Environment and Development -- Tenth Class: Violence and the Environment

This week in my Environment and Development course (ERST-IDST-POST-SAFS 3602H) we examined the relations between the environment and violence -- civil war and violent unrest.  It's a topic that has received much attention over the last 25 years.  This has been partly because of an interest in expanding the classical Cold War definition of national security (in terms of military power and geopolitics) to encompass wider issues of environmental and human security.  It's also become a lively issue in recent years through the concept of climate security: the view that climate change will lead to resource scarcity, unstable environments, and conflict.  This view has been widely endorsed in recent years, not least by the US Department of Defense.

So the starting point for this class was environmental and climate security.  After a quick overview, we examined the Syrian Civil War, and recent debates about whether this conflict can be traced to climate change.  The theory (aired most recently in the September 2017 issue of Political Geography) is that climate change caused a severe drought, which led to the collapse of agriculture, which led to large internal migration and economic hardship, which was one factor among many that fueled unrest.  This view has been fiercely debated, and so we examined the terms of that debate.

We then turned to a different set of ideas about the environment and violence: the concept of the "resource curse".  According to this view, certain resources -- such as oil, or diamonds -- have been especially prone to encouraging conflict.  Aspects of these resources, including their geography and mobility, have, in some political and social circumstances (including weak civil society institutions, social divisions and corruption) led to situations in which their exploitation has produced few benefits for most, at the expense of massive environmental degradation.

One of the leading and most tragic examples of the resource curse has been oil in Nigeria, so we spent some time examining that topic, drawing on the work of political ecologists such as Michael Watts, and viewing a recent video by The Guardian newspaper (available on YouTube) to give us a sense of conditions there.  We also explored the implications of the presence of Shell Oil in Nigeria, as a way of examining the central role of corporations (and ultimately, the industrialized world's appetite for energy) in the devastation caused by oil.