Thomas Homer-Dixon (born 1956 in Victoria, British Columbia) holds the Centre for International Governance Innovation Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, and is a Professor in the Centre for Environment and Business in the Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo. He previously held the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, and was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
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Homer-Dixon was raised in a rural area outside Victoria, British Columbia.[1]
He received his B.A. degree in political science from Carleton University in 1980 and his Ph.D. degree in Political Science from MIT in 1989, where he studied international relations, defense and arms control policy, cognitive science and conflict theory. He then moved to the University of Toronto where he led several international research projects studying the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries.
Recently, his research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on political science, economics, environmental studies, geography, cognitive science, social psychology and complex systems theory. Homer-Dixon is widely regarded as a central figure in the Environment and Security debate, having significantly shaped the discourse in the field.
Homer-Dixon proposed six kinds of environmental scarcity that could potentially produce violent conflict.
1) Greenhouse Effect 2) Statosphere Ozone Depletion 3) Degradation and loss of good agricultural land 4) Degradation and removal of forests 5) Depletion and pollution of fresh water supplies 6) Depletion of fisheries
He identified three causal paths by which scarcity produces conflict: 1) Decreasing supplies of physically controllable resources might provoke inter-state "simple-scarcity" conflicts or "resource wars" 2) Large population movements caused by environment stress might induce "group-identity" conflicts such as ethnic clashes 3) Scarcity could simultaneously increase economic deprivation and disrupt social institutions, causing "deprivation conflicts" reflected in civil strife and insurgency.
His award-winning works include: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, which won the 2006 National Business Book Award; The Ingenuity Gap, which won the 2001 Governor-General's Non-fiction Award; and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, which received the 2000 Lynton Caldwell Prize from the American Political Science Association.