Environment, Scarcity and Violence.

• Author: Smith, Nikola
• Position: REQUIRED READING - Book review

ENVIRONMENT, SCARCITY AND VIOLENCE Thomas F. Homer-Dixon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 272 pages.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, has conducted extensive research on the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. In Environment, Scarcity and Violence, he focuses specifically on the relationship between environmental scarcity, ethnic clashes and civil strife.

Homer-Dixon defines environmental scarcity as a lack of renewable resources caused by resource depletion, increased demand and unequal distribution. Resource capture by powerful groups and subsequent migration of weaker groups in search of dwindling resources, along with population growth, combine to generate social instability Meanwhile, constrained agricultural and economic productivity, social segmentation and disrupted institutions stimulate sub-national insurgencies and ethnic clashes.

The book addresses the fact that environmental scarcity is not in itself a necessary or sufficient cause of conflict. Homer-Dixon evaluates why some societies are able to adapt well to environmental scarcity while others are not. The emergence of violence is the result of what he calls an...