Much of recorded interstate conflict can be read as a dispute over who controls, extracts, or transports a scarce material input. Grain-producing hinterlands, silver mines, spice routes, coal seams, oil fields, freshwater rivers, and — in the present century — lithium, cobalt, and gallium each appear as recurring casus belli. The Age of Abundance thesis does not deny this pattern; it asks what remains of the pattern when the underlying inputs stop being scarce.
The Malthusian-geopolitical synthesis
Classical political economy, from Malthus forward, treated population pressure against fixed resources as a structural driver of famine and war. Twentieth-century geopolitics — Mackinder, Spykman, the Carter Doctrine on Gulf oil — formalized this into doctrines of territorial control over chokepoints and extraction zones. The common logic: when a critical input is inelastic in supply and unevenly distributed, whoever commands it commands everyone downstream.
Water, grain, and the 21st-century pattern
Contemporary analysts point to Nile Basin disputes, Tigris–Euphrates damming, South China Sea fisheries, and grain export controls during the 2022 Black Sea crisis as evidence the pattern is not historical. Roughly a third of the global population lives in transboundary river basins with unresolved allocation regimes. These are the proximate scarcities most likely to drive Contemporary Conflicts in the coming decades.
How abundance reframes the question
Near-zero-marginal-cost energy changes the scarcity calculus for water (via desalination), food (via indoor and precision agriculture), and many minerals (via recycling and substitution driven by Atoms Abundance). The reframing is not that conflict disappears but that the material rationale for territorial conquest weakens. See Peace Dividend for the positive case and Kardashev and Conflict for the empirical skepticism.
Open questions
Does abundance dissolve resource conflict or merely relocate it — from oil to the rare earths that build the post-oil economy, from land to data, from water to compute? The honest answer is that the evidence is partial and the transition period may be the most dangerous. Scarcity-driven war is a tendency, not a law; abundance weakens the tendency without guaranteeing peace.