On building methodological and theoretical frameworks to examine the interrelationships between environmental change and armed conflict

Abstract:

Relationships between environmental change and armed conflict have long been studied. Sometimes referred to as ‘warfare’ or ‘conflict’ ecology, much of this scholarship has come in response to local-level perceptions of landscape or livelihood changes that result from regional armed conflict. However, such studies have, first, typically focused on spatiotemporally acute and readily detectable environmental change, like deforestation, to the exclusion of protracted and more subtle environmental changes, like agricultural degradation; second, been limited to situational conflicts or circumstances, thereby inhibiting broader theoretical development; and, third, often only considered the environmental consequences rather than the environmental or climatic circumstances that may contribute to conflict. As a result, there is little opportunity for methodological or theoretical cohesion between studies. In this presentation, I synthesize findings from three case studies examining the interrelationships between agricultural change and armed conflict in the semi-arid landscapes of northwest Pakistan, Palestine, and southern Syria. Using coarse through very high resolution remotely sensed imagery, socio-economic and demographic data, conflict databases, open-source programming, and building on theoretical underpinnings of political ecology and conflict studies, I present methods and modeling approaches that aid in overcoming data scarcity and disparity between scales of analysis and integrate environmental and conflict data in spatiotemporally explicit ways. Results from these case studies illuminate the interrelationships between both protracted and acute agricultural change and armed conflict, and have broad relevance for understanding the means by which environment, conflict, and livelihoods are linked, a nexus that will only become tighter with the advance of global climate change.