CPD 532, Unit 1, sub unit cUnderstanding Natural Resource and Conflict Linkage

General Theoretical PerspectivesPeluso and Watts’ Violent Environments

Critique to (Neo)Malthusian Environmental Security• Revival of (Neo) Malthusianism in 1980s : From Kaplan

to Homer-Dixon (Green security)– Huge influence on American Foreign Policy Making during

Clinton-Gore Era– We (the Clinton Administration) believe that environment is not

simply an irrational but a real threat to our national security. (Madeline Albright, Apr 21, 1994)

• Eco-demographic pressure in ‘dark continent’, endemic to developing countries in the South, creating pictures of overpopulation, undernourishment and diseases, deforestation, soil erosion, water scarcity and drought, mass migration, violent conflict)

• Environmental security research: Intellectual as well as policy practice (state failure task force, NATO)

Critique … cond. • Environmental security: Env scarcity-violent conflict is the most visible form (two

major research projects based in the north)• Closer to the concept of cultural ecology of war:

– War is constructed neither from a conscious decision of its participants nor from structural forces but rather constituted instinctual response to population and resource disequilibria. (Naturalization and depoliticization of war)

• Env scarcity-violence link is flawed:– Privileging resource shortage / scarcity above other initial conditions (scarcity is

assumed a priori to be the trigger for conflict)– Category of scarcity is analytically unusable since it embraces wholly unrelated

processes (E.g. how do supply of resource, demand of resource and distribution of resource come under same analytical categories?)

• Scarcity models operate from an incoherent (and partial) account of environmental transformation or political economy.

• Scarcitysocial effect linkage through capture and marginalization is problematic:– Empirically, – Theoretically (not discussed political economy)– Ingenuity or adaptation concept: biological adaptation, limited to technological innovation

• Problem in genesis of violence:– Process is not discussed– Various form of violence

Violent Environment• Critique and alternative view• Reject: automatic, simplistic linkage between ‘increased env scarcity, ‘decreased

economic activity’ and ‘migration’ that ‘weakens state’ and causes ‘conflict and violence’.

• Accept: Violence as site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and social relations yet connected to larger process of material transformation and power relations

• Specific resource env (tropical forest or oil reserve) and env process (deforestation, conservation) are constituted by and in part constitute, the political economy of access to and control over resources.

• Specification of actor is important: peasants, indigenous people, workers, NGOs, State, Corporations, transnational capital

• Different forms of violence emerge from ‘governmentality’ (Foucault)– How human species and human body become the object of systematic and sustained

political attention!– New sets of operations (technologies) were brought to bear on the functioning of

institutions, the purpose of which were to regulate, normalize and discipline – to forge docile bodies and subjects.

– State and other institutions embrace calculated practices to make social agents behave in specific way.

• Theorization of Violent Environments (Toward Political Ecology of Violence) page 24 of Peluso and Watts; and its application in Sri Lanka (Bohle)

Political ecology of violenceViolent Environments• Political ecology (PE):

– It combines Marxian political economy with cultural studies and new ecology.

– It critiques both, neo-Malthusian and rigid structural Marxists formulations of environmental struggles and conflicts.

– It provides tools for thinking about the conflicts and struggles engendered by the forms of access to and combined over resources.

– Therefore attentiveness to the power relations inherent in defining, controlling and managing nature suggests an alternative way of viewing the link between environment and political action.

– The environment is an arena of contested entitlements, a theater in which conflicts or claims over property, assets, labor, and politics of recognition play themselves out.

– It involves full documentation of differentiated actors (hh, NGOs, social movements, communities, Corporations, state agencies and their institutional networks: How they operate in historically and culturally constituted fields of power.

• Analytical Entry Point: Conjunctures and convergences of CULTURE, POWER and POLITICAL ACTION.

Violent Environments• Use of political ecology to deepen and broaden the

analysis of the theoretical and empirical relationships between violence and the environment.

• Not about searching ‘environmental triggers’ of violent conflict (as done in may environmental security literatures)

• Providing accounts of the ways in shich specific environments, environmental processes, and webs of social relations are central parts of the ways violence is expressed and made expressive: What difference does environmental difference make?

• It moves far beyond identifying certain risk areas based on their certain internal features.

Violent environments• Explored production, enactment and representation of violence against

human in relation to environment (not env scarcity)• Focus on environment in four dimensions:

– Environmental degradation associated with non-renewable resource extraction (including env sacrifice of military-industrial complex)

– Environmental change associated with the human transformation of renewable resources

– Environmental enclosure associated with living space and territory; and– Forms of environmental rehabilitation, conservation and preservation

• Violent environment:– Encompass various environmental uses and forms of extraction, conservation

and rehabilitation– Comprise social causes and consequences of environmental degradation,

rehabilitation and preservation• Particular geo-physical and biological characteristics of the resources and

environments has certain causal efficacy.• But, petroleum, tropical forests possess different properties and commodity

characteristics, aside from their strategic or economic value, that play role in violence and struggles

– Environment and resource must not be overemphasized as to dilute the specific and situated dialectics of environment, social relations and violence.

Violent environment…• Violence:

– Practices (brutal acts) causing direct harm to humans (in physical, symbolic, cultural and emotional terms)

– Violence in environment is constitutive of individual, community, and institutional identities, including those connected with national states.

• State and other institutional forms of coercion, the deployment of terror, and other forms of direct violence against human bodies are complex social practices that to be understood in terms of both actual physical harm and the ways and contexts in which such harm is discussed, represented, circulated, coded, and deployed.

Model of violent environmentsPeluso and Watts (2001)

Violent environment…• Starting point: Relations between users (actors) and nature (humanized

nature and naturalized human): Labor process• Two expressions of political economy: Social relation of production and

social field of power• They give rise to certain environmental process and forms of contentions

(various forms of violence)• No single theory of violence: How causal powers, located in two spaces of

production and power relations, create forms of social mobilization and conflict in specific circumstances!– Why violence occurs in some place, not in others?– Why some factors are more important than others?– Why brutal acts define some conflicts, and not others?

• Violent environment: More inclusive sense of violence and non-violence• Violence: Site specific phenomenon deeply rooted in local histories and

social relations, but also connected to transnational process of material change, political power relations and historical conjuncture. It shapes landscape and livelihoods.

• Contrast to Neo-Malthusians: unqualified notions of population growth or scarcity or both which justify violence by states against their own people!

Political ecology of violence (Bohle and Funfgeld, 2007)

• Elaboration of Peluso and Watts in case of Sri Lanka

• Marriage of violent environment and livelihoods (actor oriented approach)

• Three generation of political ecology:– Ist (1980s): Society-resource dialectics– IInd (Politicized environments and environmental

entitlements (1990s)– IIIrd (Liberation ecologies and violent environments)

Political ecology of violence (Bohle and Funfgeld, 2007)

Bohle and Funfgeld contd…

Violent environments:NOT just about struggles over environments and resources: natural

resources neither finance nor motivate conflict, NOT linked to the scarcity or abundance of natural It refers to:

– the transformation of resource systems under the impact of violence, – the shifts in environmental entitlements, – the politicization of livelihoods, and – the new vulnerabilities created during these processes, including the

exposure, sensitivities and coping capabilities of vulnerable people. • Regimes of violence created by political conflict dtermines and

reinforces both environmental and livelihood change

From theoretical perspectives to real case scenario

• We studied major theoretical perspectives / models (arguments and counter-arguments)

• Now examples from South Asia:– Bangladesh (Ashok Swain)– Nepal (Upreti and Matthew)– Sri Lanka (Bohle and Funfgeld)

Bangladesh – India (Swain)

• Post- independence / partition: huge population growth and food crisis attempts to increase ag production in India (use of river water)

• Industrial expansion use of water and natural resource

• “Large dams are temple of modern India” Nehru huge projects (development and self-reliance)

• Problem in downstream (inside and outside country)• Farakka barrage (neat Indo-Bangladesh / east Pakistan

border) Source of dispute and attempts for negotiation (detail later)

• Diversion of water from Farakka to Calcutta region and impact in Bangladesh (dry-season flow)– Environmental destruction in Bangladesh– Disruption of fishing and navigation

• Salinization of farming soil• Change in ecological (hydrological) system• Decline in agricultural and industrial production• Floods and disaster (rise of river bed by decline in dry season flow)

– Impact in highly populated agrarian societies of Bangladesh: ‘grave crisis’ (in 1976)• Close-down of many industries• Disruption of agriculture and livelihoods (fisherman, labourers, farmers)• Loss due to Farakka withdrawal (USD 3b, 1976-1993)

– Inter-state dispute• Displaced Bangladeshis migrating to India

– Huge out-migration from Farakka affected areas of poor Bangladeshis• Out of 52 Bangladeshi migrants in India 43 were from the affected areas• Many Bangladeshi migrants in Asam and other parts were from SW part of Bangladesh• Silence by Bangladesh government: Muslim from ‘Islamic’ countries are migrating to

‘Hindu’ land

Strong relationship between Farakka withdrawal-led environmental destruction in the SW Bangladesh and displacement and migration of people from that region

• Rise of environmental migration from Bangladesh led to conflict in India– Migrants burdened the receiving regions– Assimilation is not easy and situation worsened in the multi-ethnic society

of India– Perceived / actual scarcity created sense of ‘nativism’– Native-migrant conflict by manipulation of identity by elites (All Asam

Gana Sangram Parishad or AGP and Assam Student Union vs. various groups of migrants)

– Increased strifes in Asam (e.g. Violence between Assamese and Bangladeshi migrants claimed 1700 people in 5 hrs in Feb 1983)

– Assam Minority Liberation Army (AMLA) massacred Hindus in Dec 1992– Impact in National politics: Congress, BJP and Communists (WB)

• Dispute between India and Bangladesh in migrants• Environmental destruction – even that resulting from ‘development

project’ like Farakka barrage – can lead to loss of sources of living, resulting in the mass population movement. These migrants in turn come into conflict with indigenous population in the receiving areas in various parts of India.

Nepal (Matthew and Upreti)• Environmental stress and Demographic change: Underlying

conditions contributing to the decade of insurgency• Only political analysis do not tell much about origin and durability of

civil war:– Rapidly growing youthful population– Extremely unequal society– Large number of undereducated and desperately poor people are

struggling for livelihoods from declining natural resource base– Violent struggle undermining development initiatives, tourism and

conservation effort leading to migration (vicious cycle)• Environmental stress and ppoulation factors have played significant

role in creating the underlying condition for insurgency• However consideration of population and environmental factors is

absent from analyses of Nepal’s conflict

Population and environmental factors in Nepal’s insurgency

• Population factors:– Nepal’s population is young, underemployed, uneducated and insecure– Increase in population by five-fold in less than a century in the resource-

thin country (not uniform growth: uneven pressure of population)– Although agricultural output has kept pace with population growth, no

improvement in human welfare (low HDI)• Environmental factors:

– Scarcity of arable land + unequal distribution of land • 20% land suitable for agriculture which is source of living for 70% population• bottom 47% population own only 15% of land where as top 5% population own

almost 37% of land• 29% are landless and 70% of peasants own less than one hectare)

• Maoist insurgency:– Skewed distribution of land in favor of elites: An issue of Maoist insurgency– Ideological source of insurgency: Nepal is semi-feudal and semi-colonial,

ripe for insurgency through the confiscation of land from land-onwers– Flooding and deforestation in Tarai: Increased vulnerabilities and scarcity

of fuel– Weak environmental governance to address scarcity of resources

Case Study: Koshi Tappu Wetland• Resettlement in Tarai to ease the population pressure in the hills and

attraction to hill migrants: change in land tenure and weak conservation practice (extensive deforestation)

• Construction of dam by India: Source of vulnerabilities, no significant benefits to local people

• Large wetland area• Protected area: Ramsar site (restriction in resource use such are forest

products, grazing land and fisheries)• Weak governance, low level of development, unequal social structure,

difficult livelihoods and increase in crimes• Maoists promise to return the land and to make easy access to resources

attracted many poor youths

Conclusion: Rapid population growth and environmental degradation are important

elements of Nepal’s conflicts and they must be addressed before stability can be restored.

Sri Lanka (Bohle and Funfgeld)

Violent conflict in Sri Lanka (1983-2009)• Mainly ethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamil in

the northern and eastern part of the Island• Ethno-political conflict: Instrumentalization of religion,

language, historicity and territoriality (External factors / geopolitics were very important from the beginning to evolution of conflict to ending of the conflict)

• Demand for independent Tamil homeland in the north and eastern island by LTTE

• Violent agenda have been translated into violent actions by violent actors

• Ceasefire (2002-06), War was ended by victory of Sri Lankan state over LTTE in 2009

Violent environment in Sri LankaStudy in the Batticaloa district (eastern-coast) during 1999-2001 and

2003-05.– Frontline between (shifting back and forth):

• ‘cleared area’ (coastal strip with a mixture of Tamil and Muslim urban centres and fishing communities controlled by Sri Lankan Armed Force (SLAF)

• ‘uncleared area’ (rural hinterland with peasant communities occupied by Tamil liberation movement led by LTTE

– ‘grey areas: highly unstable politically (contested control) and prone to violence, having more than one single protection regime• Muslim and Tamil communities live • Violent events have become part of social memory (in the individual life

histories and collective memories)• Stretching over 54 km along the east coast of Sri Lanka: having

resource system providing liveihoods for about 10,000 families of lagoon fisherman

• Contested space between SLAF and LTTE, strategic to have control over the northern and north-eastern ‘uncleared’ areas

Violent environment in the Batticaloa Lagoon• Drastic measures taken by SLAF and LTTE to ensure control over the

Lagoon on their respective sides severe impacts on the lagoon environment and associated natural resources (minefields, blocks and check-points and bunker systems)– Disruption of natural cycle of opening and closing of the lagoon mouth– Sand barriers and artificial dams– Salinization (paddy cultivation inland area and drop in the ground water– Stagnation of water in dry season (mosquito and other disease vector)

• Destruction of vast stretches of mangroves along the eastern government controlled shores of Batticaloa stress over fishery resources of the lagoon threatened livelihoods and declined entitlements of marginalized fishermen

• Conflict between paddy garm laborers and urban residents, joining in the fishing with fishermen

• Violent environment in the lagoon:– Disruption of the sand-bar cyccle– Destruction of mangroves– Intensification of lagoon fishing– Increasing competition among fishermen

• Environmental and livelihood concerns are overruled by military interests

Contested entitlements and decline in the env goods and services

• Batticaloa lagoon: ‘grey area’ site of violent conflict, infiltration and strategic concern: local fishermen caught in the war

• Dynamics of entitlements in two study villages: curtailed environmental entitlements of marginalized / poor fishermen– Periyakallar: With relatively wealthy Tamil fishermen, mostly targeted by

SLAF as colloaborators of LTTE and by LTTE for mobilization. Therefore previously held entitlements were heavily curtailed, and frequently politicized and exploited by LTTE.

– Iyakerny:Poor and marginalized Muslim fishermen, less targeted by SLAF and more targeted by LTTE as collaborators of SLAF. Clashes between local Muslim leaders and LTTE. Polarization between Muslims and Tamils, further worsening situation, however building political capitals to raise voice in Colombo (issue of illegal entitlements).

• Increase in social disparities between actors with unequal power, towards the ethno-political line

• Mobility and movements and their control by warring parties

Contested entitlements in Batticaloa

• A general situation of scarcity and destruction with shortages of food, environmental goods, and fishing equipment;

• The collapse of economic regulation and terms of exchange, resulting in greater uncertainty, lower levels of trust, and a tendency for economic activities to shift towards low-risk transactions including subsistence and barter;

• Biased price structures and exchange rates, often manipulated by military forces;

• Declining food production and consumption, falling incomes;• Geographical and economic fragmentation;• Increasing social and economic disparities and unequal power relations;• Pessimism, resulting in low levels of investments, sale of assets by

vulnerable groups and short-term opportunistic behaviour.Under these circumstances, the environment became an arena of contested entitlements, a theatre in which claims over resources were continuously negotiated, won and lost. Violence in the Batticaloa Lagoon was first and foremost expressed through the subjugation of the rights of people to determine the use of their environment to make a livelihood.

Politicized livelihoods

• Three types of political economy:– War economy (controlled by conflict enterpreuners)– Speculative economy (engineered by armed forces and conflict profiteers)– Survival economy (involving the vast majority of the population)

• Three household strategies under violence: – Managing personal risks and security– Adjusting household economies for survival– Accessing external support

• Household decision making became the political process• The politicization of livelihoods in Batticaloa is a reflection of the

political ecology of violence. It created alternative systems of control, profit and power, on the one hand and produced processes of disempowerment, disentitlement and exploitation, on the other.

Political ecology of violence Batticaloa (Sri Lanka)

Entitlement relations subjugated to the logic and dynamic of violence. As a consequence of restrictions on movement and mobility, violent

displacements and limited access to resources, markets and social networks

The environment became an arena of contested entitlements, where claims over resources were constantly negotiated and fought over, lost and won.

Livelihoods became highly politicized. Violence implied economic depression and precarious livelihoods for the

majority of the population. There were also war entrepreneurs and profiteers who did extremely well due

to the war, by controlling resource access, market networks and movement of goods.

Both regional and social disparities grew enormously during the violent conflict. Under these circumstances, struggles over environmental entitlements and the politicization of resource-based livelihoods created alternative systems of power and control over the environment, and induced new processes of disentitlement and social vulnerability