Hostility between the Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) and the country’s government—brewing since government officials announced a sharp increase in mining project commitments in the northern region of Niger in early 2007—escalated this month. Violence reached Niger’s capital city of Niamey for the first time on January 8, 2008, when a landmine exploded under a car, killing a local radio director. The MNJ, which decries what it perceives as the unequal distribution of profits from uranium mining and oil drilling in Tuareg territory, has killed nearly 50 soldiers since early last year, earning the wrath of the Nigerien government. Although the group vehemently denies any involvement with the January 8 attack, many in Niger are skeptical of this claim.

In its mission to prevent conflict in Africa, the new U.S. military combatant command in Africa (AFRICOM) will likely address the environmental dimensions of conflicts, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whelan told Inside the Pentagon (subscription required). “To the extent that the Africa Command in its management of our capability and capacity-building training programs enables African forces to be more effective in deterring conflicts, defusing conflicts, responding to local flare-ups that might occur because of some environmentally caused issue—then, yes, you could say that AFRICOM is part of the process of addressing the consequences of environmental change,” said Whelan. She noted that shifting weather patterns and sustained drought helped precipitate the current conflict in Darfur between pastoralists and farmers—echoing an argument UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made in a June 2007 editorial in The Washington Post.

A transcript of an October 2007 interview Whelan gave on AFRICOM is available here. In a New Security Beat post, Department of the Army Senior Africa Analyst Shannon Beebe argues that AFRICOM should implement an environmental security strategy.

By destabilizing environments, global climate change can exacerbate existing security challenges and contribute to the creation of new ones. A widely publicized November 2007 report by the Council on Foreign Relations examines the linkages between climate and security and proposes a manageable set of policy options to adapt to and reduce the impacts of an inevitable global change in climate. The report, entitled “Climate Change and National Security,” was written by Joshua Busby, an assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. In Part 1 of a two-part podcast series, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko speaks with Busby about the report and his recommendations for action.

The National Interest sponsored an online debate on the links between natural resources and conflict featuring David Victor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Klare, Sherri Goodman, and Paul Kern.

Georgetown University’s Colin Kahl argues that Kenya’s present strife is largely due to deep-seated ethnic land grievances, while a Council on Foreign Relations brief claims that it is partially the result of demographic factors—the country’s “youth bulge,” for instance.

“Weathering the Storm: Options for Framing Adaptation and Development,” a new report from the World Resources Institute, reviews climate change adaptation efforts from throughout the developing world, and explores how adaptation activities intersect with poverty, environmental degradation, and other challenges.

An article from IRIN News examines whether or not the extraction of Mozambique’s mineral resources—including heavy metals, coal, natural gas, and perhaps oil—is likely to reduce the country’s widespread poverty.

Thousands of people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi have fled the flooding caused by the overflowing Zambezi River, reports BBC News. “Damage to crops and roads has raised fears of food shortages, and aid agencies have also warned of increased risk of waterborne diseases and diseases caused by poor sanitation.”

A story in yesterday’s New York Times describes an expanding campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kikuyu tribe in western Kenya. We’ve seen this story before. In my 2006 book States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, I explained how rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and historical land grievances collided with multi-party elections in the early 1990s to provide opportunities for Kenyan elites to gain power and wealth by violently mobilizing ethnic groups against one another. The ensuing violence pitted the Kalenjin and other smaller tribal communities engaged in pastoral activities against the Kikuyu, Luo, and other traditional farming communities in the fertile Rift Valley, leaving more than a thousand Kenyans dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

Sound familiar? Demographically and environmentally induced ethnic land competition—at the heart of the 1990s conflicts—remains problematic today. Deep-seated grievances emanating from struggles over scarce farmland provide ample opportunities for elites across the political spectrum to mobilize tribal supporters to engage in violence and ethnic land cleansing during times of electoral instability—especially in rural areas, where strong group identification facilitates such mobilization. This didn’t happen during the last presidential election, in 2002, because elites bought into the democratic process and the elections were viewed as fair. In addition, the Kenyan Electoral Commission and the international community, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the strife in 1992 and 1997, closely scrutinized electoral behavior in 2002.

This time, the apparent rigging of the election by the Kibaki regime—which many minority tribes view as having used its political power to unfairly benefit its own Kikuyu tribe—unleashed the latent grievances against the Kikuyu still present in Kenyan society. “You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, told the Times. “They are political…they go back to land.”

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a regular ECSP contributor.

In an editorial in The New York Times, noted author and former Wilson Center speaker Jared Diamond argues that the world’s growing population “matters only insofar as people consume and produce.”

A new guide from MEASURE Evaluation provides a set of evidence-based indicators that integrated population-health-environment (PHE) projects can use for monitoring and evaluation.

WomenLead in Peace and Stability, a new publication from the Centre for Development and Population Activities, profiles 15 women from war-torn nations—including Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Nepal—who have worked to build sustainable peace in their countries.

Tensions are high between those who support the construction of a new township for former Nairobi slum-dwellers, and those who argue the development will jeopardize the future of Nairobi National Park.

Henrik Urdal, a senior researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), spent several weeks at the Woodrow Wilson Center this autumn as a visiting fellow. At PRIO, Urdal researches the relationships between demography and armed conflict, focusing particularly on population pressure on natural resources. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko sat down with Urdal to discuss his current research interests, including the implications of a rapidly urbanizing global populace, sub-national demographic trends in India, and the extraordinary Iranian fertility decline.

Climate change could increase instability in the Middle East, says “Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security,” a new report by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME). Written in preparation for this month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, the report focuses on how climate change could harm the region’s already-scarce water supply. Climate change’s likely impacts on water in the Middle East include reduced precipitation and resulting water shortages; more frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods; and rising sea levels.