Tag: conflict

Conflict and El Nino: How did this get through peer review?

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I opened my email this morning to a message from a colleague that linked to a new study in Nature: “Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate.” (the actual article is paywalled).  Well, that is assertive . . . especially because despite similar claims in the past, I have yet to see any study make such a definitive, general connection successfully.  Look, the problem here is simple: the connection between conflict and the environment is shaky, at best. For all of the attention that Thomas Homer-Dixon gets for his work, the simple fact is that for interstate conflict, there are more negative cases than positive case . . . that is, where a particular environmental stressor exists, conflict DOES NOT happen far more often than it does.  Intrastate conflict is much, much more complex, though there are some indications that the environment does play a triggering/exacerbating role in conflict at this scale.
Sadly, this article does not live up to its claims.  It is horrifically flawed, to the point that I cannot see how its conclusions actually tell us anything about the relationship between El Nino and conflict, let alone climate and conflict.  Even a cursory reading reveals myriad problems with the framing of the research design, the regression design, and the interpretation of the regression outputs (though, to be honest, the interpretation really didn’t matter, as whatever was coming out of the regressions was beyond salvation anyway) that lead me to question how it even got through peer review.  My quick take:
Let’s start with the experimental design:

… We define annual conflict risk (ACR) in a collection of countries to be the probability that a randomly selected country in the set experiences conflict onset in a given year. Importantly, this ACR measure removes trends due to the growing number of countries.

In an impossible but ideal experiment, we would observe two identical Earths, change the global climate of one and observe whether ACR in the two Earths diverged. In practice, we can approximate this experiment if the one Earth that we do observe randomly shifts back and forth between two different climate states. Such a quasi-experiment is ongoing and is characterized by rapid shifts in the global climate between La Niña and El Niño.

This design makes sense only if you assume that the random back-and-forth shifting did not trigger adaptive livelihoods decisions that, over time, would have served to mitigate the impact of these state shifts (I am being generous here and assuming the authors do not think that changes in rainfall directly cause people to start attacking one another, though they never really make clear the mechanisms linking climate states and human behavior).  The only way to assume non-adaptive livelihoods is to know next to nothing about how people make livelihoods decisions.  Assuming that these livelihoods are somehow optimized for one state or the other such that a state change would create surprising new conditions that introduced new stresses is more or less to assume that the populations affected by these changes were somehow perpetually surprised by the state change (even though it happened fairly frequently).  After 14 years of studying rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa, I find that absolutely impossible to believe.  Flipping back and forth between states does not give you two Earths, it gives you one Earth that presented certain known challenges to people’s livelihoods.

To identify a relation between the global climate and ACR, we compare societies with themselves when they are exposed to different states of the global climate. Heuristically, a society observed during a La Niña is the ‘control’ for that same society observed during an El Niño ‘treatment’.

No, it is not.  This is a false parsing of the world, and as a result they are regressing junk.
This is not the only problem with the research design. Another huge problem with this study is its treatment of the impact of ENSO-related state changes on people.  These state changes in the climate do not have the same impact everywhere, even in strongly teleconnected places.  The ecology and broader environment of the tropics is hardly monolithic (though it is mostly treated this way), and a strong teleconnection can mean either drought or flooding . . . in other words, the el Nino teleconnection creates a variety of climatological phenomena that play out in a wide range of environments that are exploited by an even larger number of livelihoods strategies, creating myriad environmental and human impacts.  These impacts cannot be aggregated into a broad driver of conflict – basically, their entire regression (which, mind you, is framed around a junk “counterfactual”) is populated with massively over-aggregated data such that any causal signal is completely lost in the noise.
Most reasonable approaches to the environment-conflict connection now treat environmental stresses as an exacerbating factor, or even a trigger, for other underlying factors.  Such an approach seems loosely borne out in the Nature article.  The authors note that in the “teleconnected group, low-income countries are the most responsive to ENSO, whereas similarly low income countries in the weakly affected group do not respond significantly to ENSO.”  This certainly sounds like a broad stressor (state change in the climate) is influencing other, more directly pertinent drivers of conflict.  But then we get to their statement of limitations:

Although we observe that the ACR of low-income countries is most strongly associated with ENSO, we cannot determine if (1) they respond strongly because they are low-income, (2) they are low income because they are sensitive to ENSO, or (3) they are sensitive to ENSO and low income for some third unobservable reason. Hypothesis (1) is supported by evidence that poor countries lack the resources to mitigate the effects of environmental changes. However, hypothesis (2) is plausible because ENSO existed before the invention of agriculture and conflict induces economic underperformance.

Even here, they have really oversimplified things: the way this is framed, either the environment causes the conflict (pretty much established by the literature that this is not the case), the environment causes economic problems that cause the conflict, or it is something else entirely.  Every other possible factor in the world is in that third category, and most current work on this subject concentrate on other drivers of conflict (only some of which are economic) and how they intersect with environmental stresses.
This paper is a mess.  But it got into print and made waves in a lot of popular outlets (for example, here and here).  Why?  Because it is reviving the long-dead corpse of environmental determinism…people really want the environment to in some way determine human behavior (we like simple explanations for complex events), even if that determination takes place via influences nuanced by local environmental variation, etc.  Environmental determinism fell apart in the face of empirical evidence in the 1930s.  But it makes for a good, simple narrative of explanation where we can just blame conflict on climate cycles that are beyond our control, and look past the things like colonialism that created the foundation for modern political economies of conflict.  This absolves the Global North of responsibility for these conflicts, and obscures the many ways in which these conflicts could be addressed productively.



Posted on by Ed 15

Lemonade from low earth orbit lemons

Right, so George Clooney is part of an effort to use satellite imagery to cast a light on any atrocities that might take shape as the Sudan referendum goes forward.  In short, this project aims to use hig-res commercial satellite imagery, gathered on a pretty regular basis, to document evidence of genocidal or other criminal behavior.  The idea is, as they put it, to create a form of “antigenocide paparazzi” that will bring unwanted attention to atrocities.  As Clooney argues:

“This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, ‘O.K., if you guys don’t want to do anything about it, that’s one thing,’” Clooney says. “But you can’t say you did not know.”

This is genius marketing, even if you dislike the idea (those of us with good ideas really do need to take marketing more seriously).  And a lot of people dislike the idea.  Blogger Laurenist has a critique under the hilarious title “In Space, no one can hear you say “WTF”?” (genius marketing, people).  A lot of this critique is focused on the fact that the imagery will probably not bring about the sorts of accountability necessary to actually get people to stop unwanted behaviors, at least in part because the imagery is fairly low-res.  Indeed, it is – actually lower-res than the article about the story quotes – 50 centimeter imagery is not 50 square centimeters, but 50 centimeters a side (I work with this stuff).  So it is hard to even see people in these images, unless it is at a time of day where you can pick up their shadows.  It is also focused on the fact that “just knowing” about a problem isn’t good enough to spur action – after all, it is now well documented that the international community was well aware of what was going on in Rwanda right before and during the genocide, and did nothing.  Fuzzy imagery certainly won’t change that.
I agree with this assessment.  However, there is a way to make lemonade out of this particular batch of lemons, because these images could be retasked for something much more useful.  One of the likely points of conflict post-referendum is along the corridors through which various groups move their livestock in the course seasonal migrations for food and water (if you want to drop a big word for it, say “transhumance”).  There are two things this sort of imagery can do for us – it can tell us about the biophysical situation in those corridors – are they still able to support this migration, are they ecologically unbroken or fragmented, are there barriers to movement?  Second, it can tell us how many people and animals are using these corridors, which we can use to measure local carrying capacity, and estimate the challenges that might emerge if these corridors are closed or otherwise challenged.  This would allow for effective humanitarian intervention in areas where these pastoral groups (who are typically left behind by aid and development, and hated by the state, because they won’t stay put and like crossing borders).  Hell, if they are going to drop big dollars on the images, we may as well use them for something useful and actionable.
George, you interested?  I can help set this up . . .

Posted on by Ed 2

Militarizing aid

The role of the military in development is a terribly fraught issue – and it has been with us for a very, very long time.  In my book, I argue that globalization and development turned into each other long ago – insofar as development has largely been reduced to a means by which we connect different parts of the world into a global market and political economy.  This is not because development is some sort of militaristic economic movement (though, of course, sometimes it has been used as such), but because one of the dominant assumptions in development is that free markets and a globalized political economy are the best ways to bring about improvements in human well-being (my book is an extended, empirically-based critique of this assumption).  If you accept this definition of development, colonialism was really the first phase of “development” as we understand it today.  Military force was an important part of colonial efforts to open new territories to these markets (often couched in terms of peoples “own good”), thus creating a remarkably negative association with the military in development circles.
Today, the military has largely taken on a very different role – it is a critical means by which relief supplies are delivered to disaster-stricken areas. And, in conflict zones like Iraq, the military has been forced to take on development work, despite the fact that its personnel are not trained for that mission (something most folks in the military are well aware of, and would like to see changed).  Underdevelopment has been viewed as a national security issue (such as the very poorly substantiated assumption that poverty breeds terrorism), especially in the context of climate changes which are presumed to negatively impact the poorest and most vulnerable such that they will threaten state stability in many parts of the world.  Engagement with the military is something that is nearly impossible to avoid if one works for a major agency.
I’ll be frank, here – I’ve never been comfortable with the military’s engagement with development.  As I mentioned above, they are at best highly disciplined amateurs who have little experience and no real knowledge base when conducting “aid work”, which as we all know can make anyone more dangerous than helpful.  I also think it is unfair to ask people trained for one mission to go out and conduct another for which they are not prepared – it’s never good to set someone up for failure.  But the New York Times ran a story today that really gets to the heart of my issues with the militarization of development – it makes it impossible for anyone to do good development work.  When development work is conducted alongside military operations, especially as conscious parts of a hearts-and-minds campaign, development becomes a tool of war.  This makes the practitioners combatants, at least in the eyes of the opponent.  I am in no way justifying the kidnapping or killing of those who work in development in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but I think we have to be honest about why otherwise unarmed civilians working on projects that are intended to have a community benefit might end up becoming targets.  It is not because “the enemy” is utterly depraved and indifferent – indeed many on the other side might see the use of development as a tool of war as itself depraved, a sort of holding people’s well-being hostage to larger geopolitical ends.
This post is not, in the end, a critique of the military – I certainly wish we lived in a world where they were not needed.  I imagine many of those serving in the military feel the same way.  But that is not the world we live in.  We live in a world where the military is doing development because someone has told them they have to.  This is not their fault.  However, I would ask that the military step back and think carefully about using development as part of larger combat campaigns – the association with conflict and combat gives our entire endeavor a bad name.

Posted on by Ed 0