Book Review Essay: Conflict, Ecology and the Politics of Environmental Security

For most of the 1990s the relationships between environment and conoict have been both an ongoing part of the debate about rethinking security and a matter of considerable dispute in the empirical literature. Part of the debate has been about scientiac method and the most appopriate way of proceeding to investigate these complex relationships. Deanitional difaculties abound. Methodological controversy has been unavoidable. But the larger context of who and what is threatening to whom, and what ought to be secured in the arst place, has repeatedly intruded on the scholarly analysis. This has complicated the formulation of both research questions and policy advice. These three books encapsulate many dimensions of the discussion; juxtaposing them allows the assumptions in each to be usefully contrasted with those in the other volumes. Hastings’ volume in particular allows some reoection on the politics of this scholarship and the importance of basic conceptual frameworks in social science. In the early 1990s in North America Thomas Homer-Dixon led the way in initiating a research effort trying to link matters of environmental change with