Threats to sustainability: simulating conflict within and between nations

Violent con ̄ict is increasingly viewed as a factor related to sustainable development. This article argues, based on the well-established theory of lateral pressure originally proposed by Choucri and North in 1975, that the relationship arises because the same factors that a€ect sustainable development also in ̄uence con ̄ict, namely population, technology, resources, military force, and trade and bargaining, while con ̄ict, in turn, a€ects these variables. The theory is tested with a system dynamics model that includes international as well as domestic violent con ̄ict, calibrated to seven countries in southern Africa and six OECD countries. The results show a number of situations in which con ̄ict is perpetuated in a cycle that is dicult to break. *c 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Syst. Dyn. Rev. 14, 129±162, (1998) Security, sustainability, and violent conflict Increasingly, matters related to security and stability are recognized as relevant to sustainable development. This recognition is especially salient when conditions of insecurity and instability threaten the potential for transition toward sustainability. Moreover, security and sustainability may be related to the extent that they are both shaped by the same underlying demographical parameters, technological conditions, and resource endowments rooted in socio-economic, ecological and political processes, which all interact together to shape environmental balances. Wars and warfare often divert valuable energy and resources away from social goods and economic investment (relative shares of military versus civilian expenditures) and concentrate national policies on `defense' matters rather than on sustainability trajectories. Most recently, this general awareness has taken on a new form, namely the concern expressed in both academic and policy-making circles about dual but distinct dilemmas: environmental consequences of con ̄ict and con ̄icts generated by environmental deterioration (Choucri 1997; Barbier and Homer-Dixon 1996). The problem, of course, is 129 Centre for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology E38-60, Cambridge MA 02139, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding Author {Current address: 1441 Midvale Ave 02, Los Angeles, CA 90024, U.S.A. Contract grant sponsor: Austrian Ministry of Science. Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] Annababette Wils received her PhD from the University of Vienna in Demography in 1995. Since 1989 she has worked on models of sustainable development at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Since 1995 she has been a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on natural resource use and population and con ̄ict. Matilde Kamiya received her B.A. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 in Economics. During her time at MIT, she contributed to the population and con ̄ict study as part of a student research program. She is presently a consultant at Arthur Anderson in Los Angeles. Nazli Choucri is Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Associate Director of the Technology and Development Program. She has been working on the that the causes and consequences of con ̄ict are highly interconnected, and the interconnections are likely to be greater when the con ̄icts become more violent.