Conflict and environmental stress in Ethiopian history: looking for correlations

Abstract

The issues I shall try to address in this paper are both complex and evasive. Interaction between environmental stress and degradation on the one hand and social and political instability, upheaval, conflict and war on the other can be postulated is in fact postulated by the very fact of this conference.* With regard to the causal relationship between the two processes, it is also my understanding that we are here primarily concerned with the first as a cause or potential cause of the second. The focus on Northeast Africa and the Sahel provides a further guideline: not the ecological stress and degradation caused by overproduction and overconsumption in the wealthy societies of the industrialized world, but the deterioration of the basic natural resource (cultivable land) of predominantly agricultural societies operating at or close to subsistence level. Here the earlier history of mankind, when land was the all-important resource for all societies, and the experiences of recent disasters in Africa should presumably lead us in the same direction.