Not a One-Time Event: Environmental Change, Ethnic Rivalry, and Violent Conflict in the Third World SHIN-WHA LEE This article discusses environmental security within an environmental conflict perspective. It is an attempt to examine violent consequences of environmental stress as a major research issue among the scholars of political conflict. Despite this study’s attempt to shift emphasis to the environmental context, environmental stress results in violent conflict only when interacting with other political, ethnic, economic, and social causes. But this does not imply that environmental issues should always be subordinated to others. Conflict is not a one-time event, but rather a process of change that continues through successive phases. Citing the case of Sudan,I show that even though ethnopolitical reasons alone provoked the civil war, as time goes by the character of the conflict is evolving and is complicated by environmental change. In comparison, demographic and environmental stress have been primary sources of conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh by stimulating the group identity of affected people.

The Issue

Even during the Cold War, when environmental

concerns were con-

sidered &dquo;low politics&dquo; and accorded lesser priority, there were voices raised for including nonmilitary issues in the security agenda. While ecologists examined the collapse of natural ecosystems, scholarly commentaries brought the environmental problems detailed by these ecologists to public awareness. Over the last two decades, political ecology (i.e., study of the political dimensions of human/environment interactions) has begun in earnest.l 1. In the late 1970s, Lester Brown (1977), Dennis Pirages (1978), and William Ophuls (1979) began the discussion. Brown called for a change in the traditional security agenda; Pirages suggested ecopolitics as the new agenda for international affairs; and Ophuls,

warning that human numbers and wants have outpaced nature’s bounty, addressed the political challenge of ecological scarcity. During the 1980s, Richard Ulman (1983), the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), Jessica Tuchman Mathews (1989), Norman Myers (1989), and Michael Renner (1989) were among those who advocated rethinking security studies to include environmental questions. To compare, Durham (1995) argued that it was not until the 1980s that a truly political ecology had begun to emerge. Journal of Environment & Development, Vol 6, No 4, December 1997 @ 1997 Sage Publications, Inc

365-396

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With increasing knowledge of the negative political consequences of environmental deterioration and the importance of an ecologically sustainable future, the international community has placed the environment on the global security agenda.2 In particular, social scientists have attempted to explain how environmental decline in quantity (scarcity) and quality (degradation) aggravates the social conditions of famine, poverty, ethnic cleavage, and political instability and further undermines the power and legitimacy of sovereign states. Despite progress in linking the environment to security, the question remains: Is the environment a national security issue? Although few countries deny that the global environmental situation is a matter of national concern, there are controversies over securitizing environmental issues. It is obvious that ozone depletion, climate change, deforestation, desertification, land scarcity, depletion of water supplies, and transboundary pollution affect the national interests of many states, but actually defining these problems as a national security issue would require us to get past the vagueness and broadness of the concept of environmental security The term environmental security can encompass many issues, ranging from strategies for sustainable development to securing access to a viable environment to the environmental role in violent conflicts and the negative environmental impacts of war. Ulman (1983) notes that a broader concept of security can increase the range of legitimate policy choices available. But insistence on a comprehensive definition may well make it difficult to render the concept of environmental security lucid and operational. In fact, the literature on environmental security has so far failed to provide a clear definition. Very wide definitions of environmental security, embracing the whole array of environmental problems, may have a temporary shock-effect on public debate but risk being rejected as not serious, imprecise, and inapplicable by scholars and the policy community Furthermore, the chronic nature of these problems is likely to cause &dquo;alert inertia,&dquo; and hence decreasing interest. To translate the discussion of environmental security into operational policy and to put environmental matters higher on the political agenda, it may be wiser to focus on the environmentconflict linkage rather than the broader relationship between the environment and security. As Nina Graeger (1996) has suggested, environmental security can best be defined by examining its opposite concept, environmental insecurity, specified as a situation where environmental change affects violent conflict. This article will discuss environmental security within an environmental conflict perspective. It is an attempt to take up the violent consequences of environmental stress as a major research issue among 2. For most recent literatures on environmental security, see Myers (1993), Romm (1993),

Dalby (1994,1995), Stoett (1994), Timoshenko (1992), and Graeger (1996).

367

the scholars of political conflict. Although acknowledging that the envirepresents only one of many causal (or aggravating) factors in the complex circumstances of conflicts, I will still claim that with intensifying environmental decline, violent conflict involving environmental components has been noticeably increasing. I will then move to a discussion of how, in the cases of Sudan and Bangladesh, the cycle of environmental change, ethnic rivalry, and violent conflict proceeds. There are numerous root causes interacting or stimulating each other and finally escalating into the explosion. In addition, conflict is a process, not a fixed state of crisis, and therefore continues through successive phases in the course of time. The case studies are expected to demonstrate that the environment-conflict links are too complex to be dealt with by considering single processes and short timelines. ronment

Identifying Eco Conflict: Not a One-Time Event THE DISPUTED IMPORTANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY

The current debate over environmental security includes widespread for the environment-security link with a few dissenters. For example, Peter Gleick (1990, 1991) argues that environmental stress is likely to cause interstate conflicts, which will in turn threaten international security. Daniel Deudney (1990), an environmental analyst, disagrees, arguing that interstate wars have had little to do with environmental issues. Resource wars are unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future, Deudney asserts, partly because substitutable materials enable us to reduce our dependence on natural resources, and partly because states no longer find resource dependency a threat to their military security and political autonomy, thanks to the robust character of the world trade system. Mark Levy, in his &dquo;Correspondence: Environment and Security,&dquo; with Thomas Homer-Dixon (Homer-Dixon & Levy,1995), criticizes environmental security theorists for offering loose definitions of security and using the term as a rhetorical device for getting the public’s and policy makers’ attention. Examining the proposition that global environmental degradation is a direct threat to U.S. security, Levy (1995a, 1995b) claims that most policy recommendations from environmental security theorists aim at a major reorientation of U.S. policies. With the exception of ozone depletion and climate change, according to Levy, environmental problems do not pose any security threat to the United States, and the U.S. government is not likely to increase its foreign aid budget to counter the threat of environmental stress in developing countries, which might

support

368

prevent Third World violence but will result in no benefits to the United

Criticizing those looking for environmental causes of conflict, including Homer-Dixon and his associates, Levy asserts that in order to better understand the interactions and contingencies of individual conflicts, we should shift our research focus to the multiple causes of regional conflict instead of focusing on a &dquo;shallow conventional wisStates.

dom&dquo; about the role of the environment. In response, Homer-Dixon (1994) has criticized Deudney’s neglect of forms of violence other than interstate war. Arguing that many violent conflicts do not involve the rational choice of state actors, he contends that most conflicts induced by environmental scarcity are likely to be &dquo;diffuse, persistent, and subnational,&dquo; rather than interstate resource wars. To Levy, Homer-Dixon replies that the objective of environmentconflict research is to weigh the significance of environmental variables among other independent variables that affect the occurrence of conflict, rather than paying attention to the entire range of factors &dquo;that currently cause changes in the value of the dependent variable (the incidence of violent conflict)&dquo; (Homer-Dixon & Levy, 1995, pp. 192-193). HomerDixon, in his &dquo;correspondence&dquo; with Levy, also explains that his research team deliberately narrowed their scope in order to avoid an unmanageable horde of subissues regarding security (Homer-Dixon & Levy. 1995). Levy is correct that for effective solutions to environmental problems, we need to understand regional conflicts and examine the entire complex web of causes leading to social and political violence. Yet there is a risk, as Homer-Dixon points out, that Levy would have the scholars of environment and conflict &dquo;divert resources in directions that are largely irrelevant to their interests and inappropriate given the nature of the subject matter&dquo; (Homer-Dixon & Levy, 1995, p. 193). Of course it is impossible to attribute violent conflicts to a single cause. Even when there are abundant indications that environmental stress has contributed to political violence, measuring the degree of its influence is difficult. Still, environmental stress plays an increasingly important role in regional conflicts, and scholars are well advised to assess both the seriousness of that role and the effect of environmental stress on other more commonly recognized causal factors. Additionally, Levy’s exclusive foctig on U.S. concerns about environmentsecurity issues underestimates the urgency of these issues for those who directly draw their subsistence from the environment. What matters most for environment-security research of underdeveloped countries (where the economic base, and even subsistence, of a majority of citizens is jeopardized by environmental disruption) should be how to counter environmental ills as they affect the national security of those countries. Soliciting financial aid by persuading the policy makers of affluent countries to link Third World environmental threats to their own security interests should be a secondary agenda.

369

MAJOR SOURCES OF ECO CONFLICT Violence arises from the efforts of individuals and communities to dominate other people and other groups, or from a refusal to share land, and political power. Such conflicts over what Harold called &dquo;who gets what, when, and how&dquo; have been common throughout human history. States have fought to gain, to preserve access to, or to stop another state from gaining control of, raw materials, fuels, water, sea passages, and territories. As cited by Arthur Westing (1986), World Wars I and II, the Chaco war between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932-1935), the &dquo;Soccer War&dquo; between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, the &dquo;Cod War&dquo; between Britain and Iceland (1972-1973), the Falkland clashes between Britain and Argentina in 1982, and the Gulf War of 1991 all resulted at least partly from the resort to military force to achieve a policy objective involving natural resources. The struggle over resource ownership has also contributed to civil wars. The Congo civil war of 1960-1964 resulted from Katanga’s unsuccessful secession attempt from the newly independent Republic of the Congo (Zaire since 1971). The Belgian colonial power encouraged secession to secure its investment in Katanga (now Shaba) Province where copper, uranium, and other minerals were abundant. The Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970 resulted from the south-easterners’ attempt to establish an independent republic in Biafra, which the government was unwilling to lose because of its rich deposits of oil. Although both scholarship and common-sense observation have suggested that environmental pressures were at the root of many conflicts, these pressures were nevertheless often subsumed under historical, economic, or political causes. This was partly because of a lack of conceptual tools to understand the relationship of population and environmental dynamics to conflict (such conflicts are referred to below as eco-conflicts), and partly because of inadequate empirical evidence. It was not until the late 1980s that researchers seriously began to focus on environmental change as an independent cause of conflict. The Project on Environment, Population and Security (EPS) led by Thomas HomerDixon at University of Toronto and the Zurich-based Environment and Conflict Project (ENCOP) are the two renowned research projects that have attempted to develop a theoretical framework for environmentrelated conflicts: how rapid population growth and global economic development have accelerated the depletion of natural resources and the deterioration of the global ecosystem, possibly causing declining living standards, political insecurity, social integration, and eventually civil unrest or conflicts. Several others have also examined the alleged relationship between ecological decline and violent conflict. Still, those scarce

goods,

Lasswell

3.

once

See, for

example,

(1994), and Lee (1994).

Bennett

(1991), Gleick (1991), Graeger and Smith (1994), Kaplan

370

involved in such research have agreed that whatever its source, environmental change is never the sole cause of conflict. No detailed examination of environmental change4 from an ecologist’s viewpoint is attempted in this article, which is rather a social scientist’s attempt to synthesize the major arguments associated with environmental change as a potential cause of Third World violence.

Population-Environment Imbalance Although there are unavoidable natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes, and cyclones), human actions can make natural calamities more frequent and more dangerous. Growing population pressure on land is forcing more and more people to reside in disaster-prone environments. High population density has rendered ecosystems more vulnerable, so more people are affected by acts of nature. As seen in Japan’s &dquo;Great Hanshin Earthquake&dquo; in January 1995, even industrialized countries are by no means immune to catastrophe when nature strikes densely populated urban areas. Yet the most serious demographic situations are in underdeveloped countries. The global population share of the Third World, which increased from 67% to 78% between 1950 and 1990, is expected to increase to 84% in 2025.5Such rapid population growth puts tremendous strains on fragile Third World environments, stretching the

carrying capacity of the local resource base in the absence of institutional and technological change. Overall, environmental change is a result of human interference with nature. Such interference is inevitable in that

our very livelihood relies how we utilize natural ecosystems and resources. But human incursions on the environment are increasingly problematic. We have stretched the global carrying capacity for humans, exploiting supplies of food, fodder, fuelwood, and freshwater faster than they can be replenished. To a certain extent, substitutable materials produced by human ingenuity and technological innovations have increased the earth’s carrying capacity (Simon & Khan, 1984; Deudney, 1990). Unless substitutes are found, however, it is a matter of time before the threat of exhausting nonrenewable resources (e.g., oil, gas, and lead) and renewable resources (e.g., water, soil, and air) gives rise to tensions among affected communities. on

4. Environmental change, in this article, includes population-induced ecological stress, renewable resource scarcity, environmental degradation, natural or human-induced disasters, environmental destruction by ill-conceived development policies, and drought- and war-induced famines, often aggravated by political manipulation and incompetence. Government policies of ecocide (destruction of the natural environment, which in turn endangers human life), often a wartime strategy, is also an important source of environmental

degradation. 5. The distribution (percentage) of the Third World population is the author’s estimate based on a UN table, population size and rate of increase for the world, more developed regions, less developed regions, and least developed countries, medium variant, 1950-2025

(United Nations Population Division, 1992).

371

Furthermore, population pressures countries

are

on overpopulated Third World aggravated by large-scale inflows of migrants and instance, about three quarters of the 1995 world refugee

often

refugees. For population resided in Third World countries and over 34% was found in Africa alone.6 When combining the problem of the continual increase of &dquo;people in motion&dquo; (whether migrants or refugees) with the problem of rapid population growth in less developed countries, it becomes apparent why these countries have such dire levels of environmental and economic stress. Also, large populations of newly urbanized aliens and local people affected by rapid urbanization may give rise to instability, insurgency, and internal conflict. Renewable Resource Scarcities’

Simple scarcity conflicts usually arise from a burgeoning population’s demands over resources such as water, fish, agricultural land, and forests. For example, a recent UN report quoted by Reuters News warned that unless the international community acts soon to improve water resource availability and access, worldwide &dquo;water shock&dquo; is likely to arrest human development and put the world in the danger of war over scarce water.8 Resource scarcity does not arise solely from overpopulation, however. Scarcity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for conflict, which also requires at least two organized actors and incompatible demands on the same set of limited resources. Often resource scarcity is merely a minor factor among numerous political, economic, social, and cultural factors that trigger social disruption and conflict. How, then, can scarcity-conflict linkages be explained? Ted Robert Gurr (1985) has surveyed the political consequences of resource scarcity and economic crises. Gurr shows how enduring ecological scarcity can breed gradual impoverishment and resultant material inequalities within and among societies, that tend to intensify class cleavages and ethnic hostilities and intensify conflicts, possibly shifting a liberal regime into an authoritarian political order. It should also be noted that, among other origins of scarcity, humans tend to overexploit common property resources to maximize individual self-interest. Because most renewable resources, such as watersheds, land, and the atmosphere, are held or 6. The author’s estimate is based on the figures in U.S. Committee for Refugees, World 1995. As of December 31, 1995, 5,222,000 refugees were found in Africa,

Refugee Survey

whereas the total number of the world refugees was 15,337,000. 7. The need for nonrenewable resources (except oil) is not a motivator for international conflict any longer because their scarcities "have usually produced price changes that reduce resource demand and stimulate substitution and technical innovation." On the contrary, scarcities of most renewable resources have not been effectively prevented by market forces and are increasingly threatening the internal stability of many developing countries (Homer-Dixon & Percival 1996). 8. Wally N’Dow, secretary general of the UN Conference on Human Settlements noted that some 80 countries (40% of the world’s population) are facing "water stress" ( The Boston Globe, March 22,1996, p. 14).

372

used in common, competitive abuse of shared ecological resources results in what Garrett Hardin has described as the &dquo;tragedy of the commons,&dquo; that is, scarcities of renewable resources leading to environmental destruction, social disruption, and conflict (Hardin, 1977). Resource Allocation Problems

Conflicts over resource allocation are likely to be seen by international as a zero-sum game in which one party either wins or loses. One example is disputes over access to adequate water supplies and the control of waterways between countries sharing the same river. There are 214 major river basins shared by at least two countries. Around 40% of the world’s population (about 2 billion people) live in co-riparian countries. Conflicts have arisen over shared transboundary rivers such as the Nile, Jordan, Indus, and the Ganges/Brahmaputra, and conflicts will intensify as growing populations compete over sharing limited water resources for agriculture and economic development.9 At the international level, a dominant state’s attempt to monopolize a common resource for its benefit carries a strong potential for provoking conflicts among states. Ideally, an unequal distribution of natural resources should not be a source of conflicts; the allocation of resources between adjacent countries would be ruled by principles of international equity, that is, who needs how much. In practice, as realists argue, resource allocation is often decided by the stronger state’s pursuit of its national interest. In the case of water resources in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the Turkish government has planned to use much of the flow of the Euphrates for energy and irrigation purposes without concern for the downstream effects on Syria, which faces a serious water shortage. The zero-sum nature of such conflicts is even more apparent in the Ganges basin. Lower riparian Bangladesh has long protested upstream India’s monopoly of the Ganges for its development projects. actors

sudh

Resource Inequity

The legacy of colonialism. The structural roots of unequal access and control over resources are found in the colonial period. Although the colonial experience differs from one country to another, one of the most essential objectives of the colonialists was the exploitation of natural resources for their benefit. Until the first half of this century, it seemed plausible that population pressures, increased resource scarcity, and ecological constraints could be relaxed through colonial expansion and the forceful conquest of weak but resource-rich countries by militarily stronger nations. One justification for the British Empire, which held 9. For the discussion of water and conflict, see Falkenmark (1986), Peter H. Gleick (1993), and Lowi (1993).

373

sway over much of the world in the second half of the nineteenth century, to seize colonial resources, monopolize the world market, obtain cheap raw materials, and sell them at inflated prices. Similarly, Japanese militarists expanded into East and Southeast Asia before and during World War II to gain possession of natural resources. As a consequence, marginalization of the indigenous people from access to their natural resources was a key impetus prompting decolonization. was

Internal colonialism. When it

comes to scarcity-induced economic the leading inequalities, poorer countries of the South suffer more than the advanced industrial countries of the North, in that the latter can exploit political influence and market forces to pursue their interest. As a result of such pressures at the international level, both the people in poorer countries and their physical environment have been exploited. Just as unfair terms of trade in the world market cause poorer countries to export more raw materials, economically advantaged elite groups extract the resources of the rural peasants and pastoralists on the local level (Suliman, 1992). The resulting change in the distribution of ecological resources has concentrated supply in the hands of a few, leaving the rest to suffer from acute scarcity. Unless these unfair practices are adjusted, economic deprivation, civil unrest, and ethnic strife will be

decline

to

the inevitable outcome. One example is the civil war between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the forces of the National Government of Papua New Guinea. Since its start in 1972, the operations of the enormous Panguna copper mine on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea have caused severe environmental damage on the island. While the mine production has enriched the country’s economy, it has also endangered the very survival of the indigenous Bougainvilleans, who have lost, in their minds, everything. Such unequal distribution of benefits and costs (i.e., economic profits on the one hand vs. environmental destruction on the other) led indigenous people to start a sabotage campaign against the mine in 1988, which has escalated into a guerrilla war (Boge, 1992). What is happening in Bougainville is also happening, or is likely to happen, in hundreds of Third World villages. Indigenous populations have begun to reject the concept of development imposed on them by outsiders, as they have realized that development has been about the appropriation of their resources for the sake of the state and commercial interests, in return leaving them almost nothing but the disruption of their livelihood. Indigenous struggles over outsiders’ encroachments on their lands breed popular ecological resistance in Africa and other underdeveloped countries. Their environment movements are very different from those found in affluent Western countries, in that the struggle to reclaim resources is at the core of many Third World grassroots

374

environmental efforts. Their resistance is becoming a potential source of future environment-related social conflicts.10 Mismatch of Eco-Ethnic Regions and States

Just as two or more states may occupy parts of a single eco-region, a

single state can encompass more than one eco-ethnic region. Colonialism, especially in Africa, is largely responsible for such incongruities between states and eco-ethnic regions, as the colonial power lumped many ethnicities into an artificial border or separated large homogeneous ethnic groups into different political units. In the Horn of Africa, for instance, the desert and arid eco-region inhabited by the Somali nomadic pastoralists is now divided into four states (Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Djibouti) as a result of borders created by the colonial powers. This division laid the basis for the interstate war between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977-1978, when environmental stress in northern Somalia led Ishaq Somali pastoralists to move into Ogaden in Ethiopia, precipitating tensions between Ishaq and Ogaden Somali pastoralists (Byers, 1991; Molvaer 1991). On the other hand, a single state can comprise diverse eco-geographical zones. Multi-ecoregions are usually inhabited by different ethnic groups, including minority groups lacking political autonomy over the territories they reside in. When these groups are mobilized and politicized to redress their grievances and to promote their common interests, open conflicts with dominant ethnic groups or governments are inevitable. The multi-eco-geographical situation is one of the complicated causes of the civil war in Sri Lanka. Most of the Sinhalese ethnic groups live in the wet zone in the southwest of the country, whereas the dry zone in the east and north is occupied mainly by the Tamil. The Sinhalesedominated government’s water projects in the dry zone resettled many Sinhalese in areas inhabited by the Tamil. Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia also offer cases of conflict in different eco-ethno-regional states (Byers,

1991). POSSIBLE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

By and large, demographic pressures stem from high birth rates, increasing urbanization, and a continuing influx of foreign migration or refugees. As population increases, human activities, needs, and wastes multiply, and the average individual’s level of consumption is enhanced by resource-consuming, pollution-generating technological development. Increases in population size, population density, and individual consumption escalate resource shortages and environmental damage through a vicious cycle-when resources become scarce or less accessi10. For see

a

detailed discussion of the global emergence of popular ecological resistance,

Taylor (1995).

375

and greater environmental for additional people. Such ecological damage provide stress often instigates fierce competition among the affected population. The various stages a society may go through before embarking on violent conflict related to environmental factors are seen in Figures 1 and 2. The benefit of clarifying the evolution of eco-conflicts is an ability to anticipate a new dimension of global insecurity.

ble, it requires to

Resource

more

expensive processes

resources

inequity. Growing competition

over

dwindling

resources

makes it even more difficult for regimes to ensure the &dquo;orderly&dquo; distribution of resources among an increasing population. The greater the scarcity, the more likely is failure in this regard. This is partly because powerful elites (often including members of the government elite) monopolize the valued resource. Those left out are compelled to expand into new and presumably marginal lands, a process further accelerating environmental damage. Such processes of what Homer-Dixon (1994) called &dquo;resource capture&dquo; and &dquo;ecological marginalization&dquo; result in increased environmental scarcity and degradation (see Figure 1). Increased environmental decline. Environmental scarcity and degradation become irreparable without appropriate measures to prevent overuse and pollution. Even if environmental damage is partially reversible, it will be a prohibitively long and costly process.

Heightened group identity. During times of fierce competition over resources, affected groups usually become more self-conscious and selfassertive of their group identity The spread of relative deprivation and frustration over the unequal distribution of both ecological resources and economic goods is likely to lead disadvantaged ethnic groups to mobilize for political action. This in turn generates political and social tension, particularly within a multiethnic society Economic decline. Environmental decline in quantity and quality lowers average living standards and increases poverty and malnutrition within an affected society. Impoverished groups use their group identity as a basis for political mobilization against the government or rival ethnic

groups. Forced migration. A mutually reinforcing cycle of poverty and environmental destruction sets in, as many destitute persons face a &dquo;leave or die&dquo; situation and move to ever-more ecologically marginal habitats or already overcrowded urban areas. Mass migration caused by irreversible destruction of the environment usually creates internally displaced or transnational environmental refugees, who in turn cause or contribute to conflicts within or among affected countries.

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