Natural Disasters, State Capacity, and Armed Conflict...? A Closer Look at the Foundations of the Climate Change-to-Conflict Debate.

The expectation that global climate change increases the variability of extreme weather events has generated an extreme interest in investigating how these events may be tied to our understanding of international conflict. Although the destructiveness that comes in the wake of a serious natural disaster is unequivocal, what remains unclear is whether these events are causes of violent conflict. Despite the interest that natural disasters have recently received in the ecoviolence literature, the evidence that they are associated with armed conflict is mixed. Moreover, despite their strong influence on the integrity of a state's institutional capacity, a serious discussion of how the effects of natural disasters affect state capacity is missing from existing theories of the climate change-to-conflict debate. My study makes three contributions to this field of research. First, I begin by examining the conditional relationship that state capacity and natural disasters may share in elevating, or mitigating, the risk of armed conflict. Not only does this provide a closer consideration of the foundations of eco-violence hypothesis, specifically in regards to natural disasters, it also finally addresses the belief by scholars that state capacity may share a role in the climate change-to-conflict debate. Second, I draw a distinction that the risks for armed conflict produced by environmental factors are theoretically stronger at lower levels of organizational capacity. This motivates my testing for these relationships across interstate, intrastate, and substrate levels of analysis. Finally, I use dyad-month and country-month research designs, which represents a departure from existing studies on eco-shocks and armed conflict. These designs more accurately capture the relationship between the introduction of an eco-shock and the onset of violent conflict. I show that the risk of armed conflict is not systematic, but varies dramatically and is often contrary to theoretical expectations. Surprisingly, my results suggest that the contingency of natural disasters on state capacity is more of a theoretical belief than a statistical outcome [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]