environment and war

Question 1

• There are two types of resource scarcity:

Answer 1

Wars caused by scarcity of non-renewable resources
Wars caused by scarcity of renewable resources:

Question 2

 Non-renewable resources such as

Answer 2

oil and minerals provoke more conflicts because they are more easily convertible into state power.
 Julian Simon has argued that recycling and substitution have caused the cost of primary products continues to fall: most raw materials have had a net drop in price since the early 1970s.
* However, these market values tell us little since while the population has exploded and consumption has risen, most consumers have no market access and therefore the value of goods is undervalued.
 Note: We will not focus further on non-renewable resources as they fall more traditionally into power resources.

Question 3

renewable resources

Answer 3

food, fish, forests, water, fertile soils.
 Food shortages: China, Egypt and Bangladesh lack arable land.
 More food is produced today per capita than at any time in history (The Economist, Aug 4, 2001, p.63) – the mass starvations predicted in the 1960s never materialized. The growth of the world population has been falling from its 1960 peak of 2% to 1.25% in 2001, so there is little pressure on food anyway.
 World drought zones caused by El Nino.
 Starvation in China at the end of the 19th Century:
* Rendered China vulnerable to external powers, leading to deterrence failure and war.
 Between 1950 and 1990, the world’s population went from 2.5 to 5.3 billion.
* Every year, the world’s population grows by 90 million, and will reach 11 billion in 2050.
 In the past, there have been dramatic changes in the ecology caused by natural environmental cycles that may have influenced the opportunities and frequencies for war. They are, however, extremely difficult to measure.
 The Ming fell after pushing military reform, an opportunity seized by Manchu adventurers pushed South by the mini Ice Age freeze on the 1640s.

Question 4

Dixon-Hill’s Project Findings:

Answer 4

• Hypothesis 1: decreasing supplies of physically controllable environmental resources, such as clean water and agricultural land, would provoke interstate ‘simple-scarcity’ conflicts and resource wars.
  o There is little evidence that environmental scarcity causes simple-scarcity conflicts between states.
   Scarcities in land or forests caused by environmental degradation do not cause resource wars between states.
  o Most environmental scarcities and degradations lead to intra-state rather than inter-state violence.
• Hypothesis 2: Large population movements caused by environmental scarcity could lead to identity-group clashes.
  o Substantial evidence that environmental degradation leads to population movements that cause domestic violence, but little evidence that this leads directly to inter-state war.
• Hypothesis 3: Severe environmental scarcity would increase economic deprivation and disrupt key social institutions.
  o Even this may not be true , as natural disasters and war seem to tap inefficiently-used resources, and therefore do not have detectable long-term drags on growth.
  o Deprivation hypothesis overpredicts civil strife, which simply does not happen: most poor do not revolt for lack of wealth and organization.
   There is no correlation between poverty or income inequality and domestic-level conflict.
   What is an acceptable or legitimate level of poverty or income equality depends on the value-system of the population in question. Because disorganized populations are the least likely to revolt.
  o These types of conflict could lead to state fragmentation, but as Colin Kahl showed in Kenya in the mid-1990s, environmental degradation could be used by the government to weaken its population to enhance its ability to rule.
  o However: social inequality acts against a strong middle class that could inhibit decisions for war.

Question 5

River-Basins and War:

Answer 5

• Rivers matter a great deal because they provide irrigation for growing food, particularly in the more arid parts of the world where they are the principal source of water.
• Typically, downstream riparians (downstream states) are at the mercy of the behavior of upstream states, who could divert water.