Three Generations of Environment and Security Research

Abstract

The claim that environmental factors should be integrated into the concept of security was first made in the early 1980s (for example by Richard Ullman). By the early 1990s, a `second generation' approach appeared, aiming at identifying the causal pathways from environmental scarcity to conflict by means of empirical case studies (for example by Thomas Homer-Dixon and the Toronto Group). This essay reviews the issues raised in the literature of these two approaches - the initial debate and the empirical studies - and goes on to examine a number of conceptual critiques. The emerging `third generation' draws attention to improved methodology, including the comparative study of cooperation as well as conflict as a response to environmental scarcity, which in turn focuses attention on the nature of regimes and of the role of the `state-in-society'.