Climate clashes? Weather variability, land pressure, and organized violence in Kenya, 1989–2004

Abstract

The evidence of coming climate change has generated catastrophe-like statements of a future where a warmer, wetter, and wilder climate leads to a surge in migrant streams and gives rise to new wars. Although highly popular in policy circles, few of these claims are based on systematic evidence. Using a most-likely case design on Kenya 1989–2004, with new geographically disaggregated data on armed conflicts below the common civil conflict level, this study finds that climatic factors do influence the risk of conflicts and violent events. The effect is opposite to what should be expected from much of the international relations literature; rather, it supports the observations made by recent anthropological studies. Years with below average rainfall tend to have a peaceful effect on the following year and less robustly so for the current year as well. Little support is found for the notion that scarcity of farmland fuels violence in itself or in election years. More densely populated areas – not areas with a low land per capita ratio – run a higher risk of conflict. Election years systematically see more violence, however. The findings therefore support the notion that large-scale intergroup violence is driven by calculation and political gain rather than desperate scrambles for scarce land, pasture, and water resources.

Climate variability and conflict risk in East Africa, 1990–2009

“…Our study and other studies (11,26,27) question the evidence that climatic variability is uniformly driving up the risk of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the world region generally recognized as most vulnerable to such new hazards. However, unlike previous skeptical studies of the climateconflict nexus, our study of East Africa over the past two decades is more nuanced in two respects.…”

Flexible Causal Inference for Political Science

“…In the same vein, poor economic conditions are thought to increase the risk of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess and Weerapana, 2004;Freytag, Krüger, Meierrieks and Schneider, 2011;Meierrieks and Gries, 2012), but important variables such as political freedom affect both the state of the economy and the incidence of terrorism (Grier and Tullock, 1989;Krieger and Meierrieks, 2011). Even weather, often used as an instrumental variable because of its independence from human influence, has become endogenous to anthropogenic climate change in studies of civil conflict (see, e.g., Tir andStinnett 2012 andTheisen 2012).…”

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

“…Correlations in largen studies could be due to tactical rather than causative effects and therefore highly context-specific [10•, 93]. This latter critique does not affect all quantitative studies, since some explicitly set out to investigate tactical considerations [50,58,[72][73][74][75].…”