Destabilization From ‘Within’: A “Termite Theory” of Climate’s Pathway to Violence
Publisher: Council on Strategic Risks
Author(s): Peter Schwartzstein
Date: 2025
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Governance
When we talk about climate’s contribution to violence, we generally characterize these stresses as external forces, as destabilizers applying pressure to already ‘messy’ socio-political contexts from above or outside. And there’s good reason for that categorization. It’s more or less how most other drivers of instability function. It all sounds so commonsensical too. Above all, it’s sometimes correct. Simply put, more drought, more extreme weather events, and more climate phenomena of other orders can act as proverbial final straws in places already up to their eyeballs with challenges of another nature. (This “Threat Multiplier” model is reflected in climate vulnerability measures, where factors like conflict or socioeconomic pressures are considered obstacles to a country’s capacity to cope with climate change.)
But over my decade of climate security-focused reporting in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, I’ve most frequently encountered a slightly different series of pathways from climate to violence. In these cases, climate change is gnawing away, like a termite, within people and places, rather than—or sometimes as well as—external to them. In this inversion, climate change weakens people’s ability to prevent violence fueled by other causes. For one, climate stresses directly or indirectly compromise the structures that individuals, communities, and even nation-states generally turn to at times of crisis, thereby ensuring that these institutions or local ad hoc governing bodies are less able to keep the peace when they’re most needed. For another, these stresses weaken the psychological and material coping mechanisms that people, consciously or not, fall back on when the going gets tough. That makes it more likely that non-climate-fueled troubles will translate into violence than they otherwise might.