Tobias Ide (scholar)
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Tobias Ide is a German-Australian political scientist and geographer. He is currently Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University in Perth[1] and Specially Appointed Professor of Peace and Sustainability at Hiroshima University.[2] Ide is well known for his research on climate security and environmental peacebuilding.[3] He also consults decision makers, for instance at the United Nations, World Bank, and NATO.[4]
Ide has worked extensively on the impacts of climate change and conflict risks. In several studies, he showed that climate-related disasters increase the risk of protests, armed conflict onset, and civil war escalation. However, he argues that this does not happen always and automatically, but only if certain context factors are present. These include the political exclusion of ethnic groups, low levels of development, a weakening of the government, and unsuitable government responses to the disaster.[5][6][7] He finds similar patterns when analysing conflicts about renewable resources.[8] In his 2023 book Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints, Ide argues that disasters can also lead to temporary reductions in conflict intensity by weakening the conflict parties. Such time periods provide windows of opportunity for aid delivery and conflict resolution.[9]
Furthermore, Ide has conducted widely cited research on environmental peacebuilding. He demonstrated that water and conservation cooperation between states can support already existing reconciliation efforts, drawing on examples like the Lempa River and the Virunga National Park.[10] He also argues that environmental cooperation contributes to peacebuilding within countries by improving the environmental situation, increasing trust and understanding, and building shared institutions. Such efforts can contribute to local and everyday peace if relevant institutions support the efforts and there is widespread agreement on the nature and urgency of environmental problems.[11]
Ide has coined the concept of the "dark side of environmental peacebuilding",[12] by which he refers to six potential adverse effects of environmental peacebuilding efforts:
- depoliticization (of underlying conflict drivers),
- (unvoluntary) displacement of people (e.g., by cooperative dam projects),
- discrimination of certain groups,
- deterioration into conflict (due to grievances about the efforts),
- delegitimization of the state (if NGOs and international actors perform more successful environmental management), and
- degradation of the environment (e.g., cooperative resource exploitation).[12]
These adverse effects are often unintended and avoidable. In 2022, he received the Enhancing the Environmental Peacebuilding Knowledge Base Award for this work.[13]
Career
Ide was born in 1985. He studied Political Science and Media and Communication Studies at the University of Leipzig (2005–2012). Afterwards, he went on to receive a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Hamburg (2015) and his habilitation in Political Science from the Technical University of Braunschweig (2019). After his PhD, he worked at the Georg Eckert Institute and at the University of Melbourne. He was also a visiting researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the American University in Washington, DC.[1][14][15]
