project on environmental scarcities, state capacity, & civil violence

Project Directors

Thomas Homer-Dixon – Principal Investigator

Jeffrey Boutwell – Associate Executive Officer, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Project Case Study Authors

China
Elizabeth Economy is a Fellow for China at the Council on Foreign Relations. She also co-chairs the Woodrow Wilson Center working group on China and the Environment. Previously she taught Chinese foreign policy and international environmental politics at the University of Washington. Her recent publications include a forthcoming book with Miranda Shreurs, The Internationalization of Environmental Politics (Cambridge Press, 1997). Dr. Economy received her B.A. with Honors from Swarthmore College with a major in Political Science and a minor in Russian. She received her A.M. in Political Science from Stanford, University, and her Ph.D. in that same subject from the University of Michigan.

India
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Valerie Percival, University of Toronto
received her Bachelor’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto and her Master’s degree in Conflict Analysis from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa. She has worked at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) as the lead researcher for the Preliminary Project on Environment, Poverty and Conflict. She was also a research associate at the University of Toronto and produced case studies for the Project on Environment, Population and Security and the State Capacity Project.

Indonesia
Charles Victor Barber is a Senior Associate in the Biological Resources and Institutions Program of the World Resources Institute (WRI). He has worked on Indonesian environmental issues for over a decade and lived there for three years in the late 1980s. He has authored numerous publications including Breaking the Logjam: Obstacles to Forest Policy Reform in Indonesia and the United States (1994); Tiger by the Tail?: Reorienting Biodiversity Conservation and Development in Indonesia (1995); and Eye of the Tiger: Conservation Politics and Policy on Sumatra’s Last Rainforest Frontier (forthcoming). He was also a principal writer of the Global Biodiversity Strategy(1992), published by WRI, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other international agencies. Since 1994 Barber has been based in the Philippines, where he manages a range of WRI projects in Southeast Asia and serves on the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for the Philippine Environment. He received his Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, J.D. and M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Institutions

The project is jointly administered by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at University College of the University of Toronto.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an international learned society chartered in 1780 “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Today, the Academy is composed of 3,300 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members representing the whole of the academic world and, beyond it, the arts, business, government, and the learned professions. Through its multidisciplinary study projects, the Academy addresses major issues of both scholarly and public concern including arms control, ethnic and racial conflict, environmental hazards, and the changing nature of higher education, science, and scholarship. Results of its work are often published in its quarterly journal, Daedalus, and in numerous individual volumes. The Academy headquarters is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with regional centers at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Irvine

Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Toronto
Founded in 1827, the University of Toronto has become the largest university in Canada. It is widely recognized as the country’s leading research institution, having the largest and most diverse faculty and the premier system of research libraries.

The Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, established in 1985, is an interdisciplinary teaching and research program in University College. The program moves beyond the traditional study of International Relations by examining the causes of violent strife both among and within countries, including war, revolution, insurgency, and ethnic clashes. It emphasizes practical knowledge, the interdisciplinary nature of peace and conflict, and the importance of bringing leading-edge research directly into the classroom.