Category Archives: Resource Scarcity/Abundance – Week 1

In our globalized and modern community, environmental security problem has become a rising issue. However, as we have not developed the environmental security field as much as we have done for other political security issues, multiples of possible theories exist today … Continue reading →

How we talk about and study environmental security is largely based on how we define it and what we believe is to be the major conflict and consequence. An interesting argument came up on whether environmental threats should be acknowledged … Continue reading →

Prior to reading Environmental Security: Approaches and Issues, I have neither learned nor paid attention on the environmental security studies. Thus, most of the information on this book was fairly new to me. However, through these somewhat challenging and complicated … Continue reading →

Whilst reading this week’s material, I was struck by the lack of continuity between the various scholars. Although this is clearly not meant to be a textbook written by one or two authors, I struggled to find the common ground … Continue reading →

With the primary debates of this week’s readings surrounding correlations between violent conflict and resource scarcity vs. violent conflict and resource abundance, I thought it was interesting how the introduction opened with an analysis of past acknowledgements of environmental security … Continue reading →

While reading this week’s reading assignments, I began to truly understand what we spoke about on the first day: that no one considers environmental security the same way. Once I understood this aspect, I then asked myself: if no one … Continue reading →

In addition to providing general theoretical context, this week’s readings see two schools of thought in the field of environmental conflict studies argue against each other. De Soysa asserts that wealth of resources and violent or greed-driven conflict are linked … Continue reading →

As a new area of study, environmental security has faced many challenges, especially because very little data has been collected on the topic.  Scholars have suggested that general security be reframed to include environmental security. However, framing environmental issues as … Continue reading →

Reading about theory has never been an easy endeavor for me. Attempting to understand the author’s use of big words and convoluted ideas and then translating those ideas to real life scenarios is extremely challenging, and I found reading about … Continue reading →