Environmental conflict and environmental determinism: The relative importance of social and natural factors

Many contemporary discussions of the role of environment in the causation and escalation of violent conflict treat it in a fairly deterministic fashion. Natural resources are axiomatically taken to be scarce and therefore the object of struggle between individuals, societies, and states. The invocation of 'environmental determinism' as a means of predicting resource-centered conflicts, and formulating strategies in response, is hardly a new phenomenon. The great geopoliticians of the 19th and the early 20th century engaged in similar exercises. In their work, they took little cognizance of the importance of social factors in driving conflict and thereby contributed to the emergence of competitive foreign policies that, in many ways, became self-fulfilling prophecy. In this chapter, I examine and critique this approach to 'environmental conflict and security', providing two examples of deterministic discourses of environment and conflict, one based on 'water wars', the other on population. Finally, I argue that most discussions of 'environment and security' are rooted in these types of 'naturalized' discourses and that we need to 'denaturalize' such notions and pay greater attention to social factors.