ABSTRACT
Existing research has claimed that biofuels can contribute to conicts, including violent conicts, in two ways: either they aggravate tensions in the production areas or they contribute to a rise of world food prices, thus stimulating grievances and eventually violence (Webersik and Bergius 2013). Due to the limited scope of this chapter, we focus solely on the local (or regional) tensions caused by biofuels in or around the production areas. In addition, we only deal with the links between violent conict and the cultivation of crops for biofuel production. A conict is dened in this study as a manifest clash of two or more social groups’ interests that are perceived as contradictive or incompatible by the respective groups (Ide et al. 2014). We use the term violence in order to describe all forms of physical, direct violence against human beings or property (Galtung 1969).
