2004-05 Fellow Profile: Tom Deligiannis

Tom Deligiannis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment, Peace and Security, working primarily in the Environmental Security and Peace Masters programme at the UN mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. He is completing his Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, working under the supervision of Thomas Homer-Dixon. He holds an MA in History from the University of Toronto, and a BA in History and Political Science from the University of Guelph.

In 2004, Tom was awarded a CCHS Doctoral Dissertation Award to support his field work. Tom’s dissertation builds on the tradition of environmental conflict research at the University of Toronto through his detailed field work in Peru’s southern highlands exploring the impacts of human-induced environmental and demographic change. His work focuses on Chuschi and Quispillacta, two communities in south-central Ayacucho that suffered during the dirty war against Sendero Luminoso in the 1980s and early 1990s. His dissertation combines ethnographic field study, interviews, and archival research to piece together patterns of local livelihood change up to the 1980s and to investigate whether demographic and environmental change played a role in causing rural violence in the area. These local findings are then compared to general scholarly explanations of the causes of rural violence in Peru’s highlands between the 1950s and 1980s to develop a composite model of the role of environmental and demographic change in contributing to rural violence in the highlands.

Tom believes that local studies of environmental and demographic change are key for the next generation of environmental conflict research, and that theory needs to be built from the ground up given local complexities, but in dialogue with existing environmental conflict research. This approach has been central to UPEACE’s ESP programme, with several students concentrating on local environmental conflict and environmental peacemaking efforts in Nepal, Tajikistan, Costa Rica, Peru, and Sierra Leone.

In addition to his work at UPEACE, Tom teaches a module on environmental security that is part of the University of Geneva/UNEP’s short course on environmental diplomacy. He is also the Project Director of UPEACE’s Climate Change and Adaptation Project. In February 2007 he organized a conference in The Hague that brought experts and local leaders from low-lying areas and island nations together with experts from The Netherlands to advance climate change adaptation strategies.

In 2004 Tom was also a Beattie Doctoral Fellow at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

Tom can be reached at tdeligiannis@upeace.org

Publications and Presentations:

Thomas Homer-Dixon & Tom Deligiannis, “Environmental Scarcities and Civil Violence: Perspective of the Toronto Group,” Ch. 21 in Hans Günter Brauch, John Grin, Czeslaw Mesjasz, Pal Dunay, Navnita Chadha Behera, Béchir Chourou, Ursula Oswald Spring, P. H. Liotta, Patricia Kameri-Mbote, Eds. Globalisation and Environmental Challenges: Reconceptualising Security in the 21st Century (Berlin – Heidelberg – New York – Hong Kong – London – Milan – Paris – Tokyo: Springer-Verlag, forthcoming 2007).

Daniel M. Schwartz, Tom Deligiannis, and Thomas Homer-Dixon. “The Environment and Violent Conflict.” in Paul F. Diehl and Nils Petter Gleditsch eds. Environmental Conflict. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, Tom Deligiannis, and Dirk Druet, “The Necessity of Complexity: Taking environmental conflict research beyond mechanism,” Paper Presented at 2007 International Studies Association Annual Conference, Chicago, 28 Feb., 2007.

“Environmental Scarcity and Conflict in Highland Peru,” Paper Presented at The Hague Conference on Environment, Security, and Sustainable Development, 10 May, 2004.

“Environmental Scarcity and Social Adaptation: The Peruvian Fishing Industry,” Paper Presented at 1997 International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto. Paper published online at EDC news.

“Vanguards of the Tactical Atomic Revolution: Early Army Thinking About the Tactical Use of Atomic Weapons, 1948-1949,” Paper Presented at 1997 Conference of The Society of Military History, Montgomery, AL and at 1996 Conference of The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Boulder, CO.