摘要：A 2004 symposium on resource scarcity in rural Africa produced the papers in this volume which explore relations between scarcity and conflicts.Yet the authors warn emphasis on scarcity misses the point that vested interests use scarcity as pretexts for their ambition to control other resources, and that the well-to-do stand to gain more from conflicts than the poor.Tulmin shows that the vulnerable tend to be crowded out from access to land, and Witsenburg et. al. in their well-researched article about pastoralists note that without state or political interference create conflict while traditional societies have regulatory mechanisms for times of scarcity (droughts) which reward cooperation.Unfortunately, no paper deals with the much severer urban or sub-urban situations.
