Tobias Ide

The potential links between environmental stress, natural resource scarcity and (violent) intergroup conflict have attracted much academic and political attention in recent years. Scientific studies on the issue have often been criticised for their rationalist and positivist conceptions of the environment, conflict and research. By contrast, a large literature on social conflicts and on human-environment interactions has emphasised the intersubjective construction of conflict identities, threat perceptions and environmental assessments and the relevance of these constructions for human agency. This chapter argues that SKAD is useful to analyse and understand these intersubjective dimensions of socio-environmental conflict and cooperation. In order to support this claim, I demonstrate how SKAD can help us to make sense of the simultaneity of conflict and cooperation about water between Israel and Palestine. By doing so, I also explore how SKAD can be productively combined with field research and local interviews, especially in contexts characterised by intense conflicts.

This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of the environmental peacebuilding literature with a special focus on the Middle East. It reviews the different streams of research which contribute to our understanding of environmental peacebuilding. The chapter formulates some suggestions for the theoretical integration of the different approaches. It presents two case studies which illustrate and extend the potentials and pitfalls of environmental peacebuilding in the Middle East: interactions between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq concerning the Euphrates and Tigris river basin(s); and water-related cooperation between Israel and Jordan. The trust building process between Israel and Jordan can be divided into three steps: establishing a water regime; institutionalizing the regime by a joint water committee build the peace treaty; and implementing the regime with a joint desalination project, based on game changing technological innovation.

Engagement with school textbooks is promising in research on environmental issues because textbooks are indicative of dominant discourses and contribute to the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The first part of this chapter assesses the theoretical and empirical relevance of school textbook analysis for three environment-related fields of study: environmental education, disaster education, and critical geopolitics. This section also critically discusses the methods employed for this research. The second part of the chapter suggests promising directions for future research in the three fields of study previously discussed. It also outlines how a focus on school textbooks can enrich other key debates in environment-related social science research, for instance, on environmental governance, environmental security, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

The role of climate change as a potential cause of violent conflict has been debated in the scholarly and policy communities for several years. We review the most recent quantitative and qualitative literature and find that research on the issue has produced little consensual findings so far. Further, we discuss major theoretical, conceptual and empirical issues and describe possible pathways linking climate change to violent conflict. To illustrate these issues, we analyse the climate-conflict nexus in different world regions and present three qualitative case studies in north-western Kenya, the Nile Basin, and Israel/Palestine. We find that possible reasons for the lack of scientific consensus may be the difficulties of existing approaches to adequately capture the complex links between climate change, vulnerability, and violent conflict.