Conflict, vulnerability and resilience

Conflict, in its overall sense, is an umbrella-term which can cover anything from interpersonal disagreements to total war scenarios. When considering this term in a planetary security framework, ‘conflict’ in the first place refers to ‘armed conflict’. In the same vein, climate change as a conflict factor becomes the subject of foreign and defense policies. Moreover, in developing nations with inefficient systems of governance, armed conflict and climate change could also be the subject of development policies. Nonetheless, when discussing the economics of planetary security, the term ‘conflict’ cannot be limited to ‘armed conflict’ only. Rather, the potential effects of climate change on the global economic system as a whole should also be considered. In expanding the definition of ‘conflict’ to include ‘economic conflict’, the term enters the realm of international economic policies.

New forms of armed conflict

In looking at armed conflict, balancing the scale of conflict with the complexities of modern warfare is necessary. This approach necessitates an openness for both traditional and non-traditional considerations, such as the inclusive fourth-generation warfare theory first introduced by William S. Lind in 1989 and later expanded upon by Colonel Thomas X. Hammes.[6] It comprises the various actors involved in modern warfare today, digressing further from the centralized model inherent in the 20^th century. Fourth-generation theory builds upon a historical framework of military engagements and addresses the shift between traditional interstate warfare and present unconventional non-state types of warfare. The former focuses on a centralized model where the state has a complete monopoly on violence. Alternatively, unconventional types of warfare comprise a more complex and decentralized form of conflict in which the appearance of non-state actors has changed the nature of conflict. The insurgency in Syria is a key example of such a contemporary, complex scenario, as it includes multiple conflict areas and prolonged conflicts between insurgent groups and coalitions of both national and international forces, as well as conflict by non-traditional means, such as terrorist attacks, covert operations and economic pressure. This supports the inclusion of both the Terrorism Index and Best Estimate Death Toll in Layer One’s subdomain on Security (see section five).

Economic conflict

Economic conflict can be induced by environmental stress by either contributing to changes in the global economic system which impact the system as a whole (e.g a ‘collapse’ of global banking infrastructure) or by influencing the existing balance within a state’s economy. The latter includes how environmental stress induces measures like trade embargoes, boycotts, sanctions, tariff discrimination, the freezing of capital assets, the suspension of aid, the prohibition of investment and other capital flows, and expropriation.[7] In this respect, economic conflict runs the risk of being a precursor to armed conflict.

Conflict vulnerability and resilience

‘Vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ to conflict remain important to the discussion of the economics of planetary security. Vulnerability is defined here in general terms as “[t]he propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected”[8] and resilience as “[the] degree to which a system rebounds, recoups, or recovers from a stimulus.”[9] This report examines factors that make nations ‘vulnerable’ or ‘resilient’ to conflict. As such, these two terms can be regarded as their inverse: nations that address the factors that make them less vulnerable to conflict by way of policies become more resilient to such conflict. Yet, building conflict resilience might encompass more than only addressing vulnerability factors on a national level. In particular, when looking at economic conflict, building resilience might also involve taking measures on a supranational level in order to prevent systemic risks induced by conflict factors that include climate change.

Factors contributing to conflict

Conflicts are based around an asymmetrical fulfilment of needs and interests between two or more parties. These perceived injustices or unmet needs will often be based on disputes over resources or disagreements over political, ideological, religious, ethnic or cultural differences between parties. Contemporary scholars such as Collier, Coleman, Fetherston and Nordstrom[10] have attempted to categorize these needs and interests into distributional and identity-related issues.[11] Distributional issues are directly tied to fair resource allocation, whereas identity-related issues are typically based around colliding interests between parties that often have strong religious, cultural, ideological or ethnic divisions. Figure three elucidates the importance of distributional and identity-related issues as underlying causes of conflict. This distinction is used here to allow policymakers to understand the potential distributional and identity-related issues inherent in the monitor. For instance, Ethnical Fractionalization and Factionalism in Layer One could be taken as an instantiation of the likelihood of conflict to be caused by identity-related issues. Distributional issues can be inferred from the water, land and precipitation subdomains in Layer Two.

Alone, these underlying causes are insufficient to trigger a full-scale conflict, but they will typically create higher levels of tension between parties and amplify the overall risk of conflict. Typically, intervening causes of a systemic or external nature serving as conflict catalysts will be made clearer.[12]

Several research organizations – such as the Centre of Systemic Peace, IHS Markit, the EU’s Conflict Risk Index and Visions of Humanity - have developed conflict monitoring systems that distinguish between a variety of factors contributing to armed conflict in general.[16] The detailed Conflict Vulnerability Monitor used in this report is built by the Hague Centre of Strategic Studies[17] and takes into account a large number of security, political, social and demographic factors, providing a holistic picture of the forces which underpin policy making with regard to conflict.[18]

Climate change as a conflict factor

Environmental stress has overtime become increasingly interpreted as a systemic factor which contributes to conflict.[19] Such stress is not necessarily attributed to climate change alone. Correlations between resource availability, management and extraction processes as prime examples of potential conflict risks are evident. Here, the mismanagement of resources has a tendency to catalyze distributional issues involving government inefficiency, societal divides and increased authoritarianism - issues that all raise concerns for human security.[20] Furthermore, potentially rich national endowments in resources in weak states might contribute to conflict risk, as the wide academic debate around the ‘resource curse’ has shown.[21] The relationship between climate change and conflict is even more complex than the aforementioned suggests. In a limited number of cases, environmental stress has even contributed to conflict mitigation or resolution, for instance in the case of the 1994 drought in Mozambique, which weakened the Renamo rebels and expedited the peace process.[22]

Over recent years, discussions regarding conflict risk and environmental stress have predominantly focused on the potential effects of climate change. Such effects, while traditionally understood on a domestic level, have increasingly become framed as a global concern both on the basis of their consequences and the mitigative measures that need to be levelled against them. Similarly, policymakers and academics increasingly recognize climate change as a threat multiplier. This has been reflected in many recent publications and reports that have sought to analyze the threats posed by climate-induced environmental stress. Rüttinger et al. (2015) for instance identify several critical climate-fragility risks that pose threats to the stability of states in the decades ahead, ranging from local resource competition to the unintended effects of climate policies.[23] Based on these risks, the report considers 19 nations, most of them situated in Africa, as most vulnerable to climate change as a conflict factor. However this analysis is primarily focused on the direct impacts of climate change and does not look into the indirect contribution of climate change to conflict via the international economic system; nor does it examine in more detail the potential adverse impacts of low-carbon and climate change policies to international security.

The emphasis in this new branch of research is generally on the identification of new vulnerabilities, the aggravation of existing risks and the subsequent contributions to the onset of instability and conflict as a result of climate change.[24] This research ultimately stresses that the threat posed by climate change can contribute to conflict in vulnerable nations by enhancing both the risk and the intensity of conflicts, without necessarily being the direct cause of them.[25] Such effects have been noticed for instance in the ongoing conflicts in the MENA and Sahel regions. This puts vulnerable states at risk of repeating a history similar to that of Darfur, Sudan’s westernmost region.[26]