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Security and Ecology in the Age of Globalization
SECURITY AND ECOLOGY IN THE AGE OFGLOBALIZATION
By Simon Dalby
M
any situations with a vaguely environmentaldesignation now apparently endanger modern modes of life in the North (as theaffluent industrialized parts of the world are now oftencalled). Growing population pressures andenvironmental crises in the South—the poor andunderdeveloped parts of the planet—have longconcerned policymakers and academics. Many stateshave developed security and intelligence agencies,environmental ministries, and international treatyobligations that address population and environmentaldynamics. Weather forecasts for many areas nowinclude routine updates of ozone-depletion levels andthe variable daily dangers of exposure to ultravioletradiation. Some discussions address pollution as atechnical matter and such phenomena as ozone holesin terms of risks or hazards rather than as securityconcerns. But since these matters are now also part of international political discourse and policy initiatives,environment cannot be separated from matters of whatis now called “global” security.Environmental change and resource shortages areintegral to these discussions, which have also takenplace against a backdrop of important questions withinthe North-South political dialogue. In 1992, the largestsummit of world leaders took place in Rio de Janeiroto deal with issues of environment and development.Although the level of high political attention to theseissues does fluctuate, the global environment hasclearly become a matter of continuing internationalpolitical concern. Some alarmist accounts have evensuggested that future security threats to the affluentNorth will come about because environmentaldegradation will lead to starvation and the collapse of societies in the South, leading in turn to a massivemigration of “environmental refugees.”In 1994, Robert Kaplan garnered much attentionin Washington and elsewhere with his alarmingpredictions of a “coming anarchy” premised on theassumption of resource shortages (Kaplan, 1994; seealso Kaplan, 2000). Kaplan suggested that theseresource shortages would occur in part because globalpopulation would grow faster than the ability of agriculture to support it (a traditional Malthusianargument). But Kaplan’s argument also fits into larger recent arguments about how resource shortages ingeneral cause conflict—the so-called “neo-Malthusian” arguments that underlie a substantial part
Abstract
The environment has emerged as a major theme in the post-Cold War discussion of human security. There hasbeen a considerable amount of detailed empirical work on the relationship between environmental change and likely conflicts. This article argues that, while the interconnections between the environment and conflict are manyand complex, the likelihood of large-scale warfare over renewable resources is small. Nonetheless, environmental difficulties do render many people insecure. A parallel conceptual discussion suggests that the empirical work of environmental security research needs to be placed in the larger context of global economic changes and large-scale urbanization of a growing humanity. This urban population increasingly draws resources from rural areas,disrupting indigenous populations. All these dynamics are also complicated by the rapidly increasing scale of human activities, which has induced a level of material- and energy-flow through the global economy that is anew and substantial ecological factor in the biosphere. Given the scale of these processes, societies should carefullyconsider these interconnections and reduce their total resource throughput to improve environmental security and develop sustainable modes of living for the future.
Simon Dalby
is a professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he teaches geopolitics and environment. He is co-editor of
The Geopolitics Reader
and
Rethinking Geopolitics
(both published by Routledge in 1998) and the author of
Environmental Security
(University of MinnesotaPress, 2002).
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Feature Articles
of environmental-security literature.The 1990s spawned two major interconnecteddiscussions among Northern scholars on these themes.The first discussion centered on security—itsdefinition and how it might be redefined after theCold War. This debate included dialogue on whichother threats (apart from those related to warfare) oughtto be included in comprehensive definitions andpolicies; it also examined who and what was beingsecured in the process (Buzan, Wæver, & deWilde,1998). The redefinition of security has prominentlyfeatured environmental considerations (Deudney &Matthew, 1999; Lowi & Shaw, 2000; Barnett, 2001).Second, a more empirical discussion looked at thenarrower question of whether environmental changeactually threatened (or could plausibly threaten)security for states in general and the North in particular (Diehl & Gleditsch, 2001). By the end of the 1990s, asthe lengthy bibliographies in previous editions of
ECSP Report
attest, the results of this substantial bodyof empirical research work were appearing in print.Some researchers argue that the environment-security debate has evolved in three stages (Rønnfeldt,1997). First came the initial conceptual work that calledfor a broader understanding of security than that whichdominated Cold War discourses. Second, theoristsattempted to sketch out how to specify links betweenenvironment and insecurity in order to establish apractical research agenda for scholarly analysis. Thethird stage has featured a search for empiricalverification or refutation of the initial postulates. Whilestudies are still in progress, enough detailed field workhad been done by 2000 to give at least a broad outlineof the likely relationships between environment andsecurity and to dismiss definitively much of the earlyalarmism about international conflict in the form of “ecowars.”It is now time to feed these conclusions back intothe larger conceptual discussion that first set the field’sempirical research in motion. With the wisdom of adecade’s research to draw on, environmental securitydiscussions can now move to a fourth stage of synthesisand reconceptualization (Dalby, 2002). In addition tothis fourth stage, scholars and policymakers now haveto consider current research on biospheric systemsand what is now called global change science in their effort to think clearly about both environment andsecurity. Considering matters in these terms adds somecrucial dimensions that the 1990s alarmist accounts of neo-Malthusian scarcities left out. Policymakers needto carefully consider both the context of securitydiscussions as well as what their policymaking aims tosecure; neither is as obvious as is frequently assumed.In particular, taking ecology seriously requiresquestioning more than a few conventionalassumptions.
Environment and Conflict
With these caveats in mind, the development of environmental conflict research through the 1990s canbe briefly summarized as six interconnectedapproaches. First, the Toronto school—as the researchgroups collectively lead by the University of Toronto’sThomas Homer-Dixon came to be called— emphasizes the construction of scarcity by complexsocial and environmental processes that in somecircumstances also lead to political instability (Homer-Dixon & Blitt, 1998; Homer-Dixon, 1999). TheToronto school argues that simple scarcity as a resultof environmental change and population growth isonly part of a much more complex situation in whichsocial factors intersect with natural phenomena. Theseresearchers emphasize situations in which elites extendtheir control over productive resources (in a processcalled “resource capture”) and displace peasants andsubsistence farmers (“ecological marginalization”).Resource capture and ecological marginalization,argues the Toronto school, may lead to conflict (aspeople resist displacement) and environmental damage(as these displaced people are forced to migrate tocities or to eke out their livings by clearing marginalland). In some cases, this process may be connectedto state failure and political violence, especially in thosedeveloping states in which insurgencies feed ongrievances related to injustice and inequity.Identifying where social breakdown and violenceoccur depends on understanding states’ ability torespond to such processes. In Homer-Dixon’s analyses,declining state capacity relates in at least four ways toincreasing environmental scarcity. First, environmentalscarcity increases financial demands on the state for infrastructure. Second, the state faces demands by elitesfor financial assistance or legal changes for their directbenefit. Third, this predatory elite behavior may leadto defensive reactions by weaker groups—whether inthe form of opposition to legal changes that alter
Editor’s Note:
This article is a substantially revised version of a piece that will appear in fall 2002 in
ISUMA: Canadian Journal of Policy Research.
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Security and Ecology in the Age of Globalization
property ownership arrangements or as direct protestsagainst infrastructure “developments” that dispossessthe poor. Finally, the general reduction in economicactivity caused by the combination of these dynamicscan reduce state revenue and fiscal flexibility, further aggravating difficulties. None of the Toronto researchsuggests that interstate war is likely as a directconsequence of environmental scarcity, although theindirect consequences of social friction caused bylarge-scale migration—in part across nationalboundaries—has in some cases caused internationalelites may aggravate traditional conflicts over land andother resources, especially when these resources arein short supply. Kahl’s reading reinforces the ENCOPpoint that at least a substantial part of rural violencemay have its roots in urban politics. A foreign-aid policyof building state capacity in such circumstances mayonly worsen these situations.In the late 1990s, NATO researchers took on therelationships between environment and security bydrawing on the findings of both the Toronto groupand ENCOP and adding insights from contemporary
From Bougainville to Burma, marginal peoples suffer fromdispossession, violence, and the expropriation of resources to feedinternational markets.
tensions. Frequent alarmist newspaper headlinesnotwithstanding, water wars are also unlikely; thecircumstances that would motivate such wars are rare(Lonergan, 2001).The second approach, embodied in theEnvironment and Conflicts Project (ENCOP) led byGünther Baechler, links environmental concerns moredirectly to development and social change in the South(Baechler, 1998). ENCOP examined many differentcase studies and concluded that, while conflict andenvironmental change are related in many ways,conflict is more likely to be linked directly to thedisruptions of modernity. In summarizing andclarifying the overall ENCOP model, Baechler (1999)stresses that violence was likely to occur in moreremote areas, mountain locations, and grasslands— places where environmental stresses coincide withpolitical tensions and unjust access to resources. For ENCOP, the concept of “environmentaldiscrimination” (which emphasizes situations in whichpolitics creates inequitable access to natural resources)connects directly to what Baechler calls a condition of “maldevelopment.”ENCOP links maldevelopment to a society’stransition from subsistence to market economy. Inmany cases, ENCOP argues, violence occurs as peopleresist expropriation of resources and the environmentaldamage caused by development projects. For example,in Bougainville, Papau New Guinea, a long standingand violent insurgency has been directly linked toopposition to a giant mine (Böge, 1999). Colin Kahl’s(1998) research tackles these matters in a slightlydifferent but loosely parallel way. Drawing on a detailedanalysis of Kenya, Kahl shows how threatened urbanGerman work on climate change and related matters(Carius & Lietzmann, 1999, Lietzmann & Vest, 1999).In this third environmental security approach, theseNATO researchers suggest that environmental matterscan be understood as a complex series of syndromes,some of which might cause conflict. Thecomprehensiveness of these syndromes clearly suggeststhat the notion of environment as a causal factor inconflict is simply too broad to serve as a useful analyticalcategory. But the NATO work also suggests that theenvironment is an important factor in contemporarysocial change. NATO has also sponsored high-profileworkshops to encourage dialogues on these themeswith Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states; theproceedings suggest numerous possible ways of thinking about these issues (Lonergan, 1999; Petzold-Bradley et al., 2001).A fourth school of thinking, linked to theInternational Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO),has turned the environmental scarcity-conflictargument on its head by suggesting that violence over resources in the South occurs in the struggle to control
abundant
resources (de Soysa, 2000). This researchincorporates some economists’ discussions aboutdevelopment difficulties in resource-rich areas; itsuggests that many wars concern control over revenuestreams from resources that have substantial marketvalue. (Examples include timber in Burma, diamondsin Sierra Leone, or oil fields in the Middle East.) ThePRIO research directly links violence in some casesto the core-periphery disruptions of native peoplesnoted by ENCOP. A number of recent studies havereinforced the PRIO argument by tracing the violencesurrounding resources directly to larger patterns of
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Security and Ecology in the Age of Globalization
The environment has emerged as a major theme in the post-Cold-war discussion of human security. There has been a considerable amount of detailed empirical work on the relationship between environmental change and likely conflicts. This article…
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