Simon Dalby

Wilfrid Laurier University | WLU · Balsillie School of International Affairs

The COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously highlighted the extraordinary transformations of the contemporary earth system that are currently underway and the fragility of the political institutions in place that might offer some governance of human affairs in these novel circumstances. The pandemic response has, in places, generated retrograde geopol...

Simon Dalby provides unique insights into the traditional search for security in terms of using firepower to dominate states and environments, and how this is now endangering people across the globe. Whereas earlier concerns about nuclear firepower focused on the security dilemmas it posed, Dalby offers a new perspective into the existential threat...

The relatively new scholarly focus on the interactions of globalization and environmental change in the discussion of the Anthropocene highlight the new context for both human conflicts and peacemaking. They pose daunting questions for scholarly disciplines that can no longer take the geographical situation of their research for granted. In particu...

ABSTRACT Climate change and the responses to it reveal starkly different assumptions about borders, security and the ethical communities for whom politicians and activists speak. Starting with the contrasting perspectives of Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump on climate change this essay highlights the diverse political assumptions implicit in debates...

No longer can states, corporations or people assume that environmental conditions from the past are a reliable guide as to what to expect in the future. This new environmental context is raising profound questions about how to secure food, water and other environmental necessities and forcing us to reconsider the traditional themes of international...

The difficulties many states are having in dealing with both the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency suggests that contemporary security institutions have not been adequately prepared to deal with the novel circumstances of the twenty first century. The global fossil fueled economy, which has been seen for many decades as the key to securit...

Geopolitics is 25 years old. In this Forum former editors reflect on the journey the journal has taken in those 25 years and the wider discipline (or disciplines) in which the journal sits. Alongside a recounting of how the journal came into existence and its name change to just ‘Geopolitics’, the editors reflect on the resurgence and increasingly...

An overview of the evolution of environmental security thinking and its interconnections with the climate change discussion.

Rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly severe climate change impacts, both in the form of extreme weather and melting permafrost and ice caps, suggest non-stationarity is the new normal. Whereas policies to deal with these issues remain caught in matters of national jurisdiction, cross-border issues as well as global tele-connecti...

This book draws on the expertise of faculty and colleagues at the Balsillie School of International Affairs to both locate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a contribution to the development of global government and to examine the political-institutional and financial challenges posed by the SDGs. The contributors are experts in global g...

A summary of the sustainability theme from the Borders in Globalization project.

Human insecurity is a matter of both environmental and social circumstances. In recent decades concerns with environmental change and its possible impacts on human societies have been linked to policy discussions of security. Scholarly analyses of resources, environment, change, and conflict suggest that these are far from simple linkages; scarciti...

While environmental matters rarely respect political boundaries, efforts to govern resource, pollution, wildlife and numerous other matters are often profoundly shaped by territorial jurisdiction. Direct regulation, trade restrictions and forms of international cooperation have all shaped global efforts at environmental governance, while fortress c...

The relatively new scholarly focus on the interactions of globalization and environmental change in the discussion of the Anthropocene highlight the new context for both human conflicts and peacemaking. They pose daunting questions for scholarly disciplines that can no longer take the geographical situation of their research for granted. In particu...

Fossil fuel divestment activists re-imagine how the war metaphor can be used in climate change action to transform thinking around what will lead to a sustainable society. Through the naming of a clear enemy and an end goal, the overused war metaphor is renewed. By casting the fossil fuel industry in the role of enemy, fossil fuel divestment activi...

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal admini...

Peace has re-emerged as a theme in political geography in the past few years, but it has a longer history in the discipline. Different positions on peace are epitomized by both the International Geographical Union, whose founding was proposed in London exactly a century ago, and by Halford Mackinder. That historical discussion, related to what was...

Focusing on Firepower, and the key point that Humanity is the fire species, suggests that a focus on combustion as key to the Anthropocene adds appropriate clarity to both the key process in climate change and the need to think about climate change as much more than a traditional environmental problem.

The theme of the Anthropocene raises fundamental questions for how world politics is now to be understood. Geopolitics can now no longer take the context of the human drama for granted; transformations are afoot that are of humanity’s own making. Nature is increasingly being produced at the largest of scales, and political thinking has to come to t...

Political instability is often the result of climate-induced disruptions to agricultural systems, but responses to disasters are crucial determinants of when and where conflict may occur. Historically famines have been aggravated by the failure of political elites to respond appropriately and by political economy doctrines that obscured their cause...

The fossil fuel divestment movement has been a vibrant novel development in climate change politics in recent years, particularly in North America. Here, the character of the discourse used to promote divestment as a strategy is explored. The divestment discourse is shown to rest on four overlapping narratives, those of war and enemies, morality, e...

While environmental matters rarely respect political boundaries, efforts to govern resource, pollution, wildlife and numerous other matters are often shaped by national jurisdictions. Direct regulation, trade restrictions and forms of international cooperation have all shaped global efforts at environmental governance. The context for these measure...

As mega fires become more frequent, and fire seasons lengthen, the human response to climate change is now focused on both combustion as well as the extreme precipitation events that often get more attention. Fire is a relatively neglected part of the human transformation of the planet, one that is worth revisiting as a possible way to link climate...

The human control of fire is a relatively neglected part of the discussion of the contemporary transformation of the planet. Thinking about it in terms of geopolitics is a way to link climate adaptation, extinction and the possibilities of extending traditional analyses of political ecology to the global scale. Such thinking is explicitly rejected...

A short paper pondering the importance of combustion in the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, and whether focusing directly on the geophysical process that has both allowed humanity to transform the biosphere, and recently induced the current climate crisis, allows for innovation in terms of governance for the fire species.

The sheer scale of human changes to the global biosphere now requires that discussions of governance move beyond traditional notions of environmental protection, parks, pollution, and population. Globalisation isn’t just a matter of economic, political, and cultural boundary crossings, but now has to be understood as a matter of material transforma...

Global health catastrophes have complex origins, often rooted in social disruption, poverty, conflict, and environmental collapse. Avoiding them will require a new integrative analysis of the links between disease, armed conflict, and environmental degradation within a socioecological vulnerability and human security context...

Geopolitics, climate change and environmental security operate in complicated and sometimes directly conflictual ways. Driven in part by national policies of food self-sufficiency in response to economic sanctions imposed on Iran by American and European policies, the destruction of one of the world?s largest inland lakes raises questions about the...

Human activities have changed many of the key parameters of the Holocene geological epoch of the recent past so much that we now live in the Anthropocene. New perspectives in earth system science suggest that sustainable development and plans for transitions to a sustainable peace now have to consider the possibilities of rapid phase shifts in the...

The election of the Conservative Party to power in Canada in 2006 brought with it a vision of the world that was much more competitive than previous Liberal or much earlier conservative visions. Key to all this, and the focus of this chapter, is an attempt to reinvent Canada as a player in a world of competitive geopolitics rather than as a good ci...

Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue abou...

Perhaps the most obvious point about the Anthropocene debate is the one that gets lost most frequently, precisely because it is the most obvious. Paul Crutzen's now famous outburst in 2000 (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000) stating that we do not live in the Holocene anymore was made in part because he was grappling with the question of the enormity of...

The Anthropocene has become a key theme in contemporary speculations about the meaning of the present and the possibilities for the future. While ecomodernists argue that current circumstances present opportunities and possibilities for a thriving future for humanity, a ‘good Anthropocene’, critics suggest that the future will be bad for at least m...

Draft paper presented to the Institute of British Geographers conference, Exeter, September 2015

Climate change is a major issue in global politics, one that has profound implications for the future of the planet, and one that political geographers have been addressing in recent years. This special virtual issue of Political Geography highlights the contributions made in the journal to addressing both the empirical questions of how climate cha...

Environmental causes of human action have long been part of the discussion of nature and humanity. While simplistic assumptions that environment determines human affairs have long been rejected, in recent decades, as the sheer scale of human transformations of natural systems has been realized and as climate changes inexorably unfold, nature is bac...

The discussion of the Anthropocene makes it clear that contemporary social thought can no longer take nature, or an external ‘environment’, for granted in political discussion. Humanity is remaking its own context very rapidly, not only in the processes of urbanization but also in the larger context of global biophysical transformations that provid...

"Change the system, not the climate" is a common slogan of climate change activists. Yet when this idea comes into the academic and policy realm, it is easy to see how climate change discourse frequently asks the wrong questions. Reframing Climate Change encourages social scientists, policy-makers, and graduate students to critically consider how c...

Tony Burke’s ambitious manifesto for ‘cosmopolitan security’ raises numerous issues that need attention by security scholars. The remilitarization of security matters in the aftermath of 9/11 has drastically narrowed the scope of the human security agenda and reinforced the case for critique of the taken for granted contextualizations of contempora...

Paper presented to the Association of American Geographers annual convention, April 2015 in Chicago

While geopolitics used to be about the context of global politics, now in the Anthropocene, it has become a matter of remaking that context rather than taking it as a given. What kind of planet is being made for what kind of civilization is now an unavoidable question of the global economy, as is the related political question of contemporary globa...

Climate has become a matter of security deliberation in the last few years due to the gradually dawning realization that change is happening already and has the potential to severely disrupt states and economies in coming decades. What ‘security’ has been securing is now transforming the material circumstances that made carboniferous capitalism pos...

This is a reply to:Conway, Philip. 2015. “Back down to earth: reassembling Latour’s anthropocenic geopolitics.” Global Discourse. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1004247

Crutzen and Stoermer's (2000) naming of the 'Anthropocene' has provoked lively debate across the physical and social sciences, but, while the term is gradually gaining acceptance as the signifier of the current geological epoch, it remains little more than a roughly defined place-holder for an era characterized by environmental and social uncertain...

Rising concerns about climate change and the growing realization that humanity has become a geological agent shaping planetary systems have led to the adoption of the term Anthropocene as an overarching term for the current period of planetary history. The growing disjunction between traditional geopolitical specifications of territorial and spatia...

In his 2012 Political Geography plenary at the 2012 Royal Geographical Society meeting, Stuart Elden posed the possibilities of a “geopolitics” that engages the earth, the air and volumetric understandings as an alternative to geopolitics as a synonym for global politics with its two dimensional cartographic imagination. More is needed than politic...

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 thoug...

The discussion of the Anthropocene focuses attention on the changing geological context for the future of humanity, change wrought by practices that secure particular forms of human life. These are frequently discussed in geography in terms of biopolitics. In particular liberal societies powered by carboniferous capitalism and using their practices...

Climate change has added new impetus and urgency to the long-running discussion of environmental security, leading to an emphasis on the overall transformation of planetary systems. In this article, Simon Dalby argues that this requires consideration of three themes in particular: urban vulnerabilities to extreme events; the unforeseen social and p...

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 Anthr...

Invoking security is easy; dealing with the finer points of what it means, who is insecure why and where is much more difficult. As the chapters in this volume suggest it is even more so when notions of environment are linked to matters of security, conflict and violence. In the face of repeated invocations of environmental dangers, and the potenti...

This set of essays is based on a panel session convened at the 2009 meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which sought to explore the many challenges and pitfalls involved with teaching nationalism as a topic in geography classrooms. The authors offer different but complementary insights into the practical difficulties and potential s...

Critical geopolitics is about challenging the taken for granted contextualizations of social phenomena on the large scale. Invoking insights from this burgeoning literature, this paper examines some of the key taken for granted geopolitical specifications in the discussion of arms control. In particular the case of the new Strategic Arms Reduction...

This chapter argues that a fundamental change in earth history is under way which requires a rethinking of the relationship between humankind and nature, including the political realm and international relations, that makes geopolitical approaches in the Hobbesian tradition obsolete. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen coined for this new period of ear...

In the latter stages of the cold war, and through the early decades of the age of globalization, political scientists dominated the study of international relations. Notions of global politics were frequently presumed to be a matter of inter-state relations, and the study of international politics was frequently just the study of relations between...