate–water conflict vulnerability index to capture double exposures in Lake Chad

“…Ludwig et al 2011;Tir and Stinnett 2012;Böhmelt et al 2014;Kuzdas and Wiek 2014;Selby and Hoffmann 2014;Ide 2015) indicates both good agreement in terms of the utility of our indicators in understanding climate variability and water conflict links and a prospect to expand the indicators as data for other conflict-torn portions of the Lake become available.…”

“…Mainstream writings (e.g. Böhmelt et al 2014;Selby and Hoffmann 2014) explore indicators that suggest a pathway linking climate change and water conflict. Yet the literature remains vague regarding how vulnerability analysis may enable identification of interacting variables that shape both the demand for and supply of water, including efforts to restrain water conflict in lakeside villages where climate extremes are a major threat.…”

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

“…A brief case study of Darfur critical to the scarcity perspective finds limited support for an indirect and time-lagged drought-conflict connection and some support for an abundance perspective. It also analyzes the role of water in the second civil war in southern Sudan as well as on interstate conflicts over the Nile and finds very little support for a scarcity scenario [93]. A study of flooding in southern Pakistan found that it opened up political space for radical groups, but agency played an important role for whether individuals were attracted by militants distributing post-disaster aid [94].…”

“…More purely non-naturalist critiques question the assumption in statistical investigations that the material world exerts direct effects on human behavior, despite several theoretical studies underscoring cognition and context in translating objective resources into perceptions of scarcity and subsequent framing for political mobilization [97]. Thus, operationalizations of scarcity which somehow refer to an absolute level of a resource have been criticized for not understanding that (i) scarcity should always be understood as a relational, not absolute, concept; (ii) that this "relativeness" relates to a resource's economic and political value; and (iii) that perceptions of a scarce resource as well as political, social, ideological, and economic factors structure the value of a resource [93].…”

“…Non-naturalist critiques further argue that the policy environment-policy, military, and NGO actors, although less so naturalist scholarly analyses-gives a deeply problematic neo-Malthusian model prominence [93] and further reproduces stereotypes formed during the colonial era about Africa as "the dark continent," a chaotic violent place. In turn, according to some non-naturalist studies this legitimizes a continued Northern presence to civilize Africans and conserve its pristine nature [10•, 98-100].…”