Environment, population and conflict: new modalities of threat and vulnerability in South Asia (1).

• Author: Matthew, Richard A.

"The clear consensus among many political observers is that contemporary South Asia is highly vulnerable to violent conflict. Moreover, a substantial number of analysts contend that environmental change and population growth are amplifying this vulnerability and may trigger the next major conflict in the region."

The eminent American political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing about likely sites of future conflict around the world, argues that "[t]he great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict [in the years ahead] will be cultural." (2) He predicts that "[t]he clash of civilizations will dominate global politics." (3) Within this paradigm, Huntington contends, South Asia stands out as one of the most vulnerable regions of the world. He worries that "[t]he historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial Muslim minority." (4)

Norman Myers, a British scientist, offers further reasons for concern. While Myers also comments on the longstanding antagonism between Hinduism and Islam, which he believes may "be exacerbated by the fundamentalist Muslim spirit that emanates from Iran," the focus of his analysis is environmental degradation. (5) In particular, the Himalayan water catchment, which is vital to this region, is being damaged by rapid deforestation. "This environmental decline is leading to "This environmental decline is leading to agricultural setbacks, indeed to the growing incapacity of many areas to support human communities. Yet the total population of this region, more than 1.2 billion people today, is projected to approach ... 2.6 billion before it finally levels out ... in the next century." (6) South Asia, Myers concludes, "presents much scope for conflict." (7)

Peter Gizewski and Thomas Homer-Dixon offer further reason for concern. They argue that "environmental scarcity [in Pakistan] could eventually become so severe that the conflict and institutional breakdown it generates become self-sustaining. In that event, the regime may try to divert attention from internal crisis by exacerbating tensions with its neighbors. Longstanding regional disputes (for instance, in Kashmir) would provide a ready pretext for such behavior. The potential dangers of such a course--for regional as well as global security--would be considerable." (8)

Elsewhere, Homer-Dixon makes a similar argument with regard to India:

Indian social institutions and democracy are now under extraordinary strain. The strain arises from a rapid yet incomplete economic transition, from widening gaps between the wealthy and the poor, from chronically weak political institutions, and, not least, from continued population growth and worsening environmental scarcities. Should these converging pressures cause major internal violence ... the economic, migration, and security consequences for the rest of the world would be staggering. (9) Recognizing the urgency of these threats, M. V. Ramana and A. H. Nayyar, physicists and policy analysts from South Asia, argue that conflict in the region could result in unprecedented levels of destruction. In May 1998, India conducted five nuclear tests; three weeks later Pakistan responded with six nuclear detonations of its own. In 1999, a two-month-long war erupted between the two countries in the long-disputed province of Kashmir, claiming more than 3,000 lives and making the Indian subcontinent, according to Ramana and Nayyar, "the most likely place in the world for a nuclear war." (10)

The clear consensus among many political observers is that contemporary South Asia is highly vulnerable to violent conflict. Moreover, a substantial number of analysts contend that environmental change and population growth are amplifying this vulnerability and may trigger the next major conflict in the region. From a global perspective, this is a very dangerous situation: war on the sub-continent is of special concern to the rest of the world because South Asia contains two hostile nuclear powers and rubs against two more.

US journalists, policymakers and academics have, in recent years, focused attention on these emerging threats. The September 11 terrorist attacks, the subsequent military campaign in Afghanistan and the spike in religious violence in Kashmir in the spring of 2002 have galvanized further American concerns about this region.

The stresses of population growth and negative environmental change offer one explanation for the region's deteriorating political and civil climate. In this article I've attempted to address the prominent arguments on this subject and to offer an alternative--but also discouraging--perspective on these particular forces, particularly as they relate to potential violent conflict in the region.

THE NEO-MALTHUSIAN PERSPECTIVE

When Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, he sought to challenge the unrestrained optimism about human progress espoused by various Enlightenment philosophers. Over the course of two centuries, his bleak vision of human history has inspired many thinkers to reflect on the implications of the two "fixed laws of nature" with which Malthus began his analysis: one, "food is necessary to the existence of man," and two, "the passion between the sexes is necessary.... Assuming then my postulates as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man." (11) The ultimate outcome, Malthus believed, was inevitable: too many people wing for too little food, a scenario that could only be resolved by the violent thinning of human populations through famine, disease and war.

Writing in 1948, after experiencing the unprecedented devastation of two world wars, Fairfield Osborn argued passionately about the continuing validity of Malthus's insight:

When will it be openly recognized that one of the principal causes of the aggressive attitudes of individual nations and of much of the present discord among groups of nations is traceable to diminishing productive lands and to increasing population pressures? (12) In his analysis Osborn suggested that weak or misguided political institutions and humankind's deeply ingrained willingness to use coercion had combined with unchecked population growth and unsustainable economic practices to create a situation in which "Every country, all the world, is met with the threat of an oncoming crisis." (13)

This claim was given its most recent, and perhaps most influential, reworking by a group of authors writing in the 1990s. (14) In 1994, for example, the journalist Robert Kaplan published "The coming anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet." (15) According to Kaplan, demographic change, urbanization, environmental degradation and easy access to arms are combining in West Africa to produce chronic violence, state failures and a steady flow of miserable people seeking to escape from a world that has become uninhabitable. (16) Even more alarming, this volatile and destructive mixture is gaining critical mass elsewhere in the world. Kaplan suggests that no countries, not even the rich states of the industrial North, can safely assume they are immune to the growing, planetary threat of violent anarchy.

Kaplan's essay had a tremendous influence within the first Clinton Administration. Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth had a copy sent to every US embassy, and President Clinton and Vice-President Gore saw in Kaplan's world view a concise statement of the sort of crisis they had encountered in Somalia and were then struggling to address in Haiti. For months the Kaplan thesis was enthusiastically discussed at security meetings, taught on DC campuses and championed by an array of inside-the-beltway security specialists. Outside Washington, however, Naplan's essay stimulated some immediate and remarkably pointed criticism on the grounds that it was culturally insensitive, analytically impoverished and unduly alarmist. (17)

In developing his argument, Kaplan drew heavily on the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon. (18) The insights that impressed Kaplan are presented very clearly in the concluding chapter of Homer-Dixon's major work on the subject:

[W]hat I call environmental scarcity ... can contribute to civil violence, including insurgencies and ethnic clashes.... [T]he incidence of such violence will probably increase as scarcities of cropland, freshwater, and forests worsen in many parts of the developing world. Scarcity's role in such violence, however, is often obscure and indirect. It interacts with political, economic, and other factors to generate harsh social effects that in turn help to produce violence. (19) The argument is as follows (see Figure 1, below)...