Understanding War and Peace

This chapter explores the relationships between environmental stresses, natural resource shortages, and violent conflict. It describes ideas such as tragedy of the commons, carrying capacity, and common pool resources, as well as Malthusian theories. It also explains how environmental stresses can affect various kinds of conflict, through dynamics such as states sharing transboundary water resources clashing over maritime assets such as fishing and petrochemical reserves; resource shortages fueling conflicts over distribution among substate populations; and shortages causing internal migration, in turn fueling "sons of the soil" conflicts. It also describes how state capacity, rural economies, and groupness can affect the connection between environmental stresses and conflict. The chapter discusses how conflict can in turn exacerbate environmental stresses, and pays special attention to the consequences of climate change for conflict. The chapter applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study on the relationship between drought and conflict, and a case study on the role of drought in causing the Syrian Civil War.