The Dynamic Equation Between Social Conflicts, Natural Resources and Environmental Disasters: The State of the Art and a Theoretical Proposal

In the recent years, environment, risk, biodiversity and climate have been among the main intellectual dilemmas presented by the social reality and constitute the greatest challenge to the sociological investigation. The social sciences field has not only sought to theorize these dilemmas, but also to analyze empirically recent objects of the contemporary societies, in order to deal with the super complexification of social dynamics in a polycentric and polyphonic world. Considering this perspective, recent studies on conflicts demands a robust intellectual substratum which involves a review of classic and contemporary approaches from authors affiliated with Sociology and Anthropology areas as well as efforts from social scientists to be opened to the power of the investigated social reality. It means that social scientists are called to better understand social groups who live or work on affected areas by different restrictions or arbitraries, such as: (i) legal issues, related to the use or appropriation of natural resources; (ii) scarcity related to quantity or quality of resources; (iii) natural disasters or disasters caused by human activities; (iv) issues related to the exclusion of territory or resources provoked by disputes among different social groups and among social groups and species. This paper seeks to review and analyze the state of art on social conflicts focused on natural resources and catastrophic events that have been debated in the international literature. We also seek to present and debate our theoretical affiliation which has been hold our studies on these issues.