Disasters, Asymmetric Cost, and War: Why Evidence on Climate Conflict Is Mixed

• In Event: Emerging Scholars Lightning Round: Graduate Student Research: Understanding Military, Economic, and Status Security in Contemporary and Historical Contexts

Abstract

Evidence on the effect of extreme weather events or natural disasters on the risk of armed conflict is mixed. Some scholars find that disasters and climate anomalies are associated with a higher risk of violence. Others argue, however, that those events do not directly affect the likelihood of war or even have pacifying effects. While it could be the case that one of the competing arguments is “true” and others are not, in this paper we examine another possibility: disasters and climate anomalies can have heterogenous effects on the risk of conflict and, consequently, systematically make empirical evidence mixed. Specifically, we develop a game-theoretic model of armed conflict that focuses on the role of political groups' asymmetric exposure to a disaster. The model presents two contrasting equilibria. In the first, a political group can attack its rival after a disaster opportunistically if the former incurred disproportionately smaller costs from the weather event and finds the rival temporarily vulnerable. In the second equilibrium, a player attacks the other preventively before a disaster occurs if the former is geographically vulnerable to climate anomalies and anticipates that it will be disadvantaged as a result of a disaster. The equilibria provide a novel theoretical explanation of why the empirical evidence on the climate impacts on conflict seems mixed: (i) in the first equilibrium, the presence of a disaster is positively correlated to conflict because players fight right after the extreme weather event, whereas (ii) they are negatively associated in the second because a war erupts before a disaster occurs.

Authors

• Guanwei Hu, University of California, San Diego

• Ren Charles Mueller

• Hiroto Sawada, Princeton University