The Natural Environment and Atrocity Crimes Forthcoming in Barbora Hola, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, and Maartje Weerdesteijn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crime (OUP, c.2020) Kieran Mitton Abstract The relationship of the natural environment to war has long been the subject of study, but its connection to atrocity crimes in particular has received far less attention. In this chapter I explore the rich literature on the role natural resources play in shaping violence, examining it through two broad areas of focus that define the scholarship: scarcity and abundance. In doing so, I provide an overview of the key thematic debates linking resources to violence, from early Malthusian concerns over demographic pressures to more recent focus on climate change and urbanization. Keywords Natural resources, environment, abundance, scarcity, climate, nature, greed, urbanization Dr Kieran Mitton is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and author of 'Rebels in a Rotten State: Approaches to Understanding Atrocity in the Sierra Leone Civil War (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2015). --
Kieran Mitton | 2 1. Introduction: Challenges A well-known challenge in the study of violence is the tendency of scholars to conflate its causes with those of armed conflict. In the twenty-first century, the burgeoning literature on civil wars, particularly that focused on the micro-level, has explicitly pushed back against this trend (Kalyvas, 2006).1 This scholarship has sought to treat violence as a phenomenon in its own right, allowing for a more focused approach to the study of atrocity crimes which accounts for variation between drivers of conflict and violence. Nevertheless, in the literature examining the relationship of natural resources with war, atrocities remain subsumed under theories of conflict causation (and recurrence), with the causal mechanisms behind extreme violence typically assumed rather than theoretically or empirically substantiated. This chapter highlights various ways in which this problem has manifested across work on resource scarcity and abundance, but also notes some welcome departures from this tendency. Methodological and disciplinary silos have also tended to obstruct collaboration and exchange between different fields. The studies of violence, civil war, mass atrocities and genocide hold numerous overlaps and complimentary insights, yet they have tended to work in isolation from one another. For instance, economists have been at the forefront of analysis 1 Though often closely related, violence and conflict are not synonymous: one can exist without the other (Hannah Arendt, 1970, p. 19; Brubaker and Laitin 1998, p. 425; Horowitz; 2001, p. 475). Within war, violence is typically highly varied over time and space. Violence and armed conflict often have distinct causes: for instance, Kalyvas notes that micro-level or 'local' violence in civil wars may be about score-settling between individuals, unconnected to the broader political causes of conflict (Kalyvas, 2006, p. 20).
3 | The Natural Environment and Atrocity Crimes of civil wars in the early 21st century but have rarely engaged with the study of genocide, leaving what Anderton and Brauer refer to as both an "economics gap" in genocide studies and