International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (12 page)
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Authors: Christopher S. Browning
From a traditional perspective environmental security is often reduced to an emphasis on securing access to resources and on how environmental changes and stresses may pose threats to national security. The issue is most dramatically framed by considering how increasing scarcity may provoke future conflicts as states feel compelled to fight to secure access to their share of the global resource pie.
Increasing scarcity is being driven by three key dynamics. First, as the world’s population increases greater demands are being made on the Earth’s resources. In 2012 the world’s population reached seven billion, with the UN estimating it will top nine billion by 2050. Such an increase poses obvious problems concerning how to meet people’s basic needs, let alone provide them with a reasonable level of welfare. The second cause of scarcity compounds this problem and concerns increasing levels of global economic output, projected by some to quadruple over the next fifty years. Thus, while economic growth and the emergence of consumer cultures in the world’s most populated
countries, India and China, may lift people out of poverty it also creates additional demands on planetary resources. This feeds into the third issue of environmental degradation, which is that to feed this increasing population and provide for the economic growth needed to stave off poverty, the expropriation of land for human activities (agriculture, housing, industry) is increasing. For example, in 2010 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that between 2000 and 2010 13 million hectares of forest were lost, most converted for agricultural use, with an area the size of Costa Rica disappearing every year. Deforestation not only impacts on biodiversity, but combined with systematic overexploitation it enhances rates of land degradation, which makes feeding the global population harder. For example, in Haiti, as a result of rapid population growth, unsound agricultural practices, and the chopping of wood for fuel, the area of forested land has decreased from about 60 per cent in the 1920s to about 2 per cent today. In consequence, no longer protected from heavy rains, soil erosion has undermined agricultural productivity, with the country prone to food shortages and increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events (
Figure 8
).
Underlying such concerns about scarcity are predictions most famously articulated by the political economist Thomas Malthus. In an influential essay published in 1789 Malthus argued that population growth always outstrips increases in food supply. At critical junctures, and to restore the necessary equilibrium between supply and demand, the global population is culled by epidemics, famines, and wars. Understood this way, questions of scarcity can easily foster Darwinian mindsets emphasizing the survival of the fittest, and which in International Relations has resulted in widespread predictions that resource scarcities will result in conflicts.
Such conflicts, however, may take different forms. Most evocative is the idea of inter-state ‘resource wars’, the idea being that powerful states will use their military might to defend or enhance their slice of the global resource pie. One example of such logic at play was President Jimmy Carter’s assertion in 1980 that the USA was prepared to use military force to prevent an outside power gaining control of the Persian Gulf region, owing to the vital importance of the region’s oil reserves in meeting US energy needs (see
Box 3
). For its critics American policy towards the Middle East ever since, and even in the context of the post-2001 War on Terror, only makes sense if seen within this strategic context.
8. The stark contrast of Haiti’s landscape (left) on the Haiti/Dominican Republic border
However, with the economic rise of China great power competition over resources is also increasingly evident in Africa, as China seeks to safeguard its continued economic growth by acquiring mining and extraction rights. In contrast to the West, which when seeking such deals typically imposes free trade agreements and requirements designed to protect human rights and intellectual property, and which are often viewed as having neo-colonial overtones, China imposes few demands on its African partners, instead offering to build extensive infrastructure projects in return for mining concessions. While a direct conflict between China and the USA/West in Africa is unlikely, possibilities for proxy wars as each side seeks to further their influence are not unthinkable.
Box 3 Energy Security
Debates about resource scarcity invariably raise questions about the need to secure sufficient and affordable energy supplies upon which modern industrial economies depend. In this respect, international security agendas have become preoccupied with two central issues related to production and supply.
Regarding production the concern is that with an increasing global population and the industrialization of China and India, demand for fossil fuels (and in particular oil) might ultimately outstrip supply. While oil consumption is widely projected to rise steadily from around 89 mbd (million barrels per day) as of 2011 to over 110 mbd by the 2030s, analysts disagree as to whether oil production levels have actually peaked, are about to peak, or simply are unlikely to keep up. Such disagreements reflect difficulties in measuring available supplies, disagreements as to the industry’s ability to exploit new finds, many of which are located in extreme environments, and disagreements about projected likely future finds.
For energy importing states ensuring the security of supply routes presents a different set of problems, which have gained prominence in the context of the actions of Somali pirates targeting oil tankers and the fact that supply routes present easy targets for terrorist groups. Indeed, for the West, the fact that the Middle East remains a key source of its petroleum supplies is of particular concern, as oil installations and supply routes have become highly symbolic targets for opponents of the West’s influence in the region—not least resentful of the West’s support for authoritarian regimes in the name of energy security. In Saudi Arabia, for example, this has seen attacks launched against Western oil workers and oil processing plants.
Supply-side vulnerabilities, however, can also result from producer countries using their energy exports as a tool for political and economic influence. For instance, ever since its formation in the 1960s the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose twelve member states collectively hold around 80 per cent of all proven oil reserves, has been accused of restricting supplies to manipulate prices. Similarly, throughout the early 2000s Russia was also accused of using energy as a diplomatic weapon in its relations with several post-Soviet states, first by raising prices and later by temporarily suspending supplies in response to unpaid debts.
Various options are available to tackle energy vulnerabilities. Enhancing self-sufficiency is one approach but can be controversial, especially when it results in the exploitation of fossil fuel deposits whose extraction releases high levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or destroys pristine natural environments—Canada’s exploitation of its massive tar sands deposits being a case in point. Similarly, geopolitical disputes are also emerging as states make contending claims to sovereignty over seabed resources. While the Arctic provides one example, Argentina’s dispute with the UK over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands/Malvinas is also increasingly being played out in a context of oil explorations of the deep ocean seabed. Self-sufficiency, however, can also be sought through developing renewable sources of energy, while some problems can be moderated by avoiding over-reliance on single suppliers and diversifying the sorts of energy imported.
However, while inter-state conflicts may be possible, it is often suggested that resource scarcities are actually more likely to provoke a range of transnational and internal battles. At the transnational level this can be seen in how environmental degradation and poverty are undermining people’s livelihoods and becoming significant push factors for large-scale population movements. For example, the desertification of marginal lands bordering the Sahara Desert has contributed to migration from Africa to Europe, which in many European countries is perceived as socially, economically, and politically destabilizing (see
Chapter 8
). However, resource scarcities may also spark internal conflicts stoked by the inequitable distribution of resources within particular societies. The point is that resource scarcity affects people in different ways. For some scarcity can even be an opportunity. For example, food shortages in parts of Africa have enabled wholesalers to profiteer by withholding food deliveries until prices rise. And what goes for food goes for other commodities. While the wealthy may be able to afford such increases the effects on the poor can be devastating and a considerable cause of resentment and conflict.
However, while some people worry about scarcity others suggest that resource abundance can be equally problematic. The argument is that in conditions of scarcity people often need to pull together and may be too busy trying to survive to engage in political activism. In contrast, conditions of abundance can foster complacency and greed, undermine the collective spirit, and may provide incentives for those disaffected to take action to secure their share.
The exploitation of Nigeria’s oil deposits in the Niger Delta provides a good example of this ‘resource curse’ in operation. Nigeria’s oil reserves are extensive and since the discovery of
commercially viable deposits at the end of the 1950s have provided the government with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Despite this Nigeria remains plagued by poverty. In the Delta local unemployment is rampant, fisheries and agricultural land are polluted from widespread and frequent oil spills, while little has been invested in education, welfare, or economic diversification. For critics, being recipient to tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues a year has meant the government and the political and military elite have lost connection with the broader population and feel little need to devote resources to development. In short, oil money has created a democratic deficit in which the ruling regime is able to use patronage and corruption to buy off its opponents.
While the oil companies and government make large profits from the Delta’s oil reserves the various local ethnic groups have received limited compensation and feel exploited. The result has been the emergence of rebel groups who attack the assets of the state and oil companies, kidnap workers, and illegally siphon off oil from pipelines to the scale of hundreds of thousands of barrels a year. The government response has typically entailed military crackdowns, often including human rights abuses, arbitrary killings and arrests, and collective punishment, such as by destroying villages. In 2009 an amnesty was agreed by rebel groups and the level of violence in the region declined. However, in the absence of significant change in respect of the distribution of the region’s oil wealth the peace is precarious and kidnappings and attacks on pipelines still continue.
Whether we are talking scarcity or abundance the idea that access to resources can lead to conflict has grabbed the imagination of strategists and politicians alike, with one result being a proliferation of books, articles, and reports warning of
the dangers and the likely flashpoints. Critics, however, argue that claims about impending resource wars and the proliferation of metaphors describing how states are ‘racing’, ‘grabbing’, and ‘scrambling’ to secure access to the dwindling supply of what is left are often problematic and potentially limiting in terms of the solutions to problems of resource scarcity that are identified.
The central criticism is that proclamations about resource conflicts are overly deterministic and potentially self-fulfilling. The assumption is that scarcity itself entails an inevitable logic that brings out the selfish and competitive instinct in people and states, and is one that ultimately rests on realist assumptions about the imperatives of international anarchy and the problems of interpretation inherent in the security dilemma. For critics such a view is problematic because it is fundamentally depoliticizing. This is to say that if there is a conflict over resources—whether in respect of their scarcity or abundance—then this is ultimately the result of failures to reach a compromise or cooperative settlement over how best to use those resources. As highlighted by Jon Barnett:
Politicians and military leaders might wish to present war in Darwinian or Malthusian terms as a fight over subsistence needs, but this ‘state of nature’ rhetoric is a pragmatic device that denies responsibility for peaceful action, and justifies violence in lieu of meaningful dialogue.
Beyond this, though, it is also important to recognize that tensions over the use and distribution of particular resources are also usually embedded within a broader set of political, economic, cultural, religious, or social disputes, further feeding into such disagreements and rarely their underlying cause.