Unstable Ground

Alex Alvarez is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. He was the founding director of the Martin-Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust, Tolerance, and Humanitarian Values. He is the author of several books, including Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, Genocidal Crimes, and Native America and the Question of Genocide. He has also served as an editor for the journal Violence and Victims, and he was a founding coeditor of the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention.

Alvarez, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northern Arizona University, examines climate change and its effect on conflicts in this thoughtful academic volume. He argues that the pressing issue regarding climate change is the role it plays in ‘helping create certain kinds of conflict,’ particularly ‘communal and ethnic violence, war, and genocide.’ Alvarez lays out a few ways in which environmental shifts can affect populations and occasionally lead to famine and war. He cites as an example the record heat waves that struck India and Pakistan in the summer of 2016, which melted pavement and killed over 1,000 people. Alvarez also discusses access to natural resources such as wood, oil, and gas, explaining that they ‘allow a state to meet the basic survival needs of its citizens.’ Water, Alvarez notes, is often taken for granted in industrialized nations ‘where cheap and apparently endless supplies of fresh water are readily available.’ He writes of the massive drought that ravaged Syria from 2006–2011 and bears some responsibility for the subsequent conflict there. On the flip side, populations are equally threatened by flooding rivers and rising sea levels. Alvarez’s thoughtful and precise work highlights some deeply troubling but underdiscussed aspects of climate change.

• Chapter 1: Making Sense of Climate ChangeChapter 2: On the Origins of Violent Conflict: War and the Genocidal ImpulseChapter 3: Linking Climate Change and ConflictChapter 4: Water, Violent Conflict, and GenocideChapter 5: Forced Displacement and Borders in a Warming WorldChapter 6: Preventing Conflict and Building Resilience