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Protecting the Vulnerable: Towards an Ecological Approach to Security
Abstract
The Anthropocene is something of a ‘game-changer’ for the way we can and should view international relations. It suggests the need to step back and reconsider some of the core assumptions we have about the way the world works. In the context of the Anthropocene, this means that the environment is no longer a background to geopolitics, but rather a dynamic force that impacts global politics. This chapter makes the case that the Anthropocene compels us to view and approach security not through the lens of how we might protect human collectives or institutions, but how we might protect ecosystems themselves. Consequentially, this points to a defence of ecosystems, in particular their functionality in the face of ongoing change. For doing so, the chapter outlines the contours of an ecological security discourse, emphasising its focus on the resilience of ecosystems and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable.
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Since 2007, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has debated the security implications of climate change on several occasions. This article addresses these debates by exploring two interrelated questions: What drives the continuous efforts to place climate change on the UNSC’s agenda and to what extent do the UNSC’s debates illustrate an ongoing process of climatization? To answer these, the article draws on the concept of climatization, which captures the process through which domains of international politics are framed through a climate lens and transformed as a result of this translation. It suggests that climate change has become a dominant framing and an inescapable topic of international relations and that the UNSC debates follow a logic of expansion of climate politics by securing a steady climate agenda, attributing responsibility to the Council in the climate crisis, involving climate actors and advocating for climate-oriented policies to maintain international security.
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.
The Anthropocene presents new challenges to the natural and social sciences by claiming that humanity is “entangled” with a myriad of scales, spaces, being(s), and temporalities. Yet, how does this entanglement alter our understanding of security? This article argues that the Anthropocene threatens not our physical security, but our ontological security: our deep and normalized conceptions of humanity and what it means to be a human “self” in a stable and continuous world. By replacing the foundation of ontological security in modernity – the uncertainty of death – with a new uncertainty of anthropos, the result is an existential discontinuity emanating from our own human selves. The Anthropocene thus manifests the need to secure humanity from humanity, or the paradox of securing oneself from oneself. Recent turns to the concept of “quantum entanglement” attempt to resolve this paradox by re-instilling a certain and secure “entangled” human self within an otherwise uncertain and insecure Anthropocene epoch. The article concludes that this move actually illustrates humanity’s separation, or dis-entanglement, from nature. Ethical and moral responsibilities to mediate and safeguard life and the planet derive not from (quantum) science nor from entanglement, but from a social world within which humans possess the agency to mediate and judge how to act through such concepts.
The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are required to cope with the Anthropocene – the Human Age. Drawing from various disciplines, this bold reinterpretation explores the possibilities for understanding and preparing a future that will look vastly different than the past. The book asks to dig deeper into what it means to be human and secure in an age of ecological exception. The pdf below is an extract from the book. - See more at: http://www.grgp.uct.ac.za/news/security-anthropocene-reflections-safety%C2%A0and-care#sthash.uWTBsI9X.dpuf
This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. It argues that the Paris Agreement breaks new ground in international climate policy, by acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics in climate change and allowing countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased through a process of ‘naming and shaming’. By sidestepping distributional conflicts, the Paris Agreement manages to remove one of the biggest barriers to international climate cooperation. It recognizes that none of the major powers can be forced into drastic emissions cuts. However, instead of leaving mitigation efforts to an entirely bottom-up logic, it embeds country pledges in an international system of climate accountability and a ‘ratchet mechanism’, thus offering the chance of more durable international cooperation. At the same time, it is far from clear whether the treaty can actually deliver on the urgent need to de-carbonize the global economy. The past record of climate policies suggests that governments have a tendency to express lofty aspirations but avoid tough decisions. For the Paris Agreement to make a difference, the new logic of ‘pledge and review’ will need to mobilize international and domestic pressure and generate political momentum behind more substantial climate policies worldwide. It matters, therefore, whether the Paris Agreement's new approach can be made to work.
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 about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
The recent rise of resilience thinking in climate security discourse and practice is examined and explained. Using the paradigmatic case of the United Kingdom, practitioners’ understandings of resilience are considered to show how these actors use a resilience lens to rearticulate earlier storylines of climate conflict in terms of complexity, decentralisation, and empowerment. Practitioners in the climate security field tend to reinterpret resilience in line with their established routines. As a result, climate resilience storylines and practices turn out to be much more diverse and messy than is suggested in the conceptual literature. Building on these findings, the recent success of resilience thinking in climate security discourse is explained. Climate resilience – not despite but due to its messiness – is able to bring together a wide range of actors, traditionally standing at opposite ends of the climate security debate. Through resilience storylines, climate security discourse becomes something to which a wide range of actors, ranging from security to the development field, can relate.
Associationism and the Literary Imagination traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Cairns Craig explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's exploration of a mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough.
Global climate change is one of the most daunting ethical and political challenges confronting humanity in the twenty-first century. The intergenerational and transnational ethical issues raised by climate change have been the focus of a significant body of scholarship. In this new collection of essays, leading scholars engage and respond to first-generation scholarship and argue for new ways of thinking about our ethical obligations to present and future generations. Topics addressed in these essays include moral accountability for energy consumption and emissions, egalitarian and libertarian perspectives on mitigation, justice in relation to cap and trade schemes, the ethics of adaptation and the ethical dimensions of the impact of climate change on nature.
This paper asks how the social sciences can engage with the idea of the Anthropocene in productive ways. In response to this question we outline an interpretative research agenda that allows critical engagement with the Anthropocene as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories. In order to facilitate the kind of political mobilization required to meet the complex environmental challenges of our times, we argue that the social sciences should refrain from adjusting to standardized research agendas and templates. A more urgent analytical challenge lies in exposing, challenging and extending the ontological assumptions that inform how we make sense of and respond to a rapidly changing environment. By cultivating environmental research that opens up multiple interpretations of the Anthropocene, the social sciences can help to extend the realm of the possible for environmental politics.
This article serves as the introduction to this special issue in Critical Studies on Security. It begins with a brief overview of the academic debate and policy context concerning climate change and human migration. The principal claim is that critical evaluation of the security dimensions of climate change and migration must begin with the epistemological challenge that knowledge about climate change and human migration is speculative and future-conditional. This introductory piece then provides short synopses of each article included in the special issue.
We are at a turning point when it comes to the political implications of climate change. Given the reality of a future in a climate-changed world, it is time for us-broadly as a species, but particularly as academics-to move beyond the foci of the last few decades on the politics of preventing climate change through global agreements. There is a growing literature on the obvious need to slow the impacts of climate change, develop postcarbon energy systems, and design new forms of global environmental governance. Beyond these immediate needs, however, climate change poses a range of new problems and requires a broader research agenda for a climate-challenged politics.
‘Critical security studies’ has come to occupy a prominent place within the lexicon of International Relations and security studies over the past two decades. While disagreement exists about the boundaries of this sub-discipline or indeed some of its central commitments, in this article we argue that we can indeed talk about a ‘critical security studies’ project orienting around three central themes. The first is a fundamental critique of traditional (realist) approaches to security; the second is a concern with the politics of security — the question of what security does politically; while the third is with the ethics of security — the question of what progressive practices look like regarding security. We suggest that it is the latter two of these concerns with the politics and ethics of security that ultimately define the ‘critical security studies’ project. Taking the so-called Welsh School and Copenhagen School frameworks as archetypal examples of ‘critical security studies’ (and its limits), in this article we argue that despite its promises, scholarship in this tradition has generally fallen short of providing us with a sophisticated, convincing account of either the politics or the ethics of security. At stake in the failure to provide such an account is the fundamental question of whether we need a ‘critical security studies’ at all.
Trauma, the silenced aftermath of violence, has been largely neglected by international security studies, which perceives trauma as having little relevance to global politics. However, this article contends that trauma profoundly influences global security. Unless traumatic events are worked through, they can heighten insecurity not only in the immediate aftermath of violence but decades and even generations later. The article is divided into three parts. The first section examines trauma in general terms, noting its individual, social and political dimensions. The second section examines acting out in response to trauma, with a particular focus on the meaning-making narratives adopted in order to make sense of traumatic experiences: the heroic soldier, good and evil, and redemptive violence. These narratives serve to secure the state by shutting down questioning and showing strength and decisiveness in the wake of traumatic shocks. Section three examines the notion of working through trauma. Working through involves a process of mourning, in which past atrocities are acknowledged, reflected on, and more fully understood in all their historically situated complexity. It is a deeply political process that struggles to understand and challenge those structures and practices that facilitate traumatic loss.
Those interested in the construction of security in contemporary international politics have increasingly turned to the conceptual framework of `securitization'. This article argues that while an important and innovative contribution, the securitization framework is problematically narrow in three senses. First, the form of act constructing security is defined narrowly, with the focus on the speech of dominant actors. Second, the context of the act is defined narrowly, with the focus only on the moment of intervention. Finally, the framework of securitization is narrow in the sense that the nature of the act is defined solely in terms of the designation of threats. In outlining this critique, the article points to possibilities for developing the framework further as well as for the need for those applying it to recognize both limits of their claims and the normative implications of their analysis. I conclude by pointing to how the framework might fit within a research agenda concerned with the broader construction of security.
Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - On Resilience - by Philippe Bourbeau
Over the last decade there has been an evolving debate both within the United Nations and within the scholarly literature as to whether it would be feasible, appropriate and/or advantageous for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to consider climate change to be within its remit. Given that irreversible global warming is under way and that this will inevitably have multiple global security implications—and indeed, that the Council has to some degree already addressed the issue—such a debate has become anachronistic. What is needed at this stage is nuanced analysis of how this complex policy issue may have already impacted, and may in future impact, the function and functioning of the Council. This article first reviews key variables that need to be taken into account in moving beyond a binary discussion of whether or not the Security Council should consider climate change. It then maps four broad categories of possible UNSC response, spanning from rejection of any involvement through to the Council using its Chapter VII powers and functioning as the peak body in respect of global climate change governance. It then places developments to date within those categories and concludes by considering the prospects for an increased UNSC role in the future.
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 globalization concerning who decides the future planetary configuration. The discussion of geoengineering proceeds apace as the limited success of climate mitigation focuses attention on what comes next. Thinking about how to govern geoengineering before major experiments are tried unilaterally might be the key to preventing future conflicts over such practical issues as what temperature the planet ought to be. Such questions are the key to the new geopolitics of the Anthropocene, a debate to which geography in general and political geography in particular could have much to contribute.
The Carnegie Council's work is rooted in the premise that the incorporation of ethical concerns into discussions of international affairs will yield more effective policies both in the United States and abroad. In honor of the Council's centenary, we have been asked to (briefly) present our views on the ethical and policy issues posed by climate change, focusing on what people need to know that they probably do not already know, and what should be done. In that spirit, this essay argues that climate change poses a profound ethical challenge, that the ongoing evasion of this challenge produces ineffective policy, and, therefore, that a fundamental paradigm shift is needed. More specifically, I maintain that the climate problem is usually misdiagnosed as a traditional tragedy of the commons, that this obscures two deeper and distinctively ethical challenges (what I call the tyranny of the contemporary and the perfect moral storm), and that we should address these challenges head on, by calling for a global constitutional convention focused on future generations. Copyright
The theme of identity has become one of the most important and yet contested elements in contemporary debates over the nature of security and the future of security studies. A key source of this contestation lies in the way that largely unacknowledged claims about knowledge and identity are historically related in one of the most powerful and pervasive conceptions of the relationship between politics and security, which I term the `liberal sensibility'. This foundation, however, has rarely been acknowledged by those who seek to integrate identity concerns into reformulated understandings of security. Contrary to commonly held views, a conception of identity has not been missing from prevailing theories of International Relations. On the contrary, it has been constitutive of them. Grasping the apparent absence of identity concerns as being in fact the outcome of a negative identity practice — a desire to exclude identity concerns from the realms of politics and security — provides a clearer understanding of the structure of the emerging debates between neorealist and critical theories in security studies. It also illustrates how these debates are frequently structured in quite misleading terms, terms that obscure rather than illuminate the fundamental questions raised by the relationship between identity and security.
Is climate change a national security threat to the United States? This question remains a subject of debate in academia and has received renewed emphasis in the policy community. Even taking a narrow definition of national security, climate change already constitutes a national security threat to the United States, both in terms of direct threats to the country as well as its broader extraterritorial interests. While some of these purported threats—abrupt climate change and sea-level rise—have been overstated by advocates, several concerns, mostly related to the effects of extreme weather events on the United States and its strategic interests overseas, are sufficient enough that they already constitute security threats. That climate change potentially poses a direct threat to the U.S. homeland and its overseas interests suggests the subject warrants serious attention.
It is widely recognized that changes are occurring to the earth's climate and, further, that these changes threaten important human interests. This raises the question of who should bear the burdens of addressing global climate change. This paper aims to provide an answer to this question. To do so it focuses on the principle that those who cause the problem are morally responsible for solving it (the ‘polluter pays’ principle). It argues that while this has considerable appeal it cannot provide a complete account of who should bear the burdens of global climate change. It proposes three ways in which this principle needs to be supplemented, and compares the resulting moral theory with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’.
What is real? What can we know? How might we act? This book sets out to answer these fundamental philosophical questions in a radical and original theory of security for our times. Arguing that the concept of security in world politics has long been imprisoned by conservative thinking, Ken Booth explores security as a precious instrumental value which gives individuals and groups the opportunity to pursue the invention of humanity rather than live determined and diminished lives. Booth suggests that human society globally is facing a set of converging historical crises. He looks to critical social theory and radical international theory to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the historical challenges facing global business-as-usual and for planning to reconstruct a more cosmopolitan future. Theory of World Security is a challenge both to well-established ways of thinking about security and alternative approaches within critical security studies.
What Is Extinction Rebellion and What Does It Want?
- Bbc
The Great Wall of India
- B Banerjee
Introduction: Security for Whom in a Time of Climate Crisis
- N Buxton
- B Hayes
Security in the Anthropocene
- M Fagan
Responsible for What? Carbon Producer CO
- H Shue
Securitization and Desecuritization
- O Wæver