Critical environmental security

The main conclusion that emerges from this review is the stalled evolution of environment-conflict research can be traced to the polemical approaches of critics and advocates of research in the field who have failed to synthesize areas of agreement, and instead focused on points of clarification and rebuttal. [...] The paper begins with a brief review of the projects of the Toronto Group and the Bern-Zurich Group to highlight areas of agreement and divergence in their models, in light of criticisms about the definition of the independent variable. [...] The Toronto Group and the Bern-Zurich Group Concerns about the security implications of human-induced environmental change have a long and contentious history.14 In the 1990s, a number of scholars examining this relationship chose to focus on those areas where both the local environmental relationships were crucial for people’s survival, and the opportunities and capabilities to forestall negative [...] Homer-Dixon hypothesized that environmental scarcities influence the incidence of violent civil conflict through a series of intermediate social effects, like constrained economic productivity, intra- or inter-state migration, the creation and aggravation of group tensions and divi- sions, and the weakening of institutions and the state’s capacity to respond to public needs and effectively deliver [...] To be fair, however, the Toronto Group’s case studies did examine, in varying degrees of thoroughness, the historical patterns of “appropriation and exclusion” which form the basis of distributional scarcities.45 Homer-Dixon also clearly stresses the importance of “ideational factors” for making up the “broad and complex social and psychological context” for the relationship between societies and