This study addresses the question why intergroup conflicts over scarce, renewable resources in peripheral areas of the global South escalate into violence. In order to do so, twenty cases of such conflicts, seven of which turned violent, are analyzed. The method of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is used in order to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative accounts in the field and to detect patterns of conjunctural causation. In theoretical terms, structural conditions (negative othering and high power differences between the conflict parties) and triggering conditions (external resource appropriation and recent political change) of a violent escalation of renewable resource conflicts are distinguished. The empirical results as well as various robustness checks and comparisons with individual cases suggest that the simultaneous presence of negative othering, low power differences and recent political change is a sufficient condition for the violent escalation of conflicts over scarce renewable resources. I conclude that research on socio-environmental conflicts should pay more attention to conjunctural causation, local power differences and qualitatively different forms of conflict and political change

Interest in the intersections of environmental issues, peace and conflict has surged in recent years. Research on the topic has developed along separate research streams, which broadened the knowledge base considerably, but hardly interact across disciplinary, methodological, epistemological and ontological silos. Our forum addresses this gap by bringing into conversation six research streams on the environment, peace and conflict: environmental change and human security, climate change and armed conflict, environmental peacebuilding, political ecology, securitisation of the environment, and decolonizing environmental security. For each research stream, we outline core findings, potentials for mutual enrichment with other streams, and prospects for future research.

The literature on environmental peacemaking claims that groups in conflict can put aside their differences and cooperate in the face of shared environmental challenges, thereby facilitating more peaceful relations between them. This study provides the first comprehensive review of the widely dispersed empirical evidence on such environment-peace links. In order to do so, it distinguishes three understandings of peace and identifies four mechanisms connecting environmental cooperation to peace. The results suggest that environmental cooperation can facilitate the absence of violence within states as well as symbolic rapprochement within and between states, although such links are strongly dependent on the presence of several contextual factors. The most relevant mechanisms connecting environmental cooperation to peace are an increase in understanding and trust and especially the build-up of institutions. By contrast, environmental peacemaking is unlikely to have an impact on substantial integration between states or groups. Based on these findings, the article offers four suggestions for future research: (i) assess the relevance of environmental cooperation vis-à-vis other (presumably less context-dependent) drivers of peacemaking, (ii) pay more attention to the mechanisms connecting environmental cooperation to peacemaking, (iii) focus on the interactions between and the different time horizons of the three understandings of peace, and (iv) study the downside of environmental peacemaking to provide a more nuanced assessment and identify further relevant contextual factors.