Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CLIMCONFLICT (Historical Dynamics of Violence, Conflict and Extreme Weather in Medieval Ireland)

Teaser

A growing risk of conflict associated with human-induced climatic changes that increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather and exacerbate natural resource inequalities is regarded by many scholars and policymakers as a critical security. But the degree to which...

Summary

A growing risk of conflict associated with human-induced climatic changes that increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather and exacerbate natural resource inequalities is regarded by many scholars and policymakers as a critical security. But the degree to which climatic conditions may influence conflict is heavily contested, with data shortages and the complexity of societal “pathways” that may connect climate to conflict presenting major barriers to research. Against this background, the CLIMCONFLICT project has examined the role of climate in violence and conflict in medieval Ireland from the fifth and seventeenth centuries. Key to this has been the investigation of statistical associations between extreme weather (drought, flood, cold) and historical violence and conflict. Follow-on objectives have included an examination of the complex pathways that may connect climate-related shocks to violence and conflict and how such pathways may have varied according to the prevailing socioeconomic contexts, as well as an examination of the ways that medieval Irish society attempted to mitigate instability arising from these shocks.

To achieve these objectives, the project has drawn upon human and natural archives. These include Ireland’s rich record of medieval chronicles (known collectively as the “Irish Annals”) and natural archives such as Irish oak tree-rings that allow the identification of years experiencing extremes of wet and drought. These sources were complemented by polar ice-cores that allow the identification of historical explosive volcanic eruptions known to impact the Irish climate, often promoting severe cold. Major concluding actions have involved the dissemination of project results in oral and print venues, with further publications in-press. The project’s final intention is to further the development of novel methodologies that twin the information available from human and natural archives, and to further examine the generality of the climate-conflict links observed in medieval Ireland by studying other regions and eras.

Work performed

The foundational work of CLIMCONFLICT has been a multi-centennial reconstruction of violence and conflict for medieval Ireland, synthesising evidence from the island’s many annalistic sources to reconstruct event frequencies ranging from individual murders to mass killings, battles and cattle raids. The project also drew upon natural archives, including precipitation-sensitive Irish oaks and temperature-sensitive European pine and larch, to identify associations between violence, conflict and extreme weather. The combined evidence of these sources suggests an increase in violence following extremes of cold, wet and drought. The project also examined the pathways linking climatic pressures to violence and conflict, including material pathways such as scarcity induced resource competition, in which weather-related harvest failure or livestock mortality promoted contestation over remaining resources.

In its final phase, the project examined how the efficacy of these pathways depended upon the prevailing socioeconomic and cultural context. In particular, the project charted a range of societal coping mechanisms used to restore order following extreme weather and subsistence crises. Such mechanisms included the enforcement of laws by ecclesiastical and secular elites as illustrated by a report for 1050 CE from the Annals of the Four Masters, a year when reduced Irish oak growth reveals conditions of drought. The report describes how “much inclement weather happened in the land of Ireland, which carried away corn, milk, fruit, and fish, from the people, so that there grew up dishonesty among all, [so] that no protection was extended to church or fortress… until the clergy and laity of Munster assembled, with their chieftains… where they enacted a law and a restraint upon every injustice…”.

CLIMCONFLICT results and methodology have been widely disseminated in workshops and conferences. These include the International Medieval Congress (Leeds, UK, 2017), the Scientific Approaches to the Study of the Past summer school (University of Kent, UK, 2017), the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (Washington D.C., USA, 2017), the European Geophysical Union Annual Meeting (Vienna, Austria, 2016), The Archaeology of Risk and its Perception in the Middle Ages training conference (University of Oxford, UK, 2016), and the inaugural workshop of the PAGES Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society working group (Columbia University, USA, 2016). Project research has also been published in edited volumes and journals, including contributions to Transdisciplinary Approaches to Science, Arts, Humanities and Technology Studies (2018), Making the Medieval Relevant (2018), the Cambridge History of Ireland (2018) and Indigenous Knowledge: Enhancing its Contribution to Natural Resources Management (2017). The project’s methodology has also been exploited in studying the role of climate in Ancient Egyptian conflict (Nature Communications, 2017).

Final results

Reconstructions of violence and conflict of the length produced by CLIMCONFLICT are rare and of great value in allowing the robust identification of associations between climate, violence and conflict. They also offer a means to examine how these associations may strengthen or weaken as the socioeconomic context changes, promoting greater or lesser resilience to extreme weather. Where such reconstructions are available for multiple regions, the opportunity arises for inter-regional comparisons, and the Irish data may now be compared to that of China and elsewhere during the medieval period to progress the state-of-the-art regarding climate-conflict linkages. CLIMCONFLICT has also advanced the state-of-the-art concerning multi-proxy approaches that twin the information from natural and human archives to examine the influence of past climates on society. Approaches developed by the CLIMCONFLICT project have, for example, already been applied to research on Ancient Egypt (Nature Communications, 2017).

More broadly, the project highlights the value of society’s written heritage in providing historical context to questions of social concern. Climate-conflict studies have sometimes been accused of over-simplifying links between contemporary climate and conflict. The findings of the CLIMCONFLICT project support the existence of such links but emphasize the need to avoid deterministic conceptions of society as a passive victim of extreme weather. Means existed historically, just as now, to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather and maintain or restore social stability. This is an important lesson for contemporary society as human-driven climatic changes continue to alter the frequency and severity of extreme weather.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.tcd.ie/tceh/projects/Climconflict/.