Territorial Vulnerability and Local Conflicts

Abstract

In the last years the number and the magnitude of the oppositions to new public (and private) works have increased all over the World, but the reasons of the op-position are difficult to identify. There are several international examples of conflicts originating from environ-mental oppositions as the mobilization in Istanbul in defense of Gezi park, the toppling of the government in Madagascar over land-grabbing, and the aboriginal ‘Idle No More’ movement in Canada against fracking activities. In Italy the most famous environmental conflict is the opposition to High Speed Rail in Val di Susa, but recently the referendum on the drilling in the Mediterranean sea has seen a very huge opposition front which includes also influential member of Catholic Clergy. But at the same time similar works didn’t face any (or so hard) opposition in different areas and periods. So we can hypnotize that the conflict is site specific but what are the determinants of the conflict? Can we explain the relevance of the conflict with the territorial vulnerability? How can the vulnerability be measured? What are the main dimensions of vulnerability? Several scientists analysed the relationships between the oppositions, which can degenerate in conflict, even violent, and the vulnerability of the territories where the public works are planned. The aim of the present paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the recent ad most relevant scientific papers which study the relationship between vulnerability and conflict by means of a bibliographic approach. Bibliometric approaches analyze scholarly publications and scientific production through various quantitative techniques, with the main goal of revealing how different research topic and specific scientific domains are conceptually and intellectually structured. Bibliometrics borrows the information it needs directly from the bibliographic description of scientific documents, available for download on several databases. The bibliographical data gathered in this study was collected from 682 articles from a wide range of journals available in the Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Knowledge; the search criteria included the joint appearance of the terms “vulnerability” and “conflict”. For the purpose of this research different methods have been employed to map the scientific production and to gather information about this research topic. The results of the analysis show an increasing interest in studying the relationship between conflict and vulnerability and the extension of the semantic context including several scientific fields.