Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 23 May 2022

Abstract and Keywords

The relationship of the natural environment to war has long been the subject of study, but its connection to atrocity crimes in particular has received far less attention. This chapter explores the rich literature on the role natural resources play in shaping violence, examining it through two broad areas of focus that define the scholarship: scarcity and abundance. In doing so, it provides an overview of the key thematic debates linking resources to violence, ranging from early Malthusian concerns over demographic pressures to more recent discussion of the potential (and perhaps already realized) cataclysmic impacts of climate change and urbanization.

Keywords: war crimes, genocide, armed conflict, violence, natural resources, environment, abundance, scarcity, climate, nature, greed, urbanization

Kieran Mitton

Kieran Mitton is Reader in Conflict, Security and Development in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and author of Rebels in a Rotten State: Approaches to Understanding Atrocity in the Sierra Leone Civil War (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2015).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.