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Overview
Over the past several decades, civil and ethnic wars have undermined prospects for economic and political development, destabilized entire regions of the globe, and left millions dead. States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World argues that demographic and environmental stress--the interactions among rapid population growth, environmental degradation, inequality, and emerging scarcities of vital natural resources--represents one important source of turmoil in today's world.
Kahl contends that this type of stress places enormous strains on both societies and governments in poor countries, increasing their vulnerability to armed conflict. He identifies two pathways whereby this process unfolds: state failure and state exploitation. State failure conflicts occur when population growth, environmental degradation, and resource inequality weaken the capacity, legitimacy, and cohesion of governments, thereby expanding the opportunities and incentives for rebellion and intergroup violence. State exploitation conflicts, in contrast, occur when political leaders themselves capitalize on the opportunities arising from population pressures, natural resource scarcities, and related social grievances to instigate violence that serves their parochial interests.
Drawing on a wide array of social science theory, this book argues that demographically and environmentally induced conflicts are most likely to occur in countries that are deeply split along ethnic, religious, regional, or class lines, and which have highly exclusive and discriminatory political systems. The empirical portion of the book evaluates the theoretical argument through in-depth case studies of civil strife in the Philippines, Kenya, and numerous other countries. The book concludes with an analysis of the challenges demographic and environmental change will pose to international security in the decades ahead.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691188379 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World
By Colin H. Kahl Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13835-0
Chapter One PLIGHT, PLUNDER, AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY
CIVIL STRIFE in the developing world represents perhaps the greatest international security challenge of the early twenty-first century. Three-quarters of all wars since 1945 have been within countries rather than between them, and the vast majority of these conflicts have occurred in the world's poorest nations. Wars and other violent conflicts have killed some 40 million people since 1945, and as many people may have died as a result of civil strife since 1980 as were killed in the First World War. Although the number of internal wars peaked in the early 1990s and has been declining slowly ever since, they remain a scourge on humanity. Armed conflicts have crippled the prospect for a better life in many developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, by destroying essential infrastructure, decimating social trust, encouraging human and capital flight, exacerbating food shortages, spreading disease, and diverting precious financial resources toward military spending.
Compounding matters further, the damaging effects of civil strife rarely remain confined within the afflicted countries. In the past decade alone tens of millions of refugees have spilled across borders, producing significant socioeconomic and healthproblems in neighboring areas. Instability has also rippled outward as a consequence of cross-border incursions by rebel groups, trafficking in arms and persons, disruptions in trade, and damage done to the reputation of entire regions in the eyes of investors. Globally, war-torn countries have become havens and recruiting grounds for international terrorist networks, organized crime, and drug traffickers. Indeed, the events of September 11, 2001, illustrate how small the world has become and how vulnerable even superpowers are to rising grievances and instabilities in the developing world.
Although there is no single cause of civil strife, a growing number of scholars and practitioners suggest that rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and competition over natural resources play important causal roles in many of these conflicts. Several high-profile theoretical works and case studies suggest that demographic and environmental pressures can, under certain conditions, contribute to civil strife. Moreover, an emergent body of cross-national research supports this conclusion. Recent quantitative studies analyzing the correlates of internal wars from the 1950s to the present indicate that population size and population density are significant risk factors. Another important study points out that countries at earlier stages of the demographic transition (when birth rates and death rates are both high), as well as those with large numbers of young adults and rapid rates of urbanization, have been much more prone to civil strife over the past three decades. In terms of environmental factors, recent statistical work indicates that countries highly dependent on natural resources, as well as those experiencing high rates of deforestation and soil degradation, and low per capita availability of arable land and freshwater, have higher-than-average risks of falling into turmoil. In short, many researchers now conclude that it is impossible to fully understand the patterns and dynamics of contemporary civil strife without considering the demographic and environmental dimensions of these conflicts.
Outside the ivory tower, numerous policy makers and commentators have reached similar conclusions. In 1991, for example, the then NATO secretary general Manfred Worner argued that "the immense conflict potential building up in the Third World, characterized by growing wealth differentials, an exploding demography, climate shifts and the prospect for environmental disaster, combined with the resource conflicts of the future, cannot be left out of our security calculations." Three years later, in an infamous Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Coming Anarchy," the influential journalist Robert Kaplan went so far as to suggest that the environment was "the national security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging population, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions ... will be the core foreign policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate." Echoing these sentiments, Nafis Sadik, the former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, wrote in 1998:
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.
This view has gained traction in Washington as well. Throughout much of the 1990s the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States referred to demographic and environmental pressures as threats to both the stability of developing countries and, ultimately, America's national interests. In the 1996 NSS, for example, the Clinton administration stated:
America's security imperatives ... have fundamentally changed. The central security challenge of the past half century-the threat of communist expansion-is gone. The dangers we face today are more diverse [L]arge-scale environmental degradation, exacerbated by rapid population growth, threatens to undermine political stability in many countries and regions.
In 2000 the U.S. National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2015 report included an analysis of demographic and environmental trends as part of its discussion of the possible causes of internal conflict. Commenting on the report, the New York Times suggested that it was indicative of a growing awareness in Washington that "issues like the availability of water and food, changes in population and the spread of information and disease will increasingly affect the security of the United States."
In many ways, of course, all this changed after 9/11. Indeed, the Bush administration's 2002 NSS is illustrative of the fact that the security focus of the U.S. government has shifted almost entirely to the twin menaces posed by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Yet even in the Bush administration, demographic and environmental challenges have not completely fallen off the radar screen. In a July 2002 speech, for example, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared:
Sustainable development is a compelling moral and humanitarian issue. But sustainable development is also a security imperative. Poverty, destruction of the environment and despair are destroyers of people, of societies, of nations, a cause of instability as an unholy trinity than can destabilize countries and destabilize entire regions.
More recently an October 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment to study the security implications of future climate change concluded:
There is substantial evidence that significant global warming will occur during the 21st century ... [and] the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth's environment ... As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world ... Because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change ... should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.
Do population and environmental pressures actually put countries at higher risk of experiencing civil strife? Although current research suggests a possible correlation, and many scholars and policy makers assert a causal relationship, the causal mechanisms linking demographic and environmental pressures to civil strife are still poorly understood. Existing studies on the subject point to a number of important dynamics, but several crucial causal pathways and interactions with social and political variables are ignored. This book seeks to fill the explanatory gap and thereby enhance our understanding of the population-environment-civil strife connection. Toward this end it examines both the degree to which demographic and environmental pressures can be said to cause civil strife in developing countries, and the underlying dynamics and processes involved in this relationship. Moreover, in a significant departure from much of the existing literature, the book takes a careful look at the social and political factors that exacerbate, or mitigate, the potential for violent conflict.
The goal of this chapter is to lay the foundation for the theoretical and empirical core of the book by taking stock of the current state of our knowledge. The following sections outline arguments advanced by three distinct schools of thought-neo-Malthusianism, neoclassical economics, and political ecology-and point to their limitations.
The Neo-Malthusian Perspective
Neo-Malthusians work broadly within the intellectual tradition of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose famous 1798 treatise, An Essay on the Principles of Population, argued that exponential population growth would eventually outpace the ability of the planet to provide for human needs. In the contemporary period neo-Malthusians argue that enormous demographic and economic changes have combined to place severe pressures on both the natural environment and the world's poor, lowering the quality of life for millions and threatening the political stability of many developing countries.
Pressures on the Planet, Pressures on the Poor
The past century witnessed unprecedented population growth, economic development, and environmental stress, changes that continue to this day. From 1900 to 2000 world population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion. Since 1950 alone 3.5 billion people have been added to the planet, with 85 percent of this increase occurring in developing and transition countries. Worldwide population growth rates peaked in the late 1960s at around 2 percent a year, but the current rate of 1.2 percent still represents a net addition of 77 million people per year. The differential population growth rates of rich and poor countries have also become more pronounced. The current annual rate in high-income countries is 0.25 percent compared to 1.46 percent for developing countries as a whole. Moreover, within the subset of the forty-nine least developed countries the annual rate is currently 2.4 percent. The global economy has also experienced tremendous growth over the past century. Estimates vary, but the global economy most likely increased twenty to forty times its 1900 level by 2000. The tempo of change has been especially pronounced since the end of the Second World War; between 1950 and 2002 the global economy grew from 6.7 trillion to 48 trillion. This incredible economic expansion occurred during a time of accelerating globalization and, especially since the 1980s, rising faith in the power of markets and privatization. Economic growth, globalization, and the harnessing of market forces have allowed for average living standards to advance faster than world population growth, improving the quality of life for billions. Nevertheless, the benefits of economic growth and globalization have been unevenly distributed within and across countries and regions.
In the 1990s, for example, average economic growth per capita was less than 3 percent (the threshold needed to double incomes in a generation given constant rates of inequality) in 125 developing and transition economies, and 54 of these countries were actually poorer in 2000 than in 1990. More than 1.2 billion people currently live in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than $1 a day, and a total of 2.8 billion (more than half the population of the developing world) live on less than $2 a day. Although the proportion of people suffering from extreme poverty fell from 30 percent to 23 percent during the 1990s, the absolute number only fell by 123 million because of a 15 percent increase in the population of low- and middle-income countries. Driving most of this progress was China; excluding China, the total number of extremely poor people worldwide increased by 28 million, and thirty-seven of sixty-seven countries with data saw poverty rates increase in the 1990s. Worst off was sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita income fell by 5 percent and 74 million additional people descended into extreme poverty (producing a regional total of 404 million living on less than $1 a day in 1999). Other key indexes of human welfare also reveal a similar pattern: overall progress but also numerous countries falling further behind. Over the past decade thirty-four countries had lower life expectancy, twenty-one had a larger portion of people hungry, and fourteen had more children dying before age five.
This pattern is further reflected in widening gaps between rich and poor. In 1960 the ratio between the GDP per capita in the twenty richest and twenty poorest countries was 18 to 1; in 1995 the ratio was 37 to 1. Between 1980 and the late 1990s inequality also increased within 33 of 66 countries for which adequate data are available. All told, the richest 5 percent of the world's people now receive 114 times the income of the poorest 5 percent, and the richest 1 percent receive as much as the poorest 57 percent. Non-income measures tell a similar story. A decade ago children under five were nineteen times more likely to die in sub-Saharan Africa than in rich countries, but they are now twenty-six times more likely. Indeed, Latin America and the Carribbean were the only parts of the developing world where disparities in infant mortality compared to rich countries did not widen in the 1990s.
Rapid demographic and economic change over the past century have placed severe and accelerating pressures on natural resources and planetary life-support systems. The traditional Malthusian notion that exponential population growth alone drives strains on the environment has long been refuted; no serious thinkers, including neo-Malthusians, now maintain that human-induced environmental changes are a mere function of numbers. Rather, neo-Malthusians argue that the relationship between population growth and the environment is mediated by consumption habits, and by the technologies used to extract natural resources and provide goods and services.
Neo-Malthusians contend that resource depletion and environmental degradation result from the interaction between population growth, extreme wealth, and extreme poverty. The material intensive and pollution-laden consumption habits and production activities of high-income countries are responsible for most of the world's greenhouse gases, solid and hazardous waste, and other environmental pollution. High-income countries also generate a disproportionate amount of the global demand for both nonrenewable resources (e.g., fossil fuels and non-fuel minerals) and certain products from renewable resources (e.g., grain, meat, fish, tropical hardwoods, and products from endangered species). (Continues...)
Excerpted from States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World by Colin H. Kahl
Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Plight, Plunder, and Political Ecology 1
States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife: A Theoretical Framework 28
Green Crisis, Red Rebels: Communist Insurgency in the Philippines 65
Land and Lies: Ethnic Clashes in Kenya 117
From Chaos to Calm: Explaining Variations in Violence in the Philippines and Kenya 163
Conclusions and Implications 209
Notes 249
Index 323
What People are Saying About This
An excellent book that will advance the debate and study of environmental security.
— Jack Goldstone, George Mason University
"An excellent book that will advance the debate and study of environmental security."—Jack Goldstone, George Mason University"A masterful book that will substantially advance the study of the links between environmental and demographic stress and violent conflict. It will become the standard reference book on the subject."—Thomas Homer-Dixon, University of Toronto
A masterful book that will substantially advance the study of the links between environmental and demographic stress and violent conflict. It will become the standard reference book on the subject.
— Thomas Homer-Dixon, University of Toronto