ABSTRACT
Demographic and environmental change can produce security problems of two distinctly different kinds. These have entirely different processes and outcomes and generate rather different sorts of concerns and remedies. Violent environmental/demographic security issues reflect the impact of demographic and environmental changes on traditional security concerns—that is, ways that demographic or environmental changes increase the risk of violent international or domestic conflicts. Nonviolent environmental/demographic security issues reflect changes in population or in the environment that have consequences across international borders that in and of themselves produce undesirable outcomes. Thus become issues of international security even if they are not likely to produce armed violence. Much of the literature on environmental scarcity and violent conflict has erred in predicting violence because of a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the causes of political crises. Whatever popular misery may follow from environmental decay, such decay generally does not erode the loyalty of elites to governments.
