Reconsidering Resource Conflict: Scarcity, Slow Violence, and Selby’s “Eco-determinist crisis rhetoric”

Keywords: Environmental conflict, environmental peacebuilding, climate security, food-energy-water networks, slow violence
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of key themes in resource conflict scholarship, and it considers the underlying influence of scarcity-focused perspectives. The roots of this dominant focus on scarcity go back to Thomas Malthus’s writing during the Industrial Revolution, yet this approach remains at the center of mainstream conversations and headlines about how scarce and threatened resources will motivate violence. The approach of slow violence offers the possibility to think and act critically about systems of exploitation that have shaped current human-environment geographies from national parks to climate change science. Examples of research on technologies in forest management, militarized conservation efforts, and the growing focus on managing food-energy-water networks illustrate why critical engagement with these processes is particularly important. Growing interest in environmental peacebuilding holds potential promise for developing more equitable and just relationships with environmental systems, yet even these proposals warrant careful attention for the geographies they could create or harm. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of Jan Selby’s “Eco-determinist crisis rhetoric” as a foil to entrenched Malthusian thinking and a means to more attentive work on geographies of peace and conflict as they relate to human-environment interactions.