Some events shatter the order of things — the routines and regularities of our lives that we rely upon for our sense of safety and our sense, most importantly, of who we are and where we are going. Some events change our perceptions forever. The world never looks the same again afterward. Suddenly, the reliable landmarks of life seem strange and distorted — recognizable, yet simultaneously weirdly unrecognizable.
The proliferation of light weapons is seriously impeding political and economic reforms in developing countries from Congo to Colombia, the author argues, and the resulting downward spiral could threaten U.S. national security.
with Daniel Schwartz and Tom Deligiannis | The environment, population, and conflict thesis remains central to current environment and security debates. During the 1990s, an explosion of scholarship and policy attention was devoted to unraveling the linkages among the three variables.
Edward Barbier and Thomas Homer-Dixon | Endogenous growth models have revived the debate over the role of technological innovation in economic growth and development. The consensus view is that institutional and policy failures prevent poor countries from generating or using new technological ideas to reap greater economic opportunities. However, this view omits the important contribution of natural-resource degradation and depletion to institutional instability
Valerie Percival and Thomas Homer-Dixon | The causal relationship between environmental scarcities – the scarcity of renewable resources – and the outbreak of violent conflict is complex. This article analyses the link between South Africa’s environmental scarcity and violent conflict.
Valerie Percival and Thomas Homer-Dixon | On April 6, 1994, President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane exploded in the skies above the Kigali region of Rwanda. Violence gripped the country. Between April and August of 1994, as many as 1 million people were killed and more than 2 million people became refugees.
This paper shows that some commonly advocated methodological principles of modern political science are inappropriate for the study of complex ecological-political systems. It also provides conceptual tools for thinking about the causal roles of environmental and demographic factors, and it discusses various strategies for hypothesis and inference testing.
At a meeting in Stockholm this past August, Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank’s Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development, released a new report on global water issues.
As human population and material consumption increase in coming decades, scarcities of natural resources will increase in some regions. Will societies be able to adapt?
Within the next fifty years, the planet’s human population will probably pass nine billion, and global economic output may quintuple. Largely as a result, scarcities of renewable resources will increase sharply. The total area of high-quality agricultural land will drop, as will the extent of forests and the number of species they sustain.
