ABSTRACT
In recent decades there has been renewed interest in using environmental factors to explain social phenomena. Such ‘neoenvironmental determinist’ explanations (Judkins et al. 2008) have been widely disseminated to the public through Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999). In current mainstream social sciences, including political science and economics, natural resources (abundance or scarcity), biogeography, location and climate are commonly presented as causal factors for poverty and global inequality as well as armed conflicts (Sachs 2001, Hibbs and Olsson 2004, Burke et al. 2009).
