Introduction

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• climate wars
• desertification
• ecocide
• environmental determinism
• futurology
• greenhouse effect
• threat multiplier

This special issue contains five papers dealing with various aspects of climate change and its relationship to patterns of insurgency and terrorism. This is the first special issue in this journal on a topic that increasingly dominates the media and wider political discussion, though SWI has published some papers previously in this area, most notably one by Marina Malamud in 2018 that usefully categorised climate-change conflicts into four types: 1) those linked to the environment into resource-based conflict; 2) a warfare ecology paradigm referring to non-premeditated change to the environment as a result of military conflict; 3) warfare in which the environment was the target and 4) an insurgency-conflict intersection in which climate change increased the likelihood and frequency of war and conflict.¹ These four categories have helped inform the approach taken in this introduction, especially the last relating to the probable impact of global climate change on insurgencies.

The focus on climate change comes at a time of increasingly dire warnings of an escalating ‘climate countdown’ leading to uncontrollable global chaos.² Such warnings are not especially new and stretch back several years, indicating, it appears, a paralysis of political will and an inability of governments to effect decisive international action. One early prophetic speech, for instance, on global heating and a ‘new climate frontier’ was made by the scientist Jim Hansen before the US Congress as long ago as 1988.³ Such warnings suggest, interestingly, a progressive shift in focus on the global future from the notion, widely held in some anti-war circles during the Cold War, that Armageddon lay in a some form of super-power nuclear war towards the view that it is now climate change that poses the gravest threat to humanity, with war and escalating conflict becoming dark dependent variables, almost inevitable consequences of rising global temperatures, human migration and sea levels along with declining global food resources and paralysed state structures.

None of this has generated (perhaps somewhat surprisingly) all that much academic interest on climate change and its possible impact on conflict, certainly in history and the social sciences. The 1990s were an era defined by interest in globalisation and interdependency, and the media focus on climate change waned by the years of the Clinton presidency. Debate turned to discussion on clashing civilisations, the possible end of ideology and the resurgence of ethnic conflict in such regions as Africa and the Balkans.⁴ There was a renewed focus of interest in the aftermath of the UN Security Council debate in 2007 on the security implications of climate change, a year that also saw the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. But even then, interest in political science and international relations remained muted and only started to grow by 2014 when Robert Keohane, in the annual James Madison lecture to the American Political Science Association, noted that ‘climate change is one of the major political and institutional, as well as ecological, challenges of our time’.⁵ There are clearly a variety of reasons for this general academic indifference, but it is worth noting that the focus on the state and state interests in Politics/International Relations tended to inhibit interest in patterns of climate change operating on a transboundary, regional and global basis. Attempting to fit these into a paradigm of state-centric realism was always going to be difficult.⁶

Given this background, it is fair to conclude that scepticism within military and security studies in climate change is by no means unique. It has been driven, at least in part, by a reluctance to be drawn into potentially polarising issues that some analysts view as detracting from those topics that traditionally tend to dominate military and strategic debate: shifting balances of power in post-Cold War global politics, cycles or ‘waves’ of terrorist violence, the spread of nuclear weapons and the advent of new weaponry, distinctive forms of warfare including hybrid warfare and grey area conflict, changing patterns of insurgency and international drug dealing, the emergence of a brutal land war in Ukraine and continuing conflicts in the Middle East, West Africa and the Sahel.

None of these topics, though, can be isolated from the impact of climate change in the next few decades. Indeed, it can be argued that any conflict that ensues from climate factors is likely, initially at least, to heighten existing patterns of terrorism and insurgency, with inter-state war possibly emerging at a later state. But even here, the Russian invasion of Ukraine leading to a medium-level inter-state war can be, at least partly, explained by a regime in the Kremlin committed to resisting global measures to restrict fossil fuels.⁷ Despite these reservations, there has been, it should be noted, at least some research over the years on the national security implications of climate change such as the useful volume edited by Kurt M. Campbell, Climate Cataclysm (2008). None of the research though has lead to the widespread debate that many of those involved in it had hoped.

Before proceeding further, it is important to define what exactly is meant by ‘climate change’. It can be most simply understood as ‘any change occurring to the planet’s climate either permanently or lasting for long period of time’.⁸ It is by no means such a new topic since there was some concern about the possible impact of human activity on the earth’s climate in the early nineteenth century, when the botanist Alexander Von Humboldt drew attention to it while travelling in South America in 1800.⁹ However, Humboldt was largely a lone voice and serious debate on climate change has been far more recent, raising an important question about the general reluctance in human societies to confront really major issues in comparison to apparently more manageable smaller ones.

At a more complex level, a distinction needs to be made between ‘natural’ climate change and ‘anthropogenic’ climate change: the first occurred at varying periods in the earth’s history as there were varying periods of it either cooling or heating up, a pattern sometimes stimulated by dramatic events such as the impact of a giant asteroid 65 million years ago that is widely credited with wiping out most of the dinosaur population. The latter, on the other hand, has been caused mainly by human activity since the advent of homo sapiens and stretching back over thousands of years. The study of the Anthropocene has led to an expansion of the study of landforms and landform evolution known as geomorphology. This has led more recently into a new sub-branch called Anthropogenic Geomorphology that examines the long-term impact of human action on the earth’s surface through the study of structures such as burrows, ancient agricultural settlements, as well as farming terraces, ridge and furrow systems, roads, dikes and mines. Cumulatively, this research can potentially build up a comprehensive picture of the impact of human activity on the both the earth’s surface and long-term patterns of climate change.

‘Anthropogenic’ climate change has most popularly been linked to the ‘greenhouse effect’ involving gases being released into the atmosphere which, if left unchecked, could lead to an eventual ‘tipping point’ of escalating temperatures and increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather events globally. Many, though by no means all, political leaders accept the basic arguments for anthropogenic climate changes even if they are often reluctant or hesitant to make the necessary changes to deal with them. Populists and climate change deniers, on the other hand, reject the entire science of anthropogenic climate change and rest their case on arguments pivoted around ‘natural’ climate change rooted in apparently unalterable weather cycles outside human agency.

Despite some initial doubts and scepticism, some scholars have sought to factor in climate change variables into explanations for war and conflict. This research appears to have had little, if any, impact on military and strategic decision-making. This perhaps reflects a general reluctance of many military and security analysts be drawn into the climate debate at a time when many western states such as the UK and the US have tended to marginalise it from the mainstream political agenda. Military analysis here tends to follow political and economic discussion rather than lead it and since 2001 there have been varying levels of interest in the climate change issue, starting with a relative indifference in the Bush administration; then with attempts to exert leadership on the issue by the Obama administration between 2008 and 2016; followed by denial and backtracking under Trump.

Understanding the issue has certainly been hampered by the issues of complexity. Research in this area has been conducted by a specialised epistemic community of scientifically-trained professionals, who tend, unsurprisingly, to publish in their own specialised journals. Accessing this work, as some of the papers in this issue show, can be illuminating for military analysts, but also somewhat daunting. In this regard, Welzer in his study of ‘Climate Wars’ pinpoints some of the blame on the wider indifference in the human sciences toward climate change, leaving the scientific professionals more or less on their own. ‘They may be familiar with complexity, indeed admirably so’, he remarks, ‘but not with the processes through which human beings construct reality, or with the role that the most diverse frameworks, cultural forms and socio-historical models play in the perceptions of problems and solutions’.¹⁰ Evidently, there is a need for a dialogue between different epistemic communities and the fostering of an intelligible middle ground that can shape military and strategic debate. The literature here has been relatively thin, though work published decades ago, such as that of Thomas Homer-Dixon, indicated that some social science scholars were working in detail on these themes. In 1991, Homer Dixon urged a focus on how environmental change might affect conflict as opposed to security, pointing out that the impact of environmental change would impact unevenly on different states and societies, with the poorest being especially severely hit in terms of four main variables of diminished agricultural production, economic decline, population displacement and the disruption of social relations.¹¹ The approach continues to shape more recent research as some of the papers in this issue illustrate.

For all its complexity, climate change and weather event variables are likely to exert a growing impact on military and strategic analysis in the years ahead and are worth serious examination. In an attempt to simplify this issue, I suggest three basic questions that can be posed by scholars seeking to clarify what this impact might be:

1. How far has climate change been a factor in violence and military conflict?

2. How far do military conflicts themselves exacerbate climate change?

3. How far will climate change impact on future military conflicts?

How far has climate change been a factor in violence and military conflict?

Historical research has potentially quite a lot to offer the debate on climate change and its impact on political and military conflict. This is evidenced by some recent historiography of past wars as well as a body of research data suggesting statistical links between climate change at the local and regional level and military conflict. Some early research from 2007 onwards in the Chinese context by David Zhang et al., for instance, suggested that there was a historical association between climate change and war together with price cycles, famine, migration and population decline.¹² The argument ran into considerable criticism less from military analysts than from historians suspicious of a thesis that appeared to suggest a form of environmental determinism. In response, Zhang et al. qualified their argument by asserting only that climate change should be viewed as one of a variety of factors leading to violent war and human migration. ‘The role of climate change’, they have cautioned, ‘should be understood as a first stimuli from the external natural environment to affect the normal functions of human societies in the past’.¹³

This still begged the question of what sort of role climate change has played historically in the understanding of war. This illustrated a general absence in the historiography of this area of any general theory of climate change and its impact on societal and political change. Indeed, there has been a marked timidity here in the face of the evidence compared to work in other areas of historical sociology such as social revolutions. Here, Geoffrey Parker’s wide-ranging study of seventeenth-century global history Global Crisis marked an ambitious foray into the area and was seen by some as the coming of age for the study of climate change and its social and human impact.¹⁴ The study attempted to factor in climate change patterns into a period that had, since the 1950s, been noted for being one of ‘general crisis’. This ‘crisis’ of the seventeenth century had first been seen by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in 1954 as one produced by a conflict between reactionary dynastic feudal and aristocratic classes and a rising mercantile bourgeoisie. The thesis was challenged in 1959 by Hugh Trevor Roper who redefined the crisis as one of military fiscal states unable to absorb the revolutionary challenges being made against them, over-burdened as they were by problems of war and overpopulation. By the eighteenth century, Trevor Roper argued, this political crisis of statehood had been largely resolved, in part by the stabilisation of states faced with declining population pressure in the wake of a huge demographic collapse in the Thirty Years War and other conflicts of the previous century.

Neither party to what became an intense and protracted historical debate took any serious notice of climate change. Here, at least, Parker’s study was notable for emphasising climate change dimensions to the period, though he was by no means the first to do so since a small group of historians, such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, had been aware of the issue since the 1960s.¹⁵ Parker was inspired by the years following Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2005 (that killed 2000 people and caused $81 billion damage to property) as well as a growing awareness of the possibility of human-engineered climate change. He sought to apply the methods of detailed historical research in order to broaden the scope and depth of debate. There seemed to be a constant tendency, he complained, for human societies across the world to be taken by surprise by extreme weather events and then to extrapolate from recent trends. This was a constant ‘fast forwarding’ of debate that took little notice of past catastrophes except as extraordinary and unusual cases.¹⁶

Parker certainly acknowledged the problems associated with linking climate change with historical events. Contingency always works against any simplistic determinism; in some cases, the mere existence of things like a granary in a port might well be enough, he argued, to stave off hunger, while in others, states might be able and willing to devote resources to help populations cope with what became known as the ‘little ice age’ of the seventeenth century.¹⁷ The point exemplifies the importance of what the global historian J R McNeill has termed the role of ‘resistance’ and ‘resilience’ in human societies and their ability to respond to and manage unforeseen shocks such as floods, fires, earthquakes and drought along with long-term climate change. Societies vary in their capacity to plan for these threats: in the case of resistance, they built dikes and flood defences as in Holland, or water storage cisterns in areas threatened by drought or a system of state granaries as in eighteenth century Qin China. Even if they fail to plan and build these things, they may often display varying patterns of resilience to cope with disaster when it occurs, not least through migration, though this may also be accompanied by various forms of social and political unrest.¹⁸

Here there is evidence that suggests that climate was, in some cases, a significant factor in galvanising popular discontent in some of the rebellions and revolutions of the crisis-ridden seventeenth century. The summer of 1637 was the driest in two decades when Charles I sought to apply his prayer book in Scotland, precipitating a revolt that lasted a decade.¹⁹ On a wider scale, many of the revolts in the century occurred in major cities that were more prone to the effects of climate change than rural areas, though this does rule out the operation of contingent factors. Climate may have been a factor in galvanising the disastrous rebellion in 1641 in Ireland, for instance, but it did not account for the ringleaders being betrayed and the rebellion decisively defeated by English forces.²⁰

Looking at climate change patterns over a longer time span than the seventeenth century, historical research can unravel some of the origins of more contemporary conflicts. Here Osterhammel, in a grand survey of global history in the nineteenth century, points to a progressive shifting southwards of the desert in the Sahel region of Africa. This has meant that livestock breeding communities have been forced further southwards leading to an economy of cattle, goats and camels managed by mixed communities of Arabs, Berbers and black Africans – one that led to a so-called ‘white’ ethnic identity distinct from the identities of black African communities further south. Progressive desertification here amplified social tensions as communities owning horses and camels were able to raid more sedentary black African communities. These latter communities in turn became subject to various forms of slavery and forced labour legitimated by the spread of Islam through the region.²¹

The degree to which these longer-term patterns have shaped more recent conflicts needs far more research. It appears very likely that the escalating climate change in the last 40 to 50 years has speeded up ongoing patterns of social and economic change shaped by the Sahara Desert moving some 100 km further south along with a rising population growth rate. In the Darfur region of Sudan, this led to a renewal of civil war after the collapse of a brokered peace in 2003, a conflict that Wentzel has described as the first modern climate war involving widespread dispossession and ethnic cleansing. It is also an example of a conflict where the environment has been weaponised, as Janjaweed raiders in the region not only burned down villages but also the remaining trees surrounding them to prevent the villagers returning.²²

Historical research at both the regional and global level can play an important role in unravelling various patterns of conflict that have not suddenly emerged as a result of escalating climate change. Parker itemised in this context five main groups or sets of historical sources that form a ‘human archive’: narrative records, numerical information from documents, pictorial representations, epigraphic and archaeological information, and instrumental data based on weather recordings.²³ These cover, with varying unevenness, the last few centuries of human history. They provide an important indicator for the origins or at least escalation of conflicts leading to protracted warfare such as that of seventeenth century. The obvious difference to many contemporary conflicts is that they occurred within a general pattern of global cooling, whereas contemporary climate change is centred on the opposite phenomenon of rising temperatures and global warming.

As this short survey has attempted to show, historical patterns provide only a guide to present and future trends. They are marked by the particular problem that they deal with issues of falling temperatures and little ice ages rather than rising ones provoked by global heating and predictions of future global temperature rises that could lead to various forms of social disruption and state breakdown in at least some regions. There is no assured possibility of a revival of state power as occurred in eighteenth century Europe following the prolonged warfare of the previous century. To this extent, as McNeill has pointed out, there may be analogues in the earth’s history stretching back over millions of years for current patterns of climate change, but none for the period of human history, ensuring that humanity has ‘entered unchartered terrain’.²⁴ This does not mean that historical research is of no significant use. It will be most relevant in unravelling long-term patterns of social, economic, and political conflict that have survived in various forms into the present and will be especially prone to exacerbation by current patterns of climate change

How far do military conflicts exacerbate climate change?

The second question to be addressed concerns the effects of war itself on the environment and long-term climate change: this was what Malamud has termed the ‘warfare ecology paradigm’ of unpremeditated change impacting on the environment, though in some instances it has been both strategic and premeditated. It is a dimension of warfare that has only recently started to attract serious academic interest, especially in the wake of the Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 and charges of ‘ecocide’ levelled against the Putin regime. The issue has produced a growing body of research that certainly filters into the wider debate on the impact of climate change, forming a distinctive strand of wider debate.

Given the absence of nuclear war, military conflict has proven hazardous to certain local and regional environments but not, as yet at least, on a continental or global scale. Nevertheless, this impact has been quite serious and long term. In terms of soil degradation, for instance, this impact is threefold: 1) physical, involving the major transformations of landscapes with trenches and tunnels (of the kind now evident across parts of Ukraine) 2) chemical with the contamination of the environment with a range of pollutants such as oil, heavy metals, nerve agents, herbicides, and also radioactive material and finally 3) biological such as the introduction of micro-organisms such as anthrax and various pathogens that can pollute for decades. The issue highlights the huge amounts of energy used in the prosecution of war, especially the consumption of fossil fuels as well as the long-term effect of military action on biodiversity and the pollution and contamination of the soil, water, and air.

The issue is of considerable significance for military studies. It effectively refocuses military history away from conventional assessments of war’s human effects in terms of human casualties, along with the impact of military conflict on human societies and political systems, towards a more complex pattern of historical analysis that factors in the longer-term effects of war on the ecosystem. Here, research in the last twenty or more years has started to paint a generally bleak picture. During the Vietnam War, for instance, it has been estimated that between 14% and 44% of the forest of Vietnam was lost due to the use of chemical defoliants, while the oil fires during the First Gulf War amounted to some 2% of total fossil fuel emissions in 1991. This impact needs to be seen alongside a range of indirect emissions such as huge quantities of food, power, and shelter required to for the relief of refugees from conflicts with fuel alone estimated at $1.2 billion or 5% of total aid expenditure in 2017.²⁵

It is evident that warfare, certainly since the era of major industrialised warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has had a deleterious impact on the environment. It has, it is true, been generally localised and has exerted far less impact than more general social and economic changes, such as the massive global spread of car ownership or the expansion cities and megacities in the decades since World War Two. Two Nevertheless, it has contributed in many cases to permanent shiftss in land use and population settlement, and these patterns may well escalate with increased global warming over the next few decades.

The military debate in this area has tended for the most part to be anchored in possible shifts away from the overwhelming use of fossil fuels and the strategic risk of maintaining over centralised energy supplies. The industrialisation of warfare in the nineteenth century was anchored in the application of fossil fuels to the supply and deployment of increasingly large-scale armies and navies, and later air forces. This was more or less inevitable given that fossil fuels had a higher energy or BTU content than other forms of energy sources, an issue that would only start to be systematically tacked in the latter part of the twentieth with various types of renewable energy.²⁶ It is still the case that militaries globally remain highly reliant on fossil fuels and centralised forms of energy distribution. The attack by Iran on Saudi Arabia in September 2019 showed it was possible to knock out temporarily 5% of the world’s energy supply with 18 drones and 3 missiles: an attack that indicates just how vulnerable these energy supplies are in future conflicts.²⁷ This has given vent to some debate on both decentralisation of energy supplies along with increasing use by militaries of various forms of renewable energy together with a massive shift to drones, robotics, and AI. I will not examine this debate in detail here, though it indicates that strategic logic will, to some degree, dictate a shift away from fossil fuel dependency in the next few decades, though how far and how fast is unclear.

Research on the environmental impact of warfare in the past is very likely to build up an increasingly complex picture that will certainly detract from heroic notions of warfare. Much of the research tends to be published in specialist journals, though it is of significance for policy-makers and those seeking the use of ‘greener’ weaponry that may lead to less contamination in future conflicts. However, the very nature of warfare makes precise statistical recording in this area difficult: military conflicts tend to be ‘stochastic’ in the sense that it is hard if not possible to predict exactly where major battles will take place (who could predict in early 2022 the protracted conflicts in the cities and villages of Eastern and Southern Ukraine?) so that it will often be the case that little or no precise pre-conflict information will be available, thus rendering impact analysis imprecise.²⁸ Nevertheless, such recording of the immense environmental damage in Ukraine is taking place and might eventually become a basis for charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity of the Putin regime, unless of course these all become suspended in the context of an eventual peace deal.

How far will climate change impact on future conflicts?

This dimension of climate change has proved to be one of the more contentious areas of discussion since it intrudes on the domain of strategic studies and the forecasting and planning for possible future conflicts. In the search for simplicity and parsimony, strategists analyse tangible resources such as military assets, economic strength, political aims, and geographical location when they examine the possibility of states, as well as non-state actors, resorting to armed conflict. They are thus not in the business of populist futurology when they debate this, but look, rather, at detailed indicators of states’ intentions along with indices such as current military hardware, defence spending, and various forms of diplomatic signalling. Out of this, predictions can be made, with varying degrees of certainty, on possible future conflicts – for example, that China might invade Taiwan over the next 10 years given the changing power balances in the Pacific region. But even here actual work by military analysts has been remarkably laggard. Maj. Jacob P. Jones of the US Marine Corps, for instance, has drawn attention to the way that climate change might well impact on the future battlefield. Rising sea levels will result in islands either disappearing or flooding to the point where large-scale human migration occurs, in turn putting a severe strain on Fleet Marine sources and raising the costs of operations. In 2014, the US DOD began to recognise this very issue in the Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap which outlined a strategy of identifying areas defined by ‘poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions’ – in effect belatedly recognising the points made by Homer Dixon and other scholars over 20 years before.²⁹

Factoring in climate change variables into strategic debate undoubtedly adds not only considerable complexity but a dimension that is liable to be attacked for failing to either add or detract significantly from any assessment on the possibility of war. The point was strikingly made by Hew Strachan in the collection The Changing Character of War in 2011, when he argued that factoring in climate change into strategic thinking really entails asking it to address and even predict the future, a tendency he found permeating both British government and wider western strategy at this time. Such a ‘reconfiguring’ of strategy, Strachan argued, entails taking on and attempting to deal with ‘the globe’s long-term ills, as well as many of the responsibilities already entrusted to other government departments’. The whole approach, he concluded, ‘smacks of hubris and borders on unreality, or paranoia’.³⁰

Strachan certainly had a point since even futurology failed to predict many of the dramatic changes that have occurred over the past three to four decades. Yergan, for instance, pointed out that the shale revolution in the US and beyond was not predicted; neither was the rebirth of the electric car or the nuclear accident at Fukushima.³¹ Likewise, Philip Bobbit, in his glimpse in 2008 into likely future wars in the twenty first century, Terror and Consent, had remarkably little to say about the possible impact of climate change beyond noting that globalisation (the fashionable concept of the era) was generally undermining the capacities of states and their ability to manage issues such as climate change along with other ‘threats’ such as transnational terrorism and unrestricted immigration.³²

Nevertheless, it is important not to dismiss completely the work of journalists and concerned intellectuals on the likely impact of climate change since it is precisely such writers and popular pundits who have traditionally inspired (albeit at a distance) more focused debate by military strategists. Thus, it would be premature to dismiss some of the future scenario building of writers such as Gwynne Dyer who has postulated that a growing commitment by western governments to nuclear power to see them through possible energy shortages might, by the 2030s, lead to sections of the ecologically-minded radical left moving towards a more violent ecoterrorism; likewise, the political right might well lurch in response into various forms of ‘last-ditch geo engineering’ involving belated attempts to cool the earth’s climate. Here, at least, climate change might become the basis of escalating political conflict at the heart of many western states.³³

Such prophecies might doubtless be seen as unduly alarmist. However, the plethora of known unknowns and unknown unknowns is by no means confined to the arena of climate change but pervades the wider arena of strategic studies: few strategic analysts were able to predict either the end of the Cold War or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In both cases, analysts were loath to venture into what might have seemed rash predictions. Their failure was, at least in part, due to a lack of sufficient expertise in understanding Russian politics or else a tendency to follow wider intelligence predictions, such as those of the CIA in the case of the Ukraine invasion who assumed that Russian forces would quickly prevail in February 2022, leading President Biden to withdraw some intelligence assets from the country in the initial stages of the conflict.³⁴

Lack of certainty is an inherent hazard in strategic analysis and some scholars might therefore be tempted to view a more cautious middle range pattern of analysis that avoids some of the hazards of futurology. Here there is a case for factoring in climate change variables where these are most apposite. Jay Gulledge, for instance, proposed in 2008 three possible scenarios of future climate change based on those of the IPCC: expected climate change, severe climate change, and catastrophic climate change. The three scenarios were based on varying degrees of intensity, though Gulledge stressed that they all led to the dispelling of two fairly widely held myths that climate change would be smooth and gradual and that it would not impact all that much on industrialised societies, myths that appear to shape a continuing lack of electoral concern with the issue in western elections.³⁵

The issues are especially stark in the case of South Asia. The risk of rising sea levels, drought, and storms has placed Bangladesh at the top of the Climate Change Vulnerability Index since the size of its population, now some 170 million, will in all likelihood migrate in sizeable numbers putting immense pressure on surrounding states.³⁶ This has been especially true in the case of the Indian state of Assam where, by 2010, illegal migration was estimated to total some 6 million out of a total population of 26 million. It has led to escalating tensions with some political leaders warning that the state could become a ‘Greater Bangladesh’.³⁷ Here clearly is a case for strategic analysis factoring in climate change variables into the possibilities of escalating conflict in the medium to longer term, a conflict that may well start in small-scale and even irregular warfare at the local level before escalating into a much wider inter-state conflict in the longer term.

The scope of this issue

This issue touches on some of the points raised here but hopefully points the way forward towards more research on climate change and its likely impact on insurgent conflict, terrorism, and various forms of small war.

The first paper by Hook and Marcantonio addresses the conflict in the Donbas in Ukraine post 2014, one that has only grown in international significance since the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022. Writing on a period when the conflict was still viewed as a relatively lower-level one, the authors point out that this was a relatively a novel type of conflict in the way it occurred in an industrialised region, rendering it considerably different to most comparable conflicts in less industrialised zones in developing states. This may be true though it also needs to be seen in the context of a wider Russian strategy of freezing conflicts that can be either escalated or deescalated according to perceived strategic options. The Donbas over the 8 years after 2014 became a classic example of such a ‘frozen’ conflict, rendering international involvement and assistance difficult. This has compounded a situation where the soil in Donbas has become dangerously contaminated with one expert warning by 2018 that an ecological crisis threatened the region on a scale larger than that of Chernobyl. Such warnings were largely ignored and became eclipsed by the escalation of conflict to full-scale inter-state war following the February 2022 Russian invasion. This war has itself led to massive environmental damage which will take decades to reverse and is an arena that is already attracting a considerable body of research

This gloomy start to the issue is followed by the paper by Jeronimo Rios et al. on the impact of insurgent and terrorist attacks in the Norte de Santander region of Colombia. The authors develop a rather different set of foci to those analysts who tend to view terrorism and insurgencies as, to a considerable degree, the result of climate change. They emphasise instead that the attacks by insurgent groups themselves contribute to environmental degradation in a complex set of linkages between the degradation of ecosystems, the scarcity of natural resources, fragile economic development, and political instability. It is out of this mix that ‘green wars’, they argue, are increasingly likely to emerge over the new few decades.

These papers are then followed by two papers focusing on West Africa. The first by Edward Newman et al. examines inter-communal conflict in the Lake Chad Basin region. It follows in the wake of previous research on the impact of climate change on conflict in this region. As far back as 2010, Clionadh Raleigh examined how far climate change contributed to the increasing ‘political vulnerability’ of groups in the region and consequential group conflict, suggesting that the scale of disaster relief might well depend on the degree to which escalating climate change impacted on towns and cities as well as more marginalised rural populations.³⁸ Another paper published by Owonikoko and Momodu in Vol 31, Issue 6 of this journal in 2020 also looked at the threat of ‘environmental degradation’ to political stability in the Chad Basin region.³⁹ Newman et al. continue this research focus, though they deal more specifically with the impact of the Boko Haram insurgency in the region. The accept that there is by no means a direct correlation between climate change and insurgency but point rather to climate change functioning as part of a correlation of multiple factors that collectively work to undermine the notion that violence can be easily compartmentalised into different forms based on identity, agropastoral conflicts or ideological conflicts. In practice, these tend to blur into each other to the point where they start to become indistinguishable.

The second West African paper by Ismal Bello and Sophia Kazibwe examines the more general process of desertification in North Central and Southern Nigeria and the way this has shaped conflict between pastoralists and herders over declining water, land, and foraging resources. They argue that these conflicts do not all take the same form since those in the southern region tend to be defined more around culture and religion. Much of the conflict has been propelled by migration, such as pastoralists moving to the middle belt of Nigeria in search of water and fresh pasture and the authors also note that the absence of a clear southern frontier to what appears to be a progressively expanding conflict poses a long-term threat to the stability of the Nigerian state.

By contrast, the last paper in this issue by Agenew Yeshiwas focuses upon the actions of the Ethiopian state in the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) as a major show piece project. Yeshiwas sees the project as a belated instance of high modernist top-down reconstruction of the kind that was popular in newly independent states in the decades after World War Two. Despite warnings of the long-term ecological damage that will ensue from the dam’s construction, the Ethiopian government has pressed ahead with its construction. The dam may well act as a ‘threat multiplier’ to protracted conflict in the Metekel Zone of the Benishangul Gumuz Regional State in Ethiopia, which Yeshiwas interestingly sees as taking a frontier type form. The GERD also threatens longer-term regional security unless agreement can be secured with neighbouring states such as Egypt and the unstable regime in Sudan. It serves as a dramatic example of how some states in the developing world, even when faced with the increasingly harsh and uneven impact of climate change, still act in a divisive manner risking the possibility of eventual military conflict over access to water resources.⁴⁰

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Marina Malamud, Alex Marshall, Tom Marks, and Tom Durell Young for comments on an earlier draft of this introduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul B Rich

Paull B Rich is editor of Small Wars and Insurgencies. He has taught at the universities of Bristol, Warwick and Melbourne and has published extensively on insurgencies and counter-insurgency.

Notes

1. Malamud, ‘The Environment as a Factor in Small wars’.

2. Krauss, ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’, 17–21.

3. Milman, ‘’We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come’.

4. Campbell and Parthemore, ‘National Security and Climate Change in Perspective’, 8–9.

5. Keohane, ‘The Global Politics of Climate Change: Challenge for Political Science’, 19.

6. Homer Dixon, ‘On the Threshold’, 84–85.

7. Milman, ‘‘we are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come’.

Etkind, Russia Against Modernity

8. ‘Natural vs anthropogenic climate change’.

9. Wulf, The Invention of Nature, 57.

10. Welzer, Climate Wars, 27.

11. Homer-Dixon, ‘On the Threshold’, 78.

12. Zhang, ‘Global climate change, war, and population decline in human history’.

13. Zhang, David D et al, ‘Does climate change drive violence, conflict and human migration?’, 52.

14. Degroot, ‘Global Crisis, War, Climate Change @ Catastrophe in the 17^th Century’,

15. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of feast and times of Famine: a history of climate since 1000.

16. Parker, Global Crisis, xiv.

17. Ibid, xviii.

18. McNeill, ‘Can History Help Us with Climate Warming?’ in Campbell, Climatic Cataclysm, 29–31.

19. Ibid, 502–503.

20. Ibid 508.

21. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 382.

22. Wentzel, Climate Wars, 12–13, 67. Wentzel was not the first person to point to conflict in Darfur being at least partly shaped by climate change. Tim Flannery warned of this possibility as far back as 2005. See Flannery The Weather Makers, 123–134 and Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, 231.

23. Parker, Global Crisis, xiv-xv.

24. McNeill, ‘Can History Hep Us With Global Warming?’ 27.

25. Darbyshire and Weir, ‘How Does War Contribute to Climate Change?’.

26. McNeill. The Pursuit of Power, 223.

27. Migli, ‘The Use of Renewable Energy Sources in the Military’.

28. Laurence et al, ‘The Effect of Modern War and Military Activities’.

29. Jacobs, ‘Predictive Analytics’, 35. For a more general survey of the evolution of thinking in the DOD on the issue see Erickson, ‘Climate Change and the Department of Defence’.

30. Strachan’s objections hinged on a more general resistance to changing ‘strategic studies’ into a more broadly-based ‘security studies’. Strachan, ‘Strategy in the Twenty First Century’, 511–512.

31. Yergin, The New Map, 429–430.

32. Bobbitt, Terror and Consent 544.

33. Dyer, Climate Wars, 219–220.

34. ‘CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine’, The Intercept, 5 October 2022

35. Gulledge, ‘Three Plausible Scenarios’ in Campbell, Climate Cataclysm, 52–3.

36. M. Sophia Newman, ‘Will Climate Change Spark Conflict in Bangladesh?’, The Diplomat June 27 2014

37. Goswami, ‘Bangladeshi Illegal Migration into Assam’, 2.

38. Raleigh, ‘Political Marginalisation, Climate Change and Conflict in African Sahel States’.

39. Owonikoko and Momodu, ‘Environmental degradation, livelihood and the stability of Chad Basin Region’.

40. For a recent study of the diplomatic impasse between the various states of East Africa over the management of the dam see Matthews and Vivoda, ‘‘Water Wars’: Strategic Implications of the grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’.