Thomas Homer-Dixon says it all started with one girl’s face in Patna.
A photograph of a poor girl in the town of Patna, India inspired Homer-Dixon to think about the causes of conflict and poverty and the future of our global civilization.
“I’ve always been interested in conflict, why people fight each other,” Homer-Dixon said.
Sitting in his office in University College, no signs of conflict are apparent. The office is hidden away underground, at the end of a corridor outside the popular coffee bar Diabolos and at the bottom of a spiral staircase that seems right out of the mediaeval age.
But although Homer-Dixon’s setting is serene, his mind is far away, thinking about the roots of conflicts around the globe.
He thinks what got him thinking about conflict was its counterpart, peace.
“I think it was growing up in Victoria [BC], which was a peaceful, tranquil kind of place,” he said.
He went to the University of Victoria and then moved on to Carleton, graduating in 1980. He then did a Ph.D. in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Despite leaving Canada to study at M.I.T., Homer-Dixon said he got homesick. “When I got finished at M.I.T., I wanted to give Canada another shot.”
Arriving at the University of Toronto, Homer-Dixon offered to take over the Peace and Conflict Studies program. Although it was a derelict department at the time, Homer-Dixon wanted to work at U of T. “Toronto is the best place to be in the country,” he said, although it’s “not comparable to the Oxbridge system (Oxford and Cambridge universities in the UK) or Boston (Harvard and M.I.T.).”
Starting in an office “this big”—Homer-Dixon spreads his arms about six feet apart—he started to pursue his research into the roots of conflict and the connections between social change, conflict and the capacity for adaptation in society.
In Africa, the Middle East, the new republics of the former USSR, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, these “small” conflicts simmer. They kill people, displace populations, destroy infrastructure and property—and continue to hope for a better future.
Many of these conflicts are all but ignored by the Western media. In the Congo, for example, several African countries wage war in the jungle, fighting for resources such as diamonds. This conflict has killed more than three million people, but most people in Canada have never heard of it. Meanwhile, the resources of several sub-Saharan nations are diverted from development and poverty eradication to warfare.
Other conflicts start off small, but manage to mushroom into bigger problems. Inter-factional fighting in Afghanistan triggered an invasion by the Soviet Union, which in turn triggered American assistance to fight the Soviet occupation. When the Soviets pulled out, inter-factional fighting started up again, eventually drawing in Islamist militants from around the world.
But this seemingly obscure conflict bred the terrorist strikes in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—killing thousands of people a world away from where the fighting started.
Thomas Homer-Dixon thinks these sub-national wars will become increasingly important to world stability and security.
“What are the causes of conflicts, particularly sub-national conflicts?” Homer-Dixon asked. “Resource scarcity, water scarcity, forest scarcity.”
He thinks these resource fights are made more dangerous by the proliferation of small arms around the world. Assault rifles, pistols, grenades—small arms fan the flames of small conflicts and turn minor disputes into conflagrations.
Homer-Dixon worries that conflicts will ignite more readily as small arms become more easily available. Ignored by international treaties that focus on high-tech weapons like nuclear missiles and biological weapons, small arms are cheaper than ever and easier to acquire.
These factors represent the new face of war, according to Homer-Dixon. But the issues beneath the face are the roots of his work at U of T.
“Adaptation to change,” says Homer-Dixon, is at the root of many conflicts. In the West, a world civilization has evolved to capitalize on change. The problem occurs when this atmosphere of change meets cultures that are not prepared for its ramifications. Homer-Dixon believes conflicts, especially in the developing world, are essentially adaptations to change. He thinks we can better manage change if we understand how much capacity for adaptation lies within our society. Homer-Dixon calls this adaptive capacity “ingenuity.” In his recent book The Ingenuity Gap, he advances a theory of ingenuity as it relates to societies.
Homer-Dixon fears that the world’s systems of economic, techological, and political control are becoming more and more complex. As a result, relatively minor problems, or new and unanticipated situations, can have unexpected repercussions.
Homer-Dixon’s theories are not universally accepted, however. Some of his own students are critical of his conflict and ingenuity theory. None would go on the record criticizing his work. But they feel some of his skill as a professor may lie in combining the research of other thinkers across a wide number of fields, rather than in being a truly novel thinker. Other students are critical of his teaching style, in which groups of students investigate topics from global warming to weapons proliferation and present them to the class. Homer-Dixon says this allows students to learn in a more meaningful way than through reading a package of articles. Homer-Dixon co-authored three papers with his students over the last 18 months. He said working one-on-one with his students to produce published papers is a great way to learn. “It teaches me a lot…. It’s the best tutorial ever,” Homer-Dixon added.
And although some may question his methods or theories, more and more undergrads are competing to join his program, which has doubled in size annually for several years running. 80 students are currently enrolled.
In an increasingly unpredictable world, students are in search of answers to questions even scientists have not yet figured out. While Homer-Dixon admits there is still much for him to learn, he has come to one final conclusion: “The world is a complicated place.”
