Welcome to the Anthropocene! Biopolitics, Climate Change (original) (raw)

Welcome to the Anthrpocene: Biopolitics, Climate Change and the End of the World as we know it

Biopolitics has engaged emergence, and the contemporary concerns with disease and new forms of life as potential threats requiring numerous processes of security. This discussion has not yet substantially engaged with the “emergence” of urbanity as a “threat” to the Holocene climate system. Now that earth sciences are clear that we are in the Anthropocene, a geological era marked by the industrial production of novel forcing mechanisms in the biosphere, the climate security discussion has to engage biopolitics if the theoretical basis of both is to be informed by the other. None of this suggests either conceptual clarity, nor an obvious set of policy implications, but interrogating climate security as a policy desideratum within the conceptualisations of biopolitics offers some insights into the limits of both. It also raises questions of how Anthropocene futures are imagined and incorporated into political discourse, and how these might change if emergence and life, rather than cartographies of permanence, distance and protection are the lenses through which that future is projected. If stability and safe spaces are exceptions rather than the norm, much needs to be thought differently; not least the geopolitical categories brought to bear on the discussion of climate change.

Insuring 'Our Common Future'? Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of Environmental Security

Geopolitics

Dire warnings on the “dangers” of climate change are reinvigorating past debates over environmental security. However, one strain of this debate is exceeding the state-based logics of security found in more conventional environmental security approaches. The UNFCCC's goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change” that, inter alia, threatens sustainable development has inspired volumes of research on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and has increasingly become incorporated into World Bank and UN development programmes. However, much of this research has yet to examine the cultural and political effects of framing climate change through the loaded language of security. As a result, there has been little critical analysis of the emergence of a variety of disaster risk management and insurance-based adaptation strategies that attempt to offer security against the effects of dangerous climate change. This article articulates the insights of critical environmental security studies with recent research on biopolitical security and post-structural critiques of development to unpack the biopolitical and geopolitical assumptions that animate discourses on dangerous climate change and disasters. My argument here is twofold. First, I suggest that risk management and catastrophe insurance have political effects: these biopolitical technologies sustain the global social and political order that the history of Western-led “development” has produced. Second, along these lines, dangerous climate change discourses extend the project of earlier environmental security discourses, specifically, the attempt to secure Western ways of life against the effects of environmental change. In securing “sustainable development,” discourses on dangerous climate change combine biopolitical technologies of risk management with geopolitical technologies of security to sustain the exclusion and containment of underdeveloped populations, and the mobility of the global elite, that characterise contemporary practices of development.

Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene

Global Policy, 2014

Climate change has become a matter of security in recent policy discussions. The scale of the transformations we are living through is slowly dawning on policy makers. But the implications for both security and policy making in general of our new geological conditions, our living in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, have yet to be thought through carefully. The basic geopolitical premises in security thinking are now in need of a radical overhaul in light of the insights from Earth system science. Simplistic assumptions of environmental change leading directly to conflict are misleading at best and dangerous at worst. Climate security discussions now have to engage directly with global envi- ronmental change and with Earth systems science in particular. Climate security in the long run is not a matter of envi- ronmental change causing political difficulties, but rather a matter of contemporary political difficulties causing accelerating climate change. Climate change is a production problem, not one that can be managed in the terms of traditional environmental thinking; security thinking needs to focus on the implications of this rethinking of traditional geopolitical assumptions.

'Discourses of Climate Security', Political Geography, 2013

Political Geography, 2013

Global climate change has been increasingly defined as a security threat by a range of political actors and analysts. Yet as the range of voices articulating the need to conceive and approach climate change as a security issue has expanded, so too has the range of ways in which this link has been conceptualized. This article systematically maps different approaches to the relationship between climate change and security as climate security discourses, divided here between national, human, international and ecological security discourses. In exploring the contours of each, the articles asks how the referent object of security is conceptualised (whose security is at stake?); who are conceived as key agents of security (who is responsible for/able to respond to the threat?); how is the nature of the threat defined; and what responses are suggested for dealing with that threat? Systematically mapping these alternative discourses potentially provides a useful taxonomy of the climate change–security relationship in practice. But more importantly, it serves to illustrate how particular responses to climate change (and the actors articulating them) are enabled or constrained by the ways in which the relationship between security and climate change is understood. The article concludes by suggesting that the most powerful discourses of climate security are unlikely to inform a progressive or effective response to global climate change.

Climate change and security: towards ecological security, International Theory, 2018

Climate change is increasingly characterized as a security issue. Yet we see nothing approaching consensus about the nature of the climate change–security relationship. Indeed existing depictions in policy statements and academic debate illustrate radically different conceptions of the nature of the threat posed, to whom and what constitute appropriate policy responses. These different climate security discourses encourage practices as varied as national adaptation and globally oriented mitigation action. Given the increasing prominence of climate security representations and the different implications of these discourses, it is important to consider whether we can identify progressive discourses of climate security: approaches to this relationship underpinned by defensible ethical assumptions and encouraging effective responses to climate change. Here I make a case for an ecological security discourse. Such a discourse orients towards ecosystem resilience and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable across space (populations of developing worlds), time (future generations), and species (other living beings). This paper points to the limits of existing accounts of climate security before outlining the contours of an 'ecological security discourse' regarding climate change. It concludes by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for such discourse in genuinely informing how political communities approach the climate change–security relationship.

Beyond securitisation and into posthumanism in climate change discourses and practices

Climate change has been generally depicted in catastrophic and apocalyptic terms by politicians, activists, academics, and journalists alike. However, within this quite homogenous habit, two strands of discursive practices connected to the securitisation of climate change can be discerned: one focussed on state security, and another on ecologic security. The first builds on the securitisation of migration to propose climate change policies that reinforce borders, hence engaging only with one of the presumed effects of climate change – namely, cross-border displacement. The second strand of securitisation is on the other hand attentive to the effects of climate change on the entire planet as well as on humanity. In this paper, I ask whether securitisation can be an effective method to tackle climate change, and I find that a posthuman approach could be suited to reinforce ecologic security and create sustainable, long-term policies that consider the whole of humanity and of the planet when countering climate change. In order to make this claim, I draw from critical race theorists’ intuitions that climate change has deeply intersectional roots and effects.

Climate change, securitisation of nature, and resilient urbanism

Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 2014

Climate change is a powerful reminder of the interdependencies of the human–nature relationship and the fallacy of the modernist assumption about our ability to tame nature for our exploitation with little or no consequences. However, it is argued that such reflexivity is being subverted by the dominant discourses of climate change which portray: nature as risk, our relation to it in terms of security, and the quest for urban resilience as emergency planning. By construing nature as a threat to rather than an asset for cities, they signify a departure from sustainability discourses. They represent a hark back to a premodern conception of human–nature relations that was centred on what nature does to us rather than what we do to nature. Seeing nature as risk ushers in deep concerns with security. The ‘risk society’ becomes entwined with the security society. This paper examines the political implications of this discursive shift and argues that, as securitisation becomes the hegemoni...