Population Growth, Environmental Degradation, and State-Sponsored Violence: The Case of Kenya, 1991-93

Population Growth, Environmental Degradation, and State-Sponsored Violence, The Case of Kenya, 1991-93 Colin H. h h l I n August 1995 the United States Defense IntelligenceAgency (DIA)finished a study on the water hyacinth plant in Lake Victoria, Africa. To most traditional students of international security affairs, the existence of a DIA study on plants in an African lake probably seems quite odd. The study becomes more understandable once it is recognizedthat Lake Victoria provides the burgeoning human populations of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania with 120,000 tons of fish each year. Given that a single water hyacinth plant can multiply into a million plants in one year, the plant could eventually strangle the lake and decimate the stock of fish. This in turn could lead to widespread famine and political instability, possibly creating a situation in which the United States would be called on to intervene.' The DIA study reflectsa growing interest among policymakers,environmentalists , and security specialistsin studying the demographic and environmental sources of violent civil conflict in developing countries. This interest stems chiefly from the recognition of two important trends. One is the changing nature of warfare in the post-World War I1 era. Since 1945the vast majority of wars have been located in the developing world, and most of these conflicts Colin H. Kahl is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. In 1997-98 he was a National Security Fellow at the Iohn M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Weatherhead Center for Infernational Affairs, Harvard University. I would like to thank Richard Betts, Nazli Choucri, Tim Crawford, David Downie, Peter Gleick, Jack Goldstone, Tad Homer-Dixon, Robert Jervis, Robert Keohane, Marc Levy, Rhoda Margesson, Aaron Seeskin, JackSnyder, Leslie Vinjamuri, Jon Western,Marcia Wright, and all the participants in the Olin Institute's National Security Seminar for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the United States Institute of Peace and the Olin Institute for their generous financial support. 1. Steven Greenhouse, "The Greening of U.S. Diplomacy," New York Times, October 9,1995, p. A6. International Secunty, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 1998), pp. 80-119 0 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 80 State-Sponsored Violence in Kenya, 1991-93 I 81 have been intrastate in nature.’ Second is the accelerating pace and enormity of demographic and environmental change. Between 1950and 1990,the global population more than doubled from 2.5 billion to almost 5.3 billion. Over 85 percent of this increase occurred in the developing world, where the population ballooned by an astounding 2.4 billion in forty years. This ominous trend continues. Although the rate of population growth has declined since its peak in the 1960s, the demographic momentum built into the system currently produces an unprecedented absolute increase of nearly 90 million additional people every year. The United Nations estimates that the global population will increase from its current level of more than 5.7 billion to 8.3 billion by 2025 and hit the 10-billionmark by 2050, with the bulk of this growth occurring in the worlds poorest countries3 The demographic explosion has combined with an incredible expansion in the world economy to place enormous pressure on the planet’s renewable resources and global life-support systems. A growing number of scientists and environmentalists fear that environmental degradation in many parts of the world has become, or is fast becoming, so severe that it threatens to undermine the very natural resource base upon which the economies and stable political order of developing countries ultimately depend.4 Existing scholarshiphas advanced two major hypotheses linking population growth and environmental degradation to civil strife: deprivation and state weakness. The deprivation hypothesis claims that population and environmental pressures can impoverish individuals, thereby inspiring them to take up arms against their governments. The state weakness hypothesis goes one step further. Proponents of this argument agree that population growth and environmental degradation can provide individuals with incentivesto engage in violence, but argue that impoverished individuals are unlikely to engage in armed struggle unless these pressures also increase the...