Environmental Engineering Reference
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mobilisation. As observed by Karen Ballentine of the EACW project: “The correlation
between natural resource dependency and conflict risk is not direct: variations in the
state's governance are critical intervening factors'' (2004: 4). Here, we see the inter-
play of political and socio-economic factors, often mobilised by conflict entrepreneurs
through identity-politics that serve to arouse feelings of mutual distrust and hate. Iden-
tity politics works by emphasising the differences between different identity groups,
such as race, ethnicity, religion, language or other characteristics, whether they are real
or imagined. A straightforward land conflict, for example, can become much more dif-
ficult and protracted when an identity or ethnic factor is implicated. Watts (2004b:4)
describes such identity-politics as 'governable spaces', where natural resources “gen-
erate differing sorts of governable spaces in which identity, territory and rule are
in play.''
This qualified position amounts to a debunking of simple (neo-)malthusian
approaches that emphasise mono-causal or reductionist environmentalist explana-
tions, where scarcity directly leads to conflict. As properly observed by Paul Richards
(2005: 6-8), there is no “Malthus with guns.'' Following Gleditsch (2001: 64), envi-
ronmental degradation may more appropriately be “seen as an intervening variable
between poverty and poor governance on the one hand and conflict on the other. In
this sense, environmental degradation may be seen more as a symptom that something
has gone wrong than a cause of the world's ills.''
We may conclude at this stage that the alarmist predictions of resource wars
that received a level of prominence in the 1990s were not proven or substantiated.
Scholarship at present stresses the complex and nuanced interplay between envi-
ronmental and other factors. Linkages between environment and conflict have been
found to be indirect at best. Analysis has moved from absolute to relative scarcity
and to a focus on distributional issues among different identity groups. At sub-
national or local levels, smaller conflicts may indeed occur due to resource scarcity
or mal-distribution. While there are occasionally instances of violence and inciden-
tal casualties, these fights are often not systematically organised and rarely endure.
As such, they would not normally be classified as violent conflict or low-intensity
warfare. Yet, there is a possibility that these local 'green-wars' escalate into more
prominent national violence or even spill over to neighbouring countries. They must
therefore be positioned and monitored in terms of declining rural livelihoods and
related patterns of resource plunder, predation, overexploitation and depletion. At
present it seems that rural livelihoods are allowed to deteriorate further in many coun-
tries, thereby increasing the chances that these types of conflict will emerge. The role
of government (development) policy or mismanagement in forging or exacerbating
socio-economic differentiation among different identity groups warrants further study.
It appears that such processes are in fact often based on ill-informed or misdirected
government processes, involving patron-client relations and corruption. We also see
that many conflict contexts are characterised by so-called state failure or weak state-
hood - e.g. the 'predatory state' - and therefore lack the institutional mechanisms,
will or capacity to prevent conflict from emerging or deal with conflict once it esca-
lates towards violence. As mentioned, such state-centred perspectives have likewise
come under scrutiny by research that focuses on informal institutions, non-state gov-
ernance frameworks and traditional authorities that affect mechanisms of resource
distribution.
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