Three Generations of Environment and Security Research

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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'.

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