"Environmental Conflict" and the Social Life of Environmental Security Discourse

Abstract

The concept "environmental conflict" has enjoyed increasing popularity within environmental discourses, both as a focal point of interdisciplinary research efforts and as a buzzword within general discussions concerning international security both in the U.S. and Europe. Though the concept has become a part the "master narrative" of environmentalism, its uncritical application to conflict settings has the potential to misdirect the attention of conflict mediators and policy makers. In this article the author traces the contours of environmental security discourse, while critiquing environmental conflict models. Highlighting a comparative study of three resource-related outbreaks of collective violence, the author finds that in none of the cases compared—neither the Zapatista Rebellion of Chiapas, Mexico, the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajas, in Para, Brazil, nor the "Guinea Fowl" War of Northern Region, Ghana—can simple resource scarcity be implicated as a cause of violence. In contrast to current anthropological understandings of resource-related violence, environmental conflict models are unable to take into account the social and cultural nature of resource conflicts, including the roles that social histories, symbolically-mediated perception, and local political economies play in the outbreak of violence. Given both its inadequacies and policy importance, anthropologists could make useful interventions as participants in the developing environmental security discourse. [discourse, environmentalism, violence, environmental conflict, political ecology]