Environmental Degradation and Genocide, 1958–2007

Abstract

While several studies have examined the relationship between various aspects of environmental degradation and civil conflict, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the relationship between environmental degradation and instances of genocide and politicide. Although mentioned in the popular press as a key cause for instances of state-sponsored mass killings in Rwanda and Darfur, there is little in the way of quantitative empirical work that investigates the linkage between environmental degradation and genocide. In this paper, the relationship between freshwater and land degradation and the incidence of a genocidal and/or politicidal acts is examined. More specifically, it is examined whether environmental factors helped ‘trigger’ genocidal and/or politicidal acts in 61 conflict-prone countries from 1958 to 2007. It was found that land pressures contribute to the likelihood of the incidence of genocides and politicides more so than declines in freshwater availability, but civil war incidence and regime type remain powerful explanatory factors for state-sponsored mass murder.

Notes

United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.

Democide means the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder. As Rudolf Rummel (1994, p. 38) points out, ‘democide is meant to define the killing by government as the concept of murder does individual killing in domestic society. Here intentionality (premeditation) is critical. This also includes practical intentionality. If a government causes deaths through a reckless and depraved indifference to human life, the deaths were as though intended. If through neglect a mother lets her baby die of malnutrition, this is murder. If we imprison a girl in our home, force her to do exhausting work throughout the day, not even minimally feed and clothe her, and watch her gradually die a little each day without helping her, then her inevitable death is not only our fault, but our practical intention. It is murder. Similarly, for example, as the Soviet government forcibly transported political prisoners to labour camps hundreds of thousands of them died at the hands of criminals or guards, or from heat, cold, and inadequate food and water. Although not intended (indeed, this deprived the regime of their labour), the deaths were still public murder. It was democide.’

To be sure, the building of dams and other water management projects provide the state with some measure of control, but such public works are beyond the capacity of precipitation-dependent countries in the developing world—precisely where most genocides/politicides take place.

Western European countries were excluded, because, theoretically, the exacerbative effects of declines in water and land resources are felt much more acutely in developing countries, which rely extensively on agricultural production and subsistence (which is certainly not the case for the developed Western European countries).

Accessed May 2009 at FAOSTAT website, http://faostat.fao.org/ (Resources, ResourceSTAT, land, and PopSTAT, annual time series).

The data for this measure were derived from the United Nations Environment Programme, Global Environment Outlook, available online at: http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/ (accessed May 2009).