The Seasonal Influence of Meteorological & Physical Factors on the Onset of Violent Conflict
Open Access
- Author:
- Landis, Steven Tyler
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 12, 2013
- Committee Members:
- Douglas William Lemke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Douglas William Lemke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Xun Cao, Committee Member
Philip A Schrodt, Committee Member
Jerry Y Harrington, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Violent Conflict
Climate Change
Ecoviolence
Political Science
International Relations
Seasonality - Abstract:
- Despite the renewed popular interest in the effects of environmental change on the risk of violent conflict, careful theoretical analysis and subsequent empirical testing of these relationships remain elusive. I argue that our understanding of the debate over issues of resource scarcity and violent conflict have reached a theoretical standstill, which is compounded by an over reliance on poorly measured indicators that have little temporal variation and inconsistent spatial domains. This makes the search for any statistical relationships ambiguous because it is subsequently confounded by incorrect theoretical expectations, which anticipate that these relationships remain consistent across different forms of violent conflict. I address this issue by building a series of new environmental scarcity datasets, which are measured in country-months, and then systematically test for evidence of the ecoviolence theory across various forms of violent conflict. My findings show that the risks of violent conflict, as they relate to these disaggregated measures environmental scarcity, differ substantially and are contingent on both the environmental indicator used and the relationship tested. These results suggest that some of the alarmist interpretations of environmental change are significantly overstated.