A Coming Anarchy? Pathways from Climate Change to Violent Conflict in East Africa
Publisher: Stockholm University
Author(s): Sebastian van Baalen and Malin Mobjork
Date: 2016
Topics: Climate Change, Programming, Renewable Resources
The warming of the climate system is unequivocal according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and will have a strong impact on the security of humans and states alike. In the past half-century the climate system has changed in unprecedented ways and future climate change and variability will include long-lasting alterations to all components of the climate system. With the warming of the climate system and the recognition of the implications that this has for the availability and quality of renewable natural resources, scholars and policy-makers fear that the impacts of climate change will also increase the risk of violent conflict and affect their dynamics. However, despite the rather large amount of studies in the field, scholars have yet to move beyond a number of interesting patterns to establish results that remain robust across studies. While this is partly a reflection of the inherent challenge of observing links between uncertain structural factors such as climate change and rare social outcomes such as violent conflict, the field has also been repeatedly criticised for a lack of sound theoretical development. This has been exacerbated by the practice of excluding qualitative research from state of the art reviews. The purpose of this report is to fill this gap by contributing to a better theoretical understanding of the linkages between climate change and violent conflict through consulting the combined quantitative-qualitative literature.