ECSP invited Homer-Dixon, Peluso, and Watts to engage in a dialogue about how Violent Environments characterized Homer-Dixon’s work as well as the future of environmental security research.
The Robert J. Pelosky, Jr. Distinguished Speaker Series, The Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
What am I trying to say in The Ingenuity Gap? What are the book’s key points?
Most generally, the book argues that in many aspects of our lives we’re producing immense problems for ourselves far faster than we’re solving them. We’re embedded in a set of enormously complex, tightly interlinked systems — economic, political, technological, and ecological. We don’t really understand how these systems work, so we can’t manage them effectively.
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.
with Robin Bienenstock | The current crisis in international markets highlights inadequacies in the way economists and other analysts think about the global economy.
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.
Peter Gizewski and Thomas Homer-Dixon | This paper examines the contribution of environmental scarcity to violent conflict in Pakistan. It argues that scarcity is never the sole cause of Pakistan’s social conflict.
Professor Marc Levy of Princeton University has published several critiques of recent scholarship on environmental security, including one in International Security. Thomas Homer-Dixon responds to his comments.
Kimberley Kelly and Thomas Homer-Dixon | The achievement of limited autonomy for Palestinians in Gaza and Jericho in 1993 engendered hope for peace in the Middle East, yet violence persists. The links between environmental scarcity and conflict are complex, but in Gaza, water scarcity has clearly aggravated socioeconomic conditions.
