Positivist Climate Conflict Research: A Critique

Selby, Jan

doi:10.1080/14650045.2014.964865

Cited by 90 publications

(69 citation statements)

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“…Research correlating lethal physical violence to temperature and precipitation changes, particularly violent conflict, war, and civilization collapse, has grown over the past decade [1,[3][4][5]. However, datasets used for these quantitative studies and meta-analyses may only review large-scale conflict events, and can sidestep deeper investigation and comparison of the interacting social and environmental conditions shaping violent responses to climate change [26,27]. Anthropology's holistic approach has the potential to avoid these pitfalls.…”

Section: Theorizing Climate-influenced Violence In Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

An anthropological perspective on the climate change and violence relationship

Shaffer¹

2017

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Purpose of Review:This review explores the complex climate change-violence relationship through an anthropological lens, focusing on the interacting social and environmental conditions that constrain individual choices for violence. Evidence and methods used by anthropologists to identify violent events, as well as anthropological theories regarding why individuals choose violence, are discussed. A general social-environmental model is presented and explored through four case studies, two archaeological and two ethnographic. Recent Findings: Recent research with historic and contemporary case studies suggests that resource uncertainty interacts with a complex array of pre-existing social and environmental conditions, including environmental degradation, poor governance, and social inequality, to promote violent responses both before and following climatic changes. Individuals may choose to avoid violence where supporting, cooperative mechanisms exist. Summary: Given that individuals make choices to respond violently or not based on their perceptions of these complex, interacting social and environmental conditions, violence in response to global climate change is not inevitable. KEYWORDS cooperation; governance; resource uncertainty; social-environmental system; social inequality; structural violence ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Drs. Elisabeth Gilmore and Brian Sodden for their invitation to contribute to this special edition of Current Climate Change Reports. There is no conflict of interest.

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Section: Theorizing Climate-influenced Violence In Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

An anthropological perspective on the climate change and violence relationship

Shaffer¹

2017

Preprint

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“…This discourse draws mostly upon a philosophical and/or traditional security type of thinking that presents conflict as a social construct, a somewhat "militarised framing" or "heterodox idea" that is critical to claims about relations between environment/climate and conflict (Deudney, 1990). By constructing realities based on a combination of historical antecedence and current economic, political and cultural contexts, the discourse argues for a need to explore conflict in more complex ways than simply pointing to climate change, and suggests tackling more pressing challenges such as terrorism, HIV and poverty that plague Third World countries (Selby, 2014;Floyd, 2015). Table 6 gives a summary of the different discourses, showing key similarities and differences, and how they are constructed using the central entities and/or issues recognised, the assumptions about causality and mechanistic relationships, normative judgements inferred and vulnerability portrayals.…”

Section: Discourse 3: Denial Claimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…a turn towards contextualised political ecologies of climate vulnerabilityconflict pathways in which concrete socio-political phenomena are analysed, including how "enclosure, territorialisation, and market strategies of accumulation by dispossession" may drive conflicts associated with land acquisition practices under climate change (Dunlap and Fairhead, 2014, p. 19), (ii) highlighting historicity, specificity, and variability (difference) of social structures and processes that seek to resolve complexity rather than pursuing predictability; and (iii) demonstrating flexibility in ways that incorporate contextual knowledge across space and time, and that challenges existing order (Selby, 2014). Further, a contextual vulnerability frame can enrich policies that are more socially focused and that include options on resource diversification, poverty reduction, conservation of common property resources, strengthening of collective adaptation actions, and so on.…”

Section: Portrayals Of Vulnerability Across Climate Conflict Discoursmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perspectives on contextual vulnerability in discourses of climate conflict

2016

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Abstract. The science of climate security and conflict is replete with controversies. Yet the increasing vulnerability of politically fragile countries to the security consequences of climate change is widely acknowledged. Although climate conflict reflects a continuum of conditional forces that coalesce around the notion of vulnerability, how different portrayals of vulnerability influence the discursive formation of climate conflict relations remains an exceptional but under-researched issue. This paper combines a systematic discourse analysis with a vulnerability interpretation diagnostic tool to explore (i) how discourses of climate conflict are constructed and represented, (ii) how vulnerability is communicated across discourse lines, and (iii) the strength of contextual vulnerability against a deterministic narrative of scarcity-induced conflict, such as that pertaining to land. Systematically characterising climate conflict discourses based on the central issues constructed, assumptions about mechanistic relationships, implicit normative judgements and vulnerability portrayals, provides a useful way of understanding where discourses differ. While discourses show a wide range of opinions "for" and "against" climate conflict relations, engagement with vulnerability has been less pronounced -except for the dominant context centrism discourse concerned about human security (particularly in Africa). In exploring this discourse, we observe an increasing sense of contextual vulnerability that is oriented towards a concern for complexity rather than predictability. The article concludes by illustrating that a turn towards contextual vulnerability thinking will help advance a constructivist theory-informed climate conflict scholarship that recognises historicity, specificity, and variability as crucial elements of contextual totalities of any area affected by climate conflict.

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“…For one, there is no consistent or reliable evidence of environmental pressures and shocks significantly contributing to any recent mass political violence. Quantitative studies are deeply divided on the issue, and their findings -whether positive or negativeare in any case mostly statistical artefacts (Selby 2014). The 2003-5 war in Darfur, which was described as the 'first climate change war' (Mjøs 2007;Mazo 2010: 73-86), was, it is now widely acknowledge, nothing of the sort (Selby and Hoffmann 2014a).…”

Section: Myth Number 4: That Fragile Statehood Is the Main Institutiomentioning

confidence: 99%