College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Did I Say This Land Is Your Land? Patterns of Contention in Indonesian Environmental Disputes(2014) Innes, Tara; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Environmental disputes occur frequently, particularly in contexts of poor natural resource management and vague law, but while some of these disputes end quickly without fatalities, some escalate to violence or become persistent contentious juggernauts that are increasingly hard to end. What makes a sequence of contentious events more likely to escalate to violence or persistent contention? This dissertation argues that strategic interactions in the form of violence, government behavior, and scarcity type signal the likelihood that the government will support claimant demands, and thus determine whether desperate claimants must escalate to maintain access to environmental goods and services necessary for survival. I also argue that there are material constraints from current repression and violence, and that timing matters. I test these propositions in two sets of logistic regressions, using new sub-national data from Indonesia and an in-depth case study. I find empirical support for the claims that prior violence, structural scarcity, and past government repression increase the likelihood of continued contention. The same variables except for past government repression also increase the likelihood of violence. Current government repression reduced the likelihood of both violence and continued contention, but as time passed it exerted a more pernicious effect on violence and resolution. In other words, timing mattered, although dense events were surprisingly less likely to yield violence or continued contention. This project indicated that there are significant opportunities for reducing the likelihood of violence and persistent contention through policy changes, potentially reducing the suffering of individuals, the destruction of natural environments, and drains on the capability of the state.Item Water Resources, Institutional Capacity and Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa(2009) Haxton, Wanda Jeanne; Quester, George; Kim, Soo Yeon; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Case studies where both scarcity and conflict are present have dominated research on the nexus between environmental scarcity and conflict. This dissertation offers a quantitative analysis of the effect changes in water resources have on domestic conflict in 42 Sub-Saharan African nations which differ across the dependent variable, domestic conflict, and which vary across the explanatory environmental variables. This research advances the discussion of the causal effects of environmental scarcity and degradation on domestic conflict in four ways. It grounds the domestic conflict-environmental degradation discussion in the civil and social conflict literature; research on environmental security concludes that environmental change is most likely to play a role in domestic conflicts but research on domestic conflict typically does not include environmental variables. This quantitative study addresses a methodological shortcoming of earlier research, limited variation across the variable measuring water resource availability, by testing an alternative means of operationalizing water resources using annual precipitation data weighted by land area and population and weighted by land area and gross national product. This study introduces additional variation on the dependent variable and compares the results of a dichotomous variable with the results of a dependent variable with categorical coding based on the States in Armed Conflict Database. This research extends the scope of explanatory variables to include indicators for political institutions and their capacity to manage the water resources within their national boundaries. The findings support and extend previous conclusions that water resources contribute to civil conflict and demonstrate that the use of precipitation data weighted by land area and population, a variable with variation, is a correlate for water resource availability, a static variable; and thereby providing results that are more reliable. This correlate advances the environment-conflict discourse by more directly linking the data that describes the natural world to the social changes to which those natural phenomenon are purported to relate. This study also finds that institutional capacity to manage water resources creates opportunities for rent-seeking but that open political institutions mediate between water resources and conflict.