From “Mad Max” to “Snowpiercer,” pop culture is rife with depictions of climate change leading directly to conflict over diminishing natural resources. Yet, even as the effects of climate change are felt more and more sharply, the debate about how natural resources relate to conflict is far from settled. As we enter October and the spooky season arrives, we’ll spend Deep Dive looking into how the “scare” gets put into scarcity by discussing the latest research on resource conflicts.

In a new article in the Journal of Peace Research, Tobias Ide, Miguel Lopez, Christiane Fröhlich, and Jürgen Scheffran look at water conflicts that are many steps removed from the dystopia of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Call it “Consternation Path,” maybe. While most studies of resource conflicts focus on when those conflicts erupt into shooting wars with battle deaths and/or electric guitar flamethrowers, Ide et al. chose instead to examine nonviolent protests and demonstrations that arise out of disagreements over water usage. These smaller, less drastic forms of political contestation, they argue, both matter on their own — protests can be a source of political change — and can also be warning signs for when certain disagreements about water grow into deeper, more dangerous political divides.

Sometimes, a drought leads to political organizing against established authorities, with people who are suffering from lack of water demonstrating against people in charge of keeping up water reserves. Other times, a drought is just a drought — people conserve and suffer, but don’t take out their frustrations in the streets. To figure out why some droughts are tinderboxes and other are just dry, the researchers mapped all the droughts that occurred in the Middle East and North Africa between 1996 and 2009, and then compared that map with a database of all the water-related protests that took place in the region over the same time period.

Then, applying a range of other data and (appropriately for a Halloween-themed Deep Dive) Boolean algebra, Ide et al. tried to determine what conditions are sufficient for a drought to result in protests. In every case where a drought brought on protests, the place where the protest happened was governed by an autocratic regime and had preexisting social cleavages. In over 90% of cases, interruptions to the regular water supply combined with preexisting social cleavages also produced demonstrations. In situations where these sufficiency conditions weren’t met, however, droughts generated this kind of nonviolent pushback relatively rarely.

As the authors point out, that finding is at odds with the idea that climate change is, on its own, a path to violence, even in areas where societal tensions are high. In drought conditions, social cleavages alone are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for protests, much less armed conflict. Instead, it is governance choices — either regime type at the macro level or water cuts at the micro level — that combine with drought and social unrest to spur mass political action.

To underline the importance of politics in driving resource conflict, the authors pointed to a case that doesn’t fit their model. In early 2005, Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, experienced drought, water cuts, and deep social cleavages due to Israeli occupation, yet there were no conflicts over water. It is impossible to prove the negative case but, the authors speculate, Rafah residents, living under occupation, likely had political priorities that took precedence over the water cuts. Climate change will reshape the world, but it cannot dictate how people respond to it. Just as political decisions have brought on the climate crisis, it will be political decisions that determine who bears the brunt of its effects.

Shirin Jaafari profiled Najeeb Michaeel Moussa, the Catholic Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, after he was nominated for a prestigious human rights prize. In 2014, when ISIS invaded his city of Qaraqosh, in northern Iraq, Moussa organized an evacuation that brought many of his co-religionists and hundreds of historical manuscripts in his care to safety behind Kurdish lines. At one point, ISIS fighters drew level with their convoy before being driven back by Kurdish forces. The manuscripts have since been scanned and made available to scholars, but the originals remain in Iraq as part of the country’s rich cultural heritage.

Ore Koren discussed the potential for violence in the wake of upcoming US elections in the context of past contentious elections from around the world. Electoral violence, he notes, mostly takes place in countries without the resources or institutions to constrain it. The US, he argued, has durable institutions and well-organized security services that can serve as a check on post-election violence. So far, the vast majority of American political demonstrations in 2020 have been peaceful, another strong indicator that major post-election violence is unlikely.

Orla Barry reported on widespread support for US president Donald Trump among members of far-right groups in Europe. On one hand, European right-wingers largely support Trump, and see him as an ally in their efforts to upend established institutions. On the other, some coverage of Trump as an important inspiration to the European right is overplayed, experts point out. The far-right has a long history in Europe that far predates Trump’s arrival on the American political scene and, as Barry quoted political scientist Cas Mudde as saying, European far-right parties “have a much more developed ideological frame than Trump will ever have.”

There’s been a lot of speculation in the past week about whether President Trump being in treatment for COVID-19 poses a threat to US national security. Are US adversaries readying their forces to conquer the American homeland now that the commander-in-chief is in the hospital? Experts say “definitely not, what are you even talking about?” but they’re forgetting a crucial historical example. In 1963, when the United States’ national security apparatus was thrown into chaos by the killing of John F. Kennedy, four dastardly Liverpudlians wasted no time establishing a beachhead in the States. They quickly became the vanguard force of an irreversible onslaught from the United Kingdom that became known as the British Invasion. So keep an eye out for mop haircuts in the coming days.   

The rare topical math joke.

As conflict grows between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani military has either scored a major propaganda coup or suffered a self-inflicted publicity misstep, depending on your opinion about hair metal.

Sultan Mehmed V, Ismail Enver Pasha, and Archduke Josef Ferdinand all figured out how to change their Zoom displays, which is a decent consolation prize after losing World War I.

This really obviates the need for all the Lego ICBM silos we’ve been constructing under our backyard.

“Thank goodness I was able to shave 10 minutes off my emergency response time,” the medic says as he shoots jet exhaust directly into the patient’s face.