Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
affecting international stability and consequently present new challenges to U.S.
strategy’ (USA 1994: 1).
Despite its influence on US government thinking the approach of framing
environmental scarcity as a military security concern has not been without its critics.
The empirical evidence linking environmental degradation and political conflict is,
by Homer-Dixon’s own admission, not straightforward, prompting scepticism as to
whether other variables are the real causes of conflicts in situations where environmental
scarcity can be demonstrated. Smith, for example, points out that the Senegal
River conflict was more about ethnic and class conflict than access to river water
(Smith 1994). Levy criticizes the Homer-Dixon-led research on the grounds that the
fact that only LDCs are chosen as case studies is a tacit admission that general
poverty, rather than environmental change, is the root cause of the conflicts analysed.
it is difficult to imagine how conflict in any developing country could not
involve renewable resources. Developing country elites fight over renewable
resources for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks – that’s where
the money is.
(Levy 1995: 45)
The environmental scarcity literature focuses on the competition for nonrenewable
resources as a new, destabilizing trend in post-Cold War international
relations in a similar vein to Rogers’ description of 1990s ‘prologue wars’ over
renewable and non-renewable resources (Rogers 2000: 79). Just as it can be shown
that resource wars are nothing new, neither are conflicts with a non-renewable
resources dimension. The 1969 ‘Football War’ between El Salvador and Honduras,
despite its linkage to a volatile World Cup qualifying match between the two national
sides, echoed the Senegal River dispute in that its main cause was ethnic tension
created by migration and its effects on land rights. Even two of the wealthiest and
most democratically mature states, Iceland and the UK, had a major diplomatic
dispute with a limited military dimension over fishing rights in the 1970s ‘Cod Wars’.
In respect to the much vaunted coming of ‘water wars’, Gleick points out that such
conflicts go back 5000 years and lists a number of them including an ancient
‘dambuster’ raid by Alexander the Great of Greece against Persia between 355 and
323 BC (Gleick 1994). If the focus is narrowed to domestic upheaval then it is probably
fair to suggest that most popular revolutions have had questions relating to access
to productive land at their core. Of course access to resources causes political
upheaval; it was ever thus.
Not only are ‘water wars’ nothing new, they barely register in an analysis of
modern military history. Despite a spate of publications warning of the likelihood
of conflicts fought to secure freshwater supplies, particularly in the arid and volatile
Middle East (Starr 1991, Bullock and Adel 1993), no war of this kind was fought
in the twentieth century and it has played little part in Arab–Israeli hostilities
(Libiszewski 1995). There is little evidence that fighting over resources is in any way
a distinguishing feature of the contemporary world.
Securing access to resources, it could be argued, is becoming more critical
when parts of the world are depleting life-supporting non-renewable resources, such
as in the process of desertification, but responsible management and cooperation is
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