Structural violence affects environmental change which leads to risk of violent conflict and social instability

SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES The word 'security' comes from the Latin root meaning 'lack of care' (Dower 1995). It applies to different referent objects such as the nation (national security), human beings (human security), and investments (financial security). It also applies to different risks such as stock market crashes and earthquakes, and different threats, such as rape or military invasion. Soroos (1997, p. 236) defines security as 'the assurance people have that they will continue to enjoy those things that are most important to their survival and well-being'. Depending on who is to be secured, and how environmental change--and what sorts of change--threatens them, environmental change can be considered as a security issue. Environmental change is taken here to mean short and long term changes in biological, physical and chemical components and systems resulting from both human activities and natural processes. There is now widespread agreement that important things that individuals, groups and countries value are vulnerable to environmental changes, giving rise to the concept of 'environmental security'. However, there is no agreed definition of environmental security (Dalby 2002), and there is even less consideration of what environmental insecurity means (Barnett 2001). In this article environmental insecurity is defined as the vulnerability of individuals and groups to critical adverse effects caused directly or indirectly by environmental change. It is a state that is realised when individuals and groups are unable to avoid or adapt to environmental change. Environmental security is therefore the ability of individuals to avoid or adapt to environmental change so that things that are important to their well-being are not substantially negatively affected. Of course this definition, like Soroos' above, raises the problem of determining what any given individuals' and groups' preferences are with respect to their needs and values. However, there is a widely agreed set of needs and rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration on and the associated Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic Social and Cultural Rights, and these should be taken as a minimum list of the things that should be secured from environmental change. So, examples of environmental insecurity include desertification and poverty causing hunger and migration from pastoral areas in the Sahel (Franke & Chasin 1980), water scarcity and pollution causing illness and economic decline in the Aral Sea (Weinthal 2002), and violence triggered by the environmental impacts of the Panguna mine on Bougainville (Boge 1999). Peace is most commonly defined as the absence of violence. Violence can be defined narrowly as being direct harm caused to a person's body, or broadly to include both direct harm and a range of other social problems that have some degree of adverse consequences. The most well known of these broader definitions of violence comes from Galtung (1969, p. 168), who defines violence as 'the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is'. This is obviously appropriate for acts that cause harm to people's bodies or minds, yet it encounters problems when it applies to what Galtung calls 'structural violence', which he says is caused by systems of unequal power that structure unequal life chances such that a person's potential is in some way unrealised. This includes acts and processes such as racial or sexual discrimination, declining terms of trade, malnutrition, and unemployment, which all constrain the realisation of people's potential. In short, structural violence is about social injustice and inequality--the absence of which Galtung calls 'positive peace'. The problem is that perfect is the implied goal of attempts to eliminate structural violence, and this is neither practically possible nor necessarily desirable (Boulding 1977). So, while this paper accepts Galtung's definition of peace as being the absence of direct and structural violence, it adopts Barnett's (2008) understanding of structural violence, which is based on Sen's (1999) work on the freedoms and opportunities necessary for development. In this view, structural violence arises from the inequitable distribution of economic opportunities, political freedoms, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. The equitable distribution of these freedoms and opportunities would greatly assist people to satisfy their physiological and psychosocial needs, and allowing them to act as they see fit according to the values that are important to them. Based on this understanding of peace as the absence of direct and structural violence, the paper now proceeds to explain four of the key connections between environmental security and peace. These connections are based on the way environmental change may influence direct and structural violence, and in turn the way direct and structural violence influence environmental change. ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND VIOLENT CONFLICT Most of the literature on environmental security concerns the possible linkages between environmental change and violent conflict. It is therefore relevant to that part of peace that concerns the absence of direct violence. This field of research has been well reviewed elsewhere (Dalby 2002; Gleditsch 2001; Hartmann 2001), and so what follows is a summary of findings. There is general agreement that there are indirect links between environmental change and violent conflict. However, environmental change is not the only or even the most important of factors leading to violent conflict (Homer-Dixon & Blitt 1998; Baechler 1999). Other factors--such as poverty and inequities between groups, high levels of military spending and/or high availability of weapons, external indebtedness, poorly developed conflict resolution institutions, a history of violence, state illegitimacy, weak or no , an abundance of lootable resources, and poor leadership--all seem to matter as much if not more than environmental change per se (Collier 2000; Cramer 2003; David 1997; Esty et al. 1999; Gleditsch 2001; Goodhand 2003; Kahl 2006; Raknereud & Hegre 1997). Environmental factors do not, and are unlikely to, trigger war between countries, even in the case of rivers whose waters are shared by more than one country (Baechler 1999; Homer-Dixon & Percival 1996; Wolf 1999). Rather, environmental changes can increase the risk of violent conflict and social instability within countries where governance systems are in transition, levels of inequality are high, and social-ecological systems are highly sensitive to environmental change. Many studies suggest that 'strong states' with a high trade/GDP ratio tend to be simultaneously more capable of managing environmental degradation, less dependent on primary resources for income and employment, and less prone to internal conflicts (Collier 2000; de Soysa 2000; Hauge & Ellingsen 2001). In resource dependent societies governed by weak states, environmental changes can alter the distribution of natural and economic capital among people and local groups in ways that can stimulate grievances, which may ultimately lead to violence. These grievances often form along the lines of pre-existing vertical (class-based), horizontal (spatially-based), and age-based inequalities. For example, Bobrow-Strain (2001) has described how declining agricultural production caused by changes in political and market conditions did not affect all people in a district of Chiapas equally, and that this changing social landscape led to land conflicts. Timura (2001) has also argued that unequal access to economic and political resources was a factor in conflicts in Mexico, as well as the 'Guinea Fowl' war in Ghana, and conflict in Para, Brazil. It has been reasonably well demonstrated, therefore, that environmental change can increase the risk of direct violence within if not between states and, inasmuch as this is true, it follows that from direct violence requires that environmental change be avoided or people's abilities to adapt to it be enhanced, at least in resource dependent societies in weak states. However, because environmental change does not increase the risk of violent conflict in isolation from other important social factors that are typically associated with structural violence, addressing these factors is also important.