HSD: Collaborative Research: Hydrology and Social Interactions: A Focus on Conflict in Africa

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Many scholars have hypothesized that water scarcity might contribute to the likelihood of internal political violence, yet it has been difficult to subject this proposition to an empirical test. This research project will test whether climatic and hydrologic variability influence patterns of civil war outbreak, using data for Africa, controlling for social, economic and political factors. Our goals in this project are (1) to test hypotheses linking water scarcity and variability to civil war outbreak, ceteris paribus, (2) to develop and test a methodology for combining gridded environmental time series data with spatial time series conflict data, (3) to communicate the findings and implications to decision-makers, and (4) to produce a data collection that will be useful to a wide range of civil war, human security, and other scholars interested in the impacts of water scarcity on human wellbeing and behavior. The investigators will carry out the test by bringing together subnational indicators of hydrology and conflict in Africa over the past three decades and carrying out statistical tests. The research team includes hydrologists, political scientists and geographers; this interdisciplinary approach seeks to capitalize on synergies seldom exercised in research on this topic.The research will have a number of significant intellectual impacts. It will demonstrate a methodology for combining spatial time-series data on natural resources with a widely used social science data set on internal war. This methodology is expected to have relevance across a range of social science research questions. It will provide robust answers to questions about the impact of water scarcity and water variability on the incidence of civil war. The project will generate a set of country-level and subnational-level water indicators that will be useful to a range of social science research needs, including public health, economic development, demography, and land-use/land -over change. The project will have broader impact as well, with vital policy implications in fields such as early warning, humanitarian assistance, and development planning. An award resulting from the FY 2006 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.