Climate Change and the Language of Human Security (original) (raw)
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Climate Change, Ethics and Human Security
2014
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The Climate Crisis Is a Human Security, Not a National Security, Issue
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Climate change is one of the first times, in recent memory, where public debate about treating an issue as a matter of “national security” has occurred. Many, including members of the grassroots climate change movement, have called for climate change to be treated as a national security issue. While there are a host of good reasons for treating the climate crisis as a security concern, there are equally good reasons to worry about applying the national security label to climate change, which have largely been absent from public debate. For the first time in the legal literature, this Article articulates the downsides to treating climate change as a national security issue and demonstrates how the UN-mandated concept of “human security” provides a more effective framework. Human security realizes the benefits of securitization while lessening its costs. It does so by focusing on people, rather than the state, and emphasizing sustainable development policies necessary to mitigate, rat...
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.
'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.
The securitization of climate change and the power of conceptions of security
S+F, 2009
This paper looks at recent studies that have addressed climate change as a security issue. Posing climate change as a pro blem for security has provided it with a major boost in attention. However, it raises the potential of 'securitization', i.e. that the issue is primarily addressed via traditional means of security policy. The paper analyses how selected studies frame the issue of climate change and security and considers what recommendations they make on dealing with the problem. Among its findings are that the framing of climate change as a security issue is not based on well founded analysis but is rather largely driven by ad hoc theo ries on the links between environmental degradation and violent conflict. A second finding is that different conceptualisations of security lead to different types of recommendation on how to deal with the consequences of climate change as they relate to peace and security. Securitizing the issue therefore does not necessarily lead the authors of studies to prescribe predominantly traditional security instruments for dealing with crises. However, although the authors reach different conclusions, their diagnosis of climate change as a security issue is likely to push the climate change discourse towards the use of traditional security instruments. A third finding of the paper is therefore that the mixing of different conceptions of security may increase the 'attention grabbing' power of studies but also muddle their messages.
Global Studies Quarterley, 2023
‘Climate security’ conventionally refers to climate change being a multiplier of threats to national security, international peace and stability, or human security. Here we identify a hitherto overlooked inverted climate security discourse in which climate responses (rather than climate impacts) are held to pose an existential threat to dominant fossil fuel-dependent ‘ways of life’, justifying extraordinary measures—societal climate security. In doing so, we seek to make three novel contributions. First, we set out how societal securitization applies beyond a national frame and in relation to transnational threats like climate change, arguing it promotes not just exceptional measures but also palliative ones that avoid challenging incumbent identities. Second, we draw on recent evidence and extant literatures to show that 'societal climate security' already has substantial material emanations in the form of exceptional measures, deployed domestically against climate protestors and externally against climate migrants, in the name of societal order and cohesion. Third, we turn to wider climate policy implications, arguing that societal securitization tilts policy agendas further away from rapid mitigation pathways and toward promissory measures such as ‘geoengineering’—schemes for future, large-scale technological interventions in the climate system—that may appear less threatening to established societal identities. While there are sound ecological and humanitarian rationales to research such technologies, in the context of societal securitization these can be appropriated to defend dominant ‘ways of life’ instead. To conclude, we reflect on how, were it attempted, deployment of solar geoengineering for societal security would affect security politics more widely.