Rethinking Climate Change,Conflict and Security

This special issue of Geopolitics presents a series of critical interventions on the links between global anthropogenic climate change, conflict and security. In this introduction, we situate the special issue by providing an assessment of the state of debate on climate security, and then by summarising the eight articles that follow. We observe, to start with, that contemporary climate security discourse is dominated by a problematic ensemble of policy-led framings and assumptions. And we submit that the contributions to this issue help rethink this dominant discourse in two distinct ways, offering both a series of powerful critiques, plus new interpretations of climate-conflict linkages which extend beyond Malthusian orthodoxy.     

Climate Insecurity in (Post)Conflict Areas: The Biopolitics of United Nations Vulnerability Assessments

Within the United Nations, the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have all highlighted climate risks as relevant to their work in areas affected by conflict, endorsing human security approaches as valid for mapping the relationships between climate stresses and conflict-related harm. While this policy interest has limited operational presence, I discuss salient assessments of climate vulnerability in (post)conflict areas, arguing that these agencies have applied a natural disaster rather than conflict regulation inflection of humanitarian reason. The former entails a biopolitical paradigm of disaster risk reduction, prescribing technical-managerial measures to build the resilience of vulnerable populations. This framing supports a depoliticised stance reflecting UN norms of neutrality and impartiality. I claim that this position nevertheless disregards its own geopolitical conditions and effects, which dilute the scope for international humanitarian law to assign responsibility for conflict-related harm.     

Gardens of Eden or Hearts of Darkness? The Genealogy of Discourses on Environmental Insecurity and Climate Wars in Africa

This article argues that the securitisation of Africa’s environment and climate in the early twenty-first century has less to do with multidisciplinary inquiry into the complexities of climate change, development and conflict, and more with historically established paradigms of thinking about Africa, its ecosystems and notions of disorder and violence. Securitisation is the result of a specific moment in the post–Cold War era with its particular geopolitical configuration and of deeply embedded modes of imagining the African continent, its peoples and their relationship with the environments they inhabit. The main objective of this article is to historicise and politicise the prevailing dystopian discourse about climate-induced insecurity. I show that the assumptions and chains of causality that constitute today’s climate wars narrative are remarkably similar in nature to the environmental narratives that underpinned imperialist and post-independence discourses on environment and development, legitimising highly authoritarian interventions against local populations by governments.     

From Maputo to Malabo: public agricultural spending and food security in Africa

Africa is the world’s biggest battleground in the fight against hunger. African governments and the international development community have increasingly focused on finding ways and means to end hunger and ensure the right and access to food for the continent’s burgeoning population. Public spending on agriculture is one such measure. This study examines the role government spending on agriculture has played in enhancing the state of Africa’s food security over the past 25 years. We examine the existing relationship between the two, whether this relationship varies over time and space, and whether it depends on the amount spent. We explore various aspects of food security and check whether spending on research and development follows the same patterns as the overall public agricultural spending. We find some evidence of significant beneficial effects of public agricultural spending on food security but only for the countries which allocate greater proportions of their budgets to agriculture. Spending on agricultural research and development also shows a positive impact on Africa’s food security. There also exists some evidence supporting the temporal effects of public spending. We consider that the Maputo Declaration commitment to allocate at least 10% of public spending to agriculture pertinent.     

A worldwide analysis of trend in crop yields and yield variability: Evidence from FAO data

The trend in crop yields and yield variability affects food security and impact agricultural and food policies. Recent studies in this area have either focused only on one country or performed global analysis on a handful of crops. We provide the first worldwide analysis of trend and variability for 8088 country-crop yield series taken from the FAO database, employing a robust estimator to cope with the adverse statistical effects of outliers. More than half of the series display a slowdown in yield growth due to a closing of the gap between realised and attainable yields as well as to agricultural policies promoting more sustainable agricultural practices. Around one fourth of the series show also an increase in yield variability as a consequence of climate change and changes in farm management practices. Yield variability is highest in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Middle East and North Africa, where food security may be threatened.     

Understanding Resilience in Climate Change and Conflict Affected Regions of Nepal

In the face of global climate change, strengthening community resilience becomes increasingly important, especially in conflict affected countries with fragile governance. Nepal is such a country, recovering from a decade of civil war while facing several climate and environmental risks, including floods, droughts and landslides. We aim to contribute to the understanding of resilience building by drawing on case studies from Banke, Dang and Rolpa districts in Nepal. To compare the resilience of the districts we conduct field research. None of the analysed approaches to strengthen the resilience are without unintended consequences. The provision of rice in Rolpa increases food security but also creates local preferences for rice that cannot be met sustainably. In Dang and Banke aid resources themselves have become a source of conflict. We conclude that a more holistic understanding of local realities is needed to minimise unintended effects and strengthen resilience under challenging governance and (post)conflict conditions.     

Royal Dutch/Shell

Climate change will affect security of individuals and populations as well as the security of states. The article reviews evidence on the scope and nature of the climate change challenge; reviews how these impacts manifest themselves in insecurity at diverse scales; and examines evidence on the political economy of adaptation responses to these impacts. I argue that climate security has been framed in public and policy debate over climate change such that climate change impacts are a threat to nation states in terms of their interests, their economies and their borders. This framing crowds out, subverts and constrains framing in terms of human-well being. I suggest that human security provides a broader and more encompassing notion of climate security than that focussed on security of states. Here, climate security focuses on the idea of freedom from harm and fear of individuals and communities and the capability to adapt to any imposed harm. From that human security perspective, the central analytical issues become those of vulnerability, adaptation and justice.     

Prices,poaching, and protein alternatives: An analysis of bushmeat consumption around Serengeti National Park,Tanzania

The consumption of meat from wild animals (or bushmeat) occurs throughout Africa and highlights the conflict between two distinct development goals: food security and biodiversity conservation. Growing human populations throughout the greater Serengeti ecosystem rely heavily on bushmeat as a source of protein, which places pressure on migratory wildlife populations. This paper uses unique data from protein consumption surveys from 131 households over 34 months in a generalizable empirical framework to estimate price, cross-price, and expenditure elasticities of protein sources, and analyze the potential economic effects of policies to mitigate bushmeat hunting and consumption. Results suggest that: (1) directly increasing the price of bushmeat through enforcement or other policies to reduce supply will have the most direct and largest effect of bushmeat consumption; (2) increasing income increases bushmeat consumption as well as consumption of other meat sources; (3) if surrounding fisheries experience a negative shock, or collapse, this will lead to a dramatic increase in bushmeat consumption. Overall, these results strongly indicate that policies to reduce bushmeat hunting while maintaining food security must be considered in a broad and comprehensive framework.     

Costs of civil war and fragile states in Africa

This paper provides an analysis of the costs of conflict for the countries that are most affected by it, namely low‐income and fragile countries in Africa. It provides an analysis of the impact of conflict on economic growth using a panel of African countries and investigates the differences between those categorized as fragile and others. It finds that there are significant differences, with fragile countries most affected by conflict. It also considers the potential spillover effects of conflict and finds that fragile states also suffer more from conflicts within neighboring states. Finally, it considers whether the results are robust to endogeneity of the conflict variable. Using instrumental variable estimation confirms the negative effect of conflict and the larger effects on fragile states and gives even larger coefficient estimates.     

What’s at Stake in Securitising Climate Change? Towards a Differentiated Approach

Climate change has been successfully represented as a security concern to such an extent that it is firmly established on the political agenda, even though the implementation of concrete policies is disputed. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to better trace the process of securitising climate change and assess its normative implications. We establish a typology of six climate security discourses on the basis of two dimensions: three levels of referent objects and two logics of securitisation, one that corresponds to the original Copenhagen School framework and one where the threat takes the form of the invocation of risk. We find that there are significant differences in the relative importance of the resulting climate security discourses in Germany and the US, but that normatively, all discourses come with their own problems, which calls for more detailed scrutiny and assessment of climate security discourses and their political effects.     

A Ricardian Analysis of the Distribution of Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture across Agro-Ecological Zones in Africa

This paper examines the distribution of climate change impacts across the sixteen Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs) of Africa. We combine net revenue from livestock and crops and regress total net revenue on a set of climate, soil, and socio-economic variables with and without country fixed effects. Although African crop net revenue is very sensitive to climate change, combined livestock and crop net revenue is more climate resilient. With the hot and dry CCC climate scenario, average damage estimates reach 27% by 2100, but with the mild and wet PCM scenario, African farmers will benefit. The analysis of AEZs implies that the effects of climate change will be quite different across Africa. For example, currently productive areas such as dry/moist savannah are more vulnerable to climate change while currently less productive agricultural zones such as humid forest or sub-humid AEZs become more productive in the future. S. Niggol Seo is the Consultant to the World Bank.     

气候变化对干旱区居民生计脆弱性影响研究——基于新疆和宁夏两省区的农户调查

气候变化是导致干旱区居民生计脆弱性的重要原因之一。构建生计脆弱性指标(Livelihood Vulnerability Index,LVI-IPCC)可以评估气候变化对干旱地区居民生计的影响。根据IPCC定义气候变化脆弱性的三个特征,选择新疆、宁夏两个典型干旱省份,调查社会人口指标、生计情况、社会关系网络、健康、食品、饮水安全、自然灾害和气候变化等数据,用复合指标和脆弱性指标进行对比分析。结果表明,宁夏在水资源、健康等方面的脆弱性更为明显,而新疆在社会关系、自然灾害和气候变化等方面更为脆弱。这种实证方法可用于被监测脆弱性,在缺乏地区性数据时检验某种政策的有效性。     

Micro-Geopolitics: Capitalising Security in Laos’s Golden Quadrangle

Enclosure, dispossession and displacement loom large in current debates about the recent boom in transnational farmland deals, and about Chinese agribusiness for export in particular. Often under-examined, however, are the ways that legacies of geopolitical conflict shape the inevitably uneven distribution of enclosure, dispossession and displacement. This paper constructs a case of these ‘micro-geopolitical’ legacies by examining a Chinese rubber planting ‘promotion’ project in northwestern Laos’s emerging ‘Golden Quadrangle’ development region. It argues that longstanding concerns about security inform the ways that local authorities deploy investment projects that are otherwise seen as examples of ‘foreign’ land grabbing. Further, it shows that while the geographical aims of foreign agribusiness mesh with state-mediated resettlement efforts (a darker spin on the narrative of ‘win-win’ cooperation), these activities often precede current land deals rather than result from them. Chinese agribusiness in Laos’s upland interior thus appears less as a driver of displacement than a means for attempting to secure in place a particular (if precarious) configuration of population and security.     

Violent conflict and economic growth: Some time-series evidence

This paper uses time-series methods to examine interrelationships between growth and violent conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. Results show bidirectional causalities, but the key determinant of conflict risk is prior conflict experience, not fluctuations in economic growth.     

In the Space between Exception and Integration: The Kokang Borderlands on the Periphery of China and Myanmar

In 2015, the isolated border region of Kokang in Myanmar experienced armed conflict reported around the world. Most of the estimated 100,000 refugees from the conflict crossed the border to China, while hostilities continued for six months. Unlike other ethnic minorities fighting Myanmar’s government forces all along the extensive, mountainous border with China, the Kokang is largely of Han Chinese origin with a well established and nurtured relationship with China. Based on 458 questionnaires and interviews, media reports and official government releases, this article explores the varying imaginaries of territory, security and geopolitics of distant Kokang, from refugees now in China, Chinese from adjacent Yunnan and other provinces, as well as analysts viewing the conflict from afar. The study offers a lens for border studies to view the multi-scalar and extended geopolitics of nation states and their peripheral sub-national components. Specifically, the article addresses the changing role of the border under conditions of conflict and security enhancement and the malleable definition of borderlands territory. The study reveals how borders are utilised creatively by territorial inhabitants, their neighbours and their governments, how borders work in remote places, and how cross-border culture operates even in conflict situations to mediate borders. It enlarges our understanding of evolving borders in the space between exception and integration emerging in simultaneous globalisation and localisation.     

Did rainfall shocks cause civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa? The implications of data revisions

In their seminal paper, Miguel et al. (2004) found that negative rainfall shocks (measured as negative year-on-year rainfall growth) had caused civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa over the 1981–1999 period. Since then, the rainfall and conflict data they used had undergone multiple revisions. We show that rainfall shocks are no longer statistically significant for civil conflict when the revised data are used. This is true whether we employ a different functional form for rainfall, extend the sample to include more recent observations, use longer lags for rainfall shocks, employ dynamic panel regression, or panel regressions that take into account of cross-sectional dependence. Using rainfall shocks as instruments for growth, we also find that growth is insignificant for civil conflict if the revised data are used. Upon further investigation, we find that updates in the rainfall and conflict data for one or a few countries may alone cause rainfall shocks to lose statistical significance.     

Damaging democracy? Security provision and turnout in Afghan elections†

In emerging democracies, elections are encouraged as a route to democratization. However, not only does violence often threaten these elections, but citizens often view as corrupt the security forces deployed to combat violence. We examine the effects of such security provision. In Afghanistan's 2010 parliamentary election, polling centers with similar histories of pre‐election violence unintentionally received different deployments of the Afghan National Police, enabling identification of police's effects on turnout. Using data from the universe of polling sites and various household surveys, data usually unavailable in conflict settings, we estimate increases in police presence decreased voter turnout by an average of 30%. Our results adjudicate between competing theoretical mechanisms through which security forces could affect turnout, and show behavior is not driven by voter anticipation of election‐day violence. This highlights a pitfall for building government legitimacy via elections in weakly institutionalized and conflict‐affected states.     

Short Changing the Value of Democracy for Economic Development in Africa

Official donor policy towards Africa seems to be informed by the twin requirements of alleviating poverty on the one hand and ensuring respect for human rights and democratization on the other. In practice, when these interests conflict, as they usually do in Africa, donors tend to choose to continue supporting dictatorships, arguing that economic development will eventually lead to democratization. This paper argues that this faulty reasoning is a product of modernization theory that has had undue influence in western policy circles. Based on a broad survey of the literature, the paper shows that there is no theoretical or empirical basis for the claim that authoritarian regimes would provide better economic performance than democracies in general and particularly in Africa. Furthermore, available evidence suggests that the lack of democratization (defined broadly to include the substance of democracy such as government accountability and basic freedoms in addition to meaningful democratic elections) is a key constraint on economic and social development in Africa. Finally, the paper argues that even when the empirical case to establish a definite causal relationship between democratization and development cannot be ascertained, a very strong case can be made for prioritizing democratization for the long term societal transformation of the continent.     

Short Changing the Value of Democracy for Economic Development in Africa

Official donor policy towards Africa seems to be informed by the twin requirements of alleviating poverty on the one hand and ensuring respect for human rights and democratization on the other. In practice, when these interests conflict, as they usually do in Africa, donors tend to choose to continue supporting dictatorships, arguing that economic development will eventually lead to democratization. This paper argues that this faulty reasoning is a product of modernization theory that has had undue influence in western policy circles. Based on a broad survey of the literature, the paper shows that there is no theoretical or empirical basis for the claim that authoritarian regimes would provide better economic performance than democracies in general and particularly in Africa. Furthermore, available evidence suggests that the lack of democratization (defined broadly to include the substance of democracy such as government accountability and basic freedoms in addition to meaningful democratic elections) is a key constraint on economic and social development in Africa. Finally, the paper argues that even when the empirical case to establish a definite causal relationship between democratization and development cannot be ascertained, a very strong case can be made for prioritizing democratization for the long term societal transformation of the continent.     

Positivist Climate Conflict Research: A Critique

In recent years a large body of work has emerged that uses a positivist epistemology and quantitative methods to assess the likely conflict impacts of global climate change. This article advances a critique of this positivist climate conflict research programme, identifying within it three serial shortcomings. It contends, first, that the correlations identified by this research are specious, since they always rest upon coding and causal assumptions which range from the arbitrary to the untenable. It argues, second, that even if the correlations identified within this research were significant and meaningful, they would still not constitute a sound basis for making predictions about the conflict impacts of climate change. And it submits, third, that this research programme reflects and reproduces an ensemble of Northern stereotypes, ideologies and policy agendas. A departure from positivist method is required, the article contends, if we are to get close to thinking through the wide-ranging political and conflict implications of the human transformation of the global climate.