Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding

Ashok Swain, Joakim Öjendal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315473758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a large body of research examining the linkage between environmental scarcity, violent conflict, and cooperation. However, this environmental security polemic is still trying to deliver a well-defined approach to achieving peace. Studies are being undertaken to find the precise pathways by which cooperative actions are expected not only to pre-empt or moderate resource conflicts but also to help diffuse cooperative behaviour to other disputed issues. The recognition that environmental resources can contribute to violent conflict accentuates their potential significance as pathways for cooperation and the consolidation of peace in post-conflict societies.

Conceived as a single and reliable reference source which will be a vital resource for students, researchers, and policy makers alike, the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding presents a wide range of chapters written by key thinkers in the field, organised into four key parts:

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• Part I: Review of the concept and theories;

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• Part II: Review of thematic approaches (resources, scarcity, intervention, adaptation, and peacebuilding);

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• Part III: Case studies (Middle East, Iraq, Jordan, Liberia, Nepal, Colombia, Philippines);

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• Part IV: Analytical challenges and future-oriented perspectives.

Enabling the reader to find a concise expert review on topics that are most likely to arise in the course of conducting research or policy making, this volume presents a truly global overview of the key issues and debates in environmental conflict and peacebuilding.

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1

Environmental conflict and peacebuilding

An introduction

Ashok Swain and Joakim Öjendal

The past two decades have witnessed the production of a large body of research work examining the linkage between environmental scarcity, violent conflict, and cooperation. The growing threat of global climate change has also added strength to this area of academic investigation. However, this environmental security polemic is still trying to deliver a well-defined approach to achieving peace. Studies are being undertaken to find the precise pathways by which cooperative actions are expected not only to pre-empt or moderate resource conflicts but also to help diffuse cooperative behavior to other disputed issues. To date there has not been a comprehensive volume covering environmental conflict and peacebuilding. This handbook aims to rectify that by providing a state-of-the-art review of research on how utilization of environmental resources can cause conflicts and how it can be a catalyst for cooperation and peacebuilding.

The problem addressed in this handbook is anything but trivial. On the one hand, the struggle for limited resources is an age-old cause for conflict, on the other, civilizations and societies are built on cooperation over the same limited resources. Obviously, causality on environmental scarcities and the making of peace goes in both directions. As such the interconnection – and indeed the entire field – remains under-conceptualized and overly complex. This handbook recognizes this complexity and aims to make an inventory of issues and findings in the contemporary research in this field. As such it covers a broad section of views, findings, and experiences on the relation between environmental resources and conflict.

In addition to the issue of causality between environmental stress and conflict and how a limited set of actors approach this rivalry over scarce resources, the issue of limited resources has recently taken on global dimensions through overall unsustainability, global climate change, and the volatility of some particularly scarce and critical resources (such as water, forest, and energy). Thus, there is a now a global and collective concern on how to safeguard access to critical resources and to deal with global climate change. This is a historically qualitatively new dimension to the field of environmental studies. In conflict terms, this global dimension can be seen as a conflict multiplier creating a complex web of interests, rivalries, and vulnerabilities. The unsustainability of contemporary global resource utilization and the accelerating global climate change indicate that there will be severe environmentally related impacts that will increase overall risks and vulnerabilities with distinct actors and areas being particularly jeopardized. Hence security issues have entered the environmental field.

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Traditionally, security has been typically defined by threats which challenge it. This attitude has kept the focus of security away from non-military threats that promise to undermine the stability of many countries in the coming years. Trans-boundary environmental issues are gradually beginning to challenge the sacred boundaries of national sovereignty. The end of the Cold War also provided a new opportunity to attain an effective global security system that can address the broader needs of security for the human population and the planet. Global security is only partly dependent upon military power. Environmental stress is one of the major elements among many political, economic, and social factors that contribute to instability and conflict. The global challenges mentioned above have increasingly shown that environmental issues need to be given higher priority.

As Conca and Dabelko argued already in 1998, the global environmental debate rapidly in the post-Cold War period started focusing on “not only economic issues of welfare, production, and livelihood but also political questions of international conflict, violence and geopolitics.” For good reasons, this probed the conflictual dimension of environmental changes. Every year, the world population is increasing by 78 million, roughly the equivalent of another Germany. The world population is projected to reach 10 billion around the year 2050. While population growth has stagnated in the industrialized world, it is still extremely high in many developing countries of the South, where more than 90 percent of population growth takes place. Research has found population growth pressure to have a significant impact on the likelihood of a state becoming involved in interstate military conflicts (Swain 2012). It might, however, be a matter of debate whether the population growth directly affects the decision-making of the state to go to war or not (Urdal 2005), but it undoubtedly generates scarcity of resources in developing countries.

Availability of renewable natural resources is increasingly falling short of meeting human needs. The future predictions on population growth and economic activities have brought a distinct possibility of severely crippling the natural resource base on which human beings are dependent for survival. The decline in agriculture, desertification, decreasing green cover, freshwater scarcity, and extinction of species threaten the life and survival of present and future generations. Hence the interconnections between the global environmental resources, security, and violent conflict is a field of growing concern, locally, regionally, and globally.

In the next section we will review the debate on causality between violent conflict and environmental stress (and vice versa), followed by discussions on whether increasing scarcity and accelerating global climate change act as a conflict multiplier or rather as a mechanism for increased cooperation – the latter putting focus on how peacebuilding could be performed in order to trigger this rather than the former which is also discussed.

Violent conflict and environmental stress

Destruction of the environment is commonly seen as a repercussion of violent conflict or conflict-induced migration. Many studies in the post-Second World War period have focused on the environmental consequences of warfare.

Besides the direct adverse effects of conflict on the environment, it is also true that, in some cases, environmental change is carried out as the deliberate objective in conflict rather than being an unwanted by-product. Even in the time of ‘peace,’ the military preparedness heavily contributes to resource depletion and environmental destruction. The production, testing, and maintenance of conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons procreate vast amounts of toxic and radioactive substances, which contaminate soil, air, and water (Leaning 2000).

Besides major wars and their preparations, internal civil wars are also a major contributing factor to global environmental destruction (Gurses 2012). Large-scale environmental destruction has taken place in most parts of Africa, South Asia, and Central America, due to the presence of civil wars in those regions. This is not only a direct impact of warfare but also a result of more complicated connections: for instance, internal violence makes it impossible to develop sustainable agriculture; it leads to massive deforestation and the destruction of wildlife.

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Refugee movement is the direct product of political conflicts and its consequences extend beyond the actors involved in the conflict (Swain & Jägerskog 2016). There are more than 21 million people recognized as refugees in the world today. Mentioning the most familiar cases, they originate from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Western Sahara, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the former Yugoslavia. In most cases, they have moved to their poor neighboring countries. The pressure created by the presence of refugees in receiving countries can be considerable. Aside from their potential threat to the social, economic and political fabric of the host state and society, they can also be a major source of environmental destruction in the areas of their resettlement (Swain & Jägerskog 2016).

The poorest people in society are relatively more dependent for their livelihood on renewable resources and are less capable of following conservation procedures. Refugees, generally belonging to this category of society, are more likely to cause environmental destruction than others. Their uncertain residential status, lack of land ownership and desire to return to their native place reduce their incentive to protect the environment in which they unwillingly find themselves. The refugees’ consumption of resources coupled with their unfamiliarity with the local ecosystem often multiplies the harm to the local environment. Three types of environmental destruction are associated with the refugees: deforestation, land degradation, and water pollution (Swain 2012). While the number of international conflicts has been reduced in the past few years, the world is now witnessing an increase of internal conflicts, e.g., civil wars, ethnic conflicts, etc. As a result, the number of refugee movements has increased and simultaneously amplified the threat to the environment in the regions of their settlement.

Environmental stress and violent conflicts

Environmental destruction, while not immediately intuitive, can also be the cause and not merely the consequence or premeditated consequence of violent conflicts. In the last decade, findings of several major research projects have proved that environmental scarcities are already contributing to violent conflicts, particularly in the developing world. Applying different methodologies and studying disparate cases, all these research efforts have tried to establish the conflict-inducing potential of environmental scarcity.

Environmental changes have drastically reduced the availability of cultivable land, green forests, freshwater, clean air, and fish resources. The effects of this reduction are becoming more acute due to the increasing demand for resources to meet the needs of a growing population, and changing consumption behavior. Conflicts over renewable natural resources have grown more potent as demand for essential commodities increases day by day and as the supply-side looks more and more insecure. Most states depend greatly on renewable resources – soil, water, fish, and forests – that sustain much of their economic activity. When one state works for ‘development’ by acquiring or exploiting more than its share of these resources, it often affects the interests of other states. Conflicts over renewable resources have already shown their presence in most parts of the world.

Besides fisheries, river water resources have the massive potential of bringing various state actors into a conflictual situation. Almost all the major river systems, which are the paramount suppliers of water to mankind, are shared by more than one state. When multiple countries are jointly dependent on the same river systems, upstream withdrawal, damming and pollution may lead to conflict with downstream countries. There are many interstate conflicts active among the users of international river basins in different parts of the world. Climate change has raised the specter of further flow variation in these rivers, raising the possibilities for further hostility between the disputing riparian countries (Swain 2004).

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Threats to basic food supplies of a country have become cause for friction and tensions between countries in the past. Trade embargoes and other forms of political manipulation have been used to get access to food supplies. Due to the increasing loss of arable land in some countries, food production may substantially decline. Under conditions of a changing climate and growing population, the situation may become even more severe. Many developing countries spend more than half of their income on food, which makes them more vulnerable to increased food prices due to production shortfalls. Thus, changes in productivity of major grain importers and exporters may provoke international tensions and conflict (Swain 2012).

Not only scarcity of environmental resources, but also environmentally induced population migration is becoming a source of international conflicts. The loss of living space and source of livelihood due to environmental change could force the affected people to migrate. Environmental changes have already forced a large number of people to move across international borders. This phenomenon has been one of the growing concerns of the international community for some time. Arguably the mass movement of populations may create security concerns for a nation-state. Trans-border environmental migration has several conflict-inducing characteristics between the receiver and sender states (Swain 1996).

There have been several instances of intra-state armed conflict over scarce natural resources. But, armed conflict is not the only logical ending of environmental scarcity. Obviously, many different forms of action may follow from the moment environmental destruction occurs: debate, demonstrations, out-migration, action to remedy the damage, halting or eliminating the sources of destruction, as well as serious conflicts (Wallensteen & Swain 1997b). It might be argued, however, that a government’s response is more determining than many other factors. In most of the cases, environmentally induced conflict typically ends with highly generalized recommendations for environmental cooperation, but primarily there is a lack of careful analysis of the specific mechanisms or pathways by which cooperation could be expected to forestall or mitigate conflict (Conca & Dabelko 2002).

Global climate change – an environmental conflict multiplier or process for triggering cooperation?

Several studies show that environmental stress is one main catalyst that creates societal insecurity that may result in conflict (Swain 1993; Gleditsch 1998; Homer-Dixon 2001; Machlis & Hanson 2008). Meanwhile, the relationship between climate change and armed conflict receives more and more attention. It is often assumed that climate change will intensify environmental stress and might even create new conflicts (Salehyan 2008; Lee 2009; Swain 2015).

Climate change is a global environmental problem caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide and methane, in the Earth’s atmosphere. The world is warming up faster than at any time in the previous 10,000 years. The predicted dramatic sea level rise caused by this climatic change may deprive millions of people of their living space and source of livelihood in the near future. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that sea levels could rise an average rate of 6 centimeters per decade over the next century. A rise of this magnitude will no doubt threaten the densely populated low-lying countries and coastal zones in different parts of the world. Among other foreseeable impacts are increases in tropical cyclones. Increased cyclones would also enhance the risk of coastal flooding. Climate change can also potentially alter the typical rainfall pattern, which may lead to increased flooding, drought and soil erosion in tropical and arid regions of the world.

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The issue of climate change is high on the world’s policy agenda at present. Agricultural production may become highly vulnerable to climate change, given the other multiple stresses that affect food systems in the South. Response to climate change can also affect particular societies’ cultural norms and social practices related to food production. Moreover, some states and societies are better at formulating adaptation strategies for all aspects of land use practices to safeguard them against the negative consequences of climate change. To address the adverse effects of climate change, the effectiveness and coping abilities of existing institutions matter as well.

Climate change can be linked to conflict in various ways. These include: increased competition over reduced/uncertain water supply, increased competition over agricultural land in the face of reduced crop yields, desertification and rising food prices, large-scale migration as a result of sea level and weather changes, and diminished capacity of governments to provide services to their people in the face of increasing poverty (Lee 2009; Swain 2015). While the exact impact...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding: An Introduction
• Part I Review of the Concept and Theories
• Part II Review of Thematic Approaches
• Part III Case Studies
• Part IV Analytical Challenges and Future-Oriented Perspectives
• Index