Demographic Change, Natural Resources and Violence' the Current Debate

"[T]he end of the Cold War raised the salience of and deepened the debate over, non-traditional security issues, including the potentially destabilizing effects of dramatic demographic and environmental change." In 1998, Naris Sadik, former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, wrote: Many features of today's or very recent conflicts--whether in the Balkans, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Rwanda, Somalia, Zaire, or elsewhere--are all too familiar ... namely ethnic, religious, and economic. However, there are other features and signs which are much less familiar ... Most alarming among these is the rapid growth of the world's human population and the implications this may have for global stability and security.... Social and environmental change ... is taking place on a scale that has never been witnessed before ... To cope with these changes, governments need resources and capabilities which, in all too many cases, fall seriously short of what are available ... If support for the most disadvantaged developing countries (and there are many in or near that position) is not forthcoming in the years ahead, it seems likely that instability and disorder will be experienced on a much larger scale than they have even today. (1) Comments such as this illustrate a growing concern that rapid population growth and mounting natural resource pressures represent significant threats to the political stability of developing countries. These concerns are not new; Reverend Thomas Malthus first voiced them more than two hundred years ago, and dire predictions of exploding human numbers, impending environmental crises and a future plagued by endless resource wars have been popular for decades. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War raised the salience of, and deepened the debate over, non-traditional security issues, including the potentially destabilizing effects of dramatic demographic and environmental change. (2) This article surveys one aspect of this debate, specifically the relationship between violent intrastate conflict and demographic and environmental stress (DES)--a combination of pressures including population growth and the degradation, depletion and maldistribution of natural resources. (3) While neo-Malthusians argue that population growth and resource scarcity have been, and will continue to be, important contributors to political crises and conflict in developing countries, neo-classical economists are more optimistic about the prospects for social adaptation. Indeed, recent neo-classical work on the environmental sources of civil wars actually inverts the neo-Malthusian position, arguing that an abundance of natural resources, rather than scarcity, is more likely to produce armed conflict. The following sections describe these arguments in greater detail. I conclude that both neo-Malthusians and their neo-classical rivals would profit from greater theoretical specificity, especially as it relates to critical intervening factors and processes, the varied conflict potential of renewable vs. non-renewable resources and the different time frames assumed by each approach. NEO-MALTHUSIAN ARGUMENTS Neo-Malthusian conflict hypotheses start with the contention that DES can place severe strains on both societies and states, thereby making countries subject to instability and civil strife. Pressures on Societies According to neo-Malthusians, DES produces three interrelated strains on societies: renewable resource scarcity (4), economic marginalization and demographic shifts. DES can lead to a scarcity of renewable resources in countries lacking the institutions and the technological, social and political ingenuity to adapt. Population growth can bring about scarcity by increasing the demand for resources, while environmental degradation can generate it by decreasing resource supply. …