Peter
Schwartzstein

When we talk about climate’s contribution to violence, we generally characterize these stresses as external forces, as destabilizers applying pressure to already ‘messy’ socio-political contexts from above or outside. And there’s good reason for that categorization. It’s more or less how most other drivers of instability function. It all sounds so commonsensical too. Above all, it’s sometimes correct. Simply put, more drought, more extreme weather events, and more climate phenomena of other orders can act as proverbial final straws in places already up to their eyeballs with challenges of another nature. (This “Threat Multiplier” model is reflected in climate vulnerability measures, where factors like conflict or socioeconomic pressures are considered obstacles to a country’s capacity to cope with climate change.¹)

But over my decade of climate security-focused reporting in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, I’ve most frequently encountered a slightly different series of pathways from climate to violence. In these cases, climate change is gnawing away, like a termite, within people and places, rather than—or sometimes as well as—external to them. In this inversion, climate change weakens people’s ability to prevent violence fueled by other causes. For one, climate stresses directly or indirectly compromise the structures that individuals, communities, and even nation-states generally turn to at times of crisis, thereby ensuring that these institutions or local ad hoc governing bodies are less able to keep the peace when they’re most needed. For another, these stresses weaken the psychological and material coping mechanisms that people, consciously or not, fall back on when the going gets tough. That makes it more likely that non-climate-fueled troubles will translate into violence than they otherwise might.

Among a rash of other crippled or disrupted survival strategies, the very fact that the relationships on which troubled peoples frequently rely are also fraying for climate-related reasons can fuel further violence.^2,3 Like soldiers dispatched into battle naked, wounded, and unarmed, vulnerable people must increasingly run their usual gauntlets of ‘regular’ threats to peace and stability—and some new external climate ones, all while stripped by these termite-like climate impacts of their carefully crafted defenses. Cue bad things.

This partial re-articulation of the nature of the problem, which builds on the work of other researchers such as Hegazi et al. and which I’ve come to refer to as the “termite theory” of climate-related violence, is potentially meaningful for a few key reasons.⁴ It helps to explain, as Josh Busby and others have articulated, what makes some places susceptible to climate-related violence while similarly or more climate-battered places avoid it.⁵ It hints at a few appropriate responses, and in terms slightly more specific than ‘improve governance’. After all, at a time when adequate climate mitigation isn’t currently on the cards, we may have alternative entry points from which to try and stifle this fast-proliferating form of violence. Ultimately and most importantly, the more we come to understand the nature and gravity of climate’s contribution to violence, the more likely it is that we might begin to dedicate the kind of energy and resources to tackling these stresses that their severity warrants. Below are some key examples of “termite theory” at work: