Environmental Stress, Political Institutions and Social Conflict

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

The fast-expanding literature on the climate-conflict nexus has improved our understanding of the causes of political violence, but it falls short of identifying local contextual factors that may moderate the effects of environmental stress on social conflict. This project advances our scientific understanding of how environmental stress impacts social conflict. Focusing on conflicts organized around lineage- (caste-clan) and religion-based identities, this project highlights the importance of attenuated manifestation of social conflict, such as denial of access to community resources, asset appropriations and public humiliation, particularly against marginalized socioeconomic groups. These attenuated manifestations received little attention in the existing literature, which almost exclusively focuses on accentuated manifestations of social conflict, such as insurgencies and civil wars, even though localized attenuated incidents can engender major accentuated violence, fueling instability in a geopolitically volatile region that is of vital importance to US national security and global peace. In addition to generating theoretical and empirical insights, the project will train undergraduate and graduate students, especially from under-represented groups, in a critical area of social science research. The PIs collect high resolution environmental stress and conflict data, leveraging discontinuities in historical and contemporary political institutions across carefully selected subdistrict, district and national boundaries, and deploying a range of methodological tools, including ethnographic work and a survey experiment to facilitate a strong causal inference. They will develop a theoretical framework that builds on the existing literature to offer a nuanced understanding of the role of historical and contemporary political institutions in moderating the effects of environmental stress and water access on social conflict. In theorizing a moderated and highly contextual relationship, this project challenges dominant narratives in both research and environmental stress and its impact on conflict and research on the role of colonial institutions while highlighting the importance of distinguishing between inter- and intra-ethnic divisions. The project develops an empirical framework that integrates three different levels of analysis – the district, sub-district and individual – within carefully controlled geographical settings. The sub-district level analysis focuses on selected clusters of geographically contiguous provinces in the two countries. For these analyses, the project will generate: a) large-scale, high-resolution data organized around religion- and lineage-based identities on the entire accentuated-attenuated social conflict spectrum; and, b) highly-localized longitudinal maps on water security and political institutions across the two countries. To validate the findings and clearly identify causal mechanisms, the PIs benchmark the results obtained from analyses of district and sub-district data against a forced-choice conjoint experiment deployed in 240 carefully selected primary census units in India combined with ethnographic work conducted in a subset of these communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.