Is global climate change likely to become a significant source of violent conflict, and should it therefore be seen as a national security challenge? Most Northern governments, militaries, think tanks and NGOs believe so, as do many academic researchers, on the grounds that increased temperatures, changing precipitation patterns and rising sea levels will worsen existing social stresses, especially within poor societies and marginal communities across Africa and Asia.
This book argues otherwise. The first collection of its kind, it brings together leading scholars of Anthropology, Geography, Development Studies and International Relations to provide a series of critical analyses of mainstream thinking on the climate-security nexus. It shows how policy discourse on climate conflict consistently misrepresents the causes of violence, especially by obscuring its core political dimensions. It demonstrates that quantitative research provides a flawed basis for understanding climate-conflict linkages. It argues that climate security discourse is in hoc with a range of questionable military, authoritarian and developmental agendas. And it reveals that the greening of global capitalism is already having violent consequences across the global South. Climate change, the book argues, does indeed have serious conflict and security implications but these are quite different from how they are usually imagined.
This book was published as a special issue of Geopolitics.
1. Introduction: Rethinking Climate Change, Conflict and Security Jan
Selby and Clemens Hoffmann
2. Converging on Disaster: Climate Security and
the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa Betsy Hartmann
3. Gardens
of Eden or Hearts of Darkness? The Genealogy of Discourses on Environmental
Insecurity and Climate Wars in Africa Harry Verhoeven
4. Climate
Insecurity in (Post)Conflict Areas: The Biopolitics of United Nations
Vulnerability Assessments Michael Mason
5. Positivist Climate Conflict
Research: A Critique Jan Selby
6. Whats at Stake in Securitising Climate
Change? Towards a Differentiated Approach Franziskus von Lucke, Zehra
Wellmann, and Thomas Diez
7. Climatic Disasters and Radical Politics in
Southern Pakistan: The Non-linear Connection Ayesha Siddiqi
8.
Understanding Resilience in Climate Change and Conflict Affected Regions of
Nepal Janani Vivekananda, Janpeter Schilling, and Dan Smith
9. The
Militarisation and Marketisation of Nature: An Alternative Lens to
Climate-Conflict Alexander Dunlap and James Fairhead
Jan Selby is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK, and Director of the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research (SCSR). His research focuses on peace processes, environmental security, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and International Relations theory.
Clemens Hoffmann is Assistant Professor of International Relations, at Bilkent University, Turkey. His research interests include political ecology, environmental conflict and security, critical, postcolonial and materialist IR theory and Turkish foreign policy.
