States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World. By Colin H. Kahl. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 354p. $35.00.

Environmental issues have only recently attracted more attention in social science's reasoning about the causation of war. Even though many scholars would probably agree with the assertion that environmental degradation and demographic pressure play a role in the causal nexus of many civil wars, the question of how this relation could be conceptualized has remained open for a long time. It is the aim of Colin Kahl's book to tackle this issue not by a mere theoretical and conceptual discussion but by using two intensely studied cases as material to construct such a conceptualization and to render it empirically applicable and plausible.