ABSTRACT
Since the Second World War, around 235 armed conflicts in 120 countries have claimed some 10 million lives in battle-related violence.2 The number of ongoing, armed conflicts has declined markedly since the early 1990s, levelling out in the last few years. The number of annual battle-deaths has seen a long-term decline since the Second World War. However, the 30+ armed conflicts that are currently ongoing remain a crucial component of human insecurity. In addition to the direct loss of life in battle, armed conflict claims high human costs through disease, refugee flows and the destruction of infrastructure. Reducing armed conflict makes a major contribution to improving human security. Although the work summarized in this chapter deals mostly with direct violence between organized parties within and between states, it is likely to have implications for other forms of violent human insecurity as well. Armed conflict is a product of identity, motivation and opportunity (Gurr 1970;
Ellingsen 2000). Both parties to an armed conflict need some kind of identity (regional, cultural, economic or ideological) to organize for armed struggle. They need the motivation to fight, whether it is to redress a grievance, to capture an economic advantage or to defend the status quo. Finally, they need the opportunity to fight, in geographical (proximity and terrain) as well as financial terms (to pay the troops). One set of hypotheses sees scarce natural resources as a motive for insurrection.
Increasing concern with the state of the world’s environment in the 1970s led many to believe that environmental degradation might become sufficiently serious to lead to violence. Many saw the role of resources as filling the explanatory gap as wars continued even after the decline of conflict along ideological lines at the end of the Cold War. This chapter focuses on the debate between neo-Malthusians, who see the growing scarcity of renewable resources as detrimental to human security, and technological optimists or cornucopians. We deal more briefly with political ecology and liberalism, which have also contributed to the debate, but leave out any discussion of ‘the resource curse’ hypothesis, which focuses on local abundance of globally scarce resources (de Soysa 2002). We critique the theoretical and empirical literature on armed conflict generally, with a focus on internal conflict. We find the more dramatic version of neo-Malthusian thought to have little empirical foundation, particularly if scarcity in and by itself is
expected to produce conflict. Scarcity seems more likely to increase the risk of conflict when interacting with governance or level of development.
