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Violent internal conflicts in more and more countries are ruining the lives of millions of people and undermining the ability of their governments to provide security and a tolerable economic existence. The contributors to this book take a new view of the reasons for this grave development in Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia and elsewhere. They question traditional analyses of conflict which rely primarily on ethnic, religious and cultural explanations since these do not take account of the increasingly obvious link between the growing scarcity of renewable resources and violent conflict in developing countries. At the same time, this book argues that one cannot understand domestic conflicts simply in environmental terms. For environmental scarcity functions in a society within a complex matrix of historically derived economic and political situations. In particular, an unequal social distribution of resourecs exacerbates scarcity and fuels popular conflict. The contributors to the book include Wolfgang Sachs, Larry Lohmann and Nicholas Hildyard.