Anthropocene Geopolitics by Dalby Simon;

Author:Dalby, Simon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2020-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

CLIMATE SECURITY DISCOURSE

Indeed, it was the failure to respond effectively and the increasingly alarming projections from climate sciences concerning what is coming (Anderson and Bows 2011) that made security agencies pay attention to climate matters (CNA 2014; Werrell and Femia 2017). Faced with long-term changes, and required to think about strategic threats to the integrity of states, security planners have been generating technical reports and projection of the risks to states and directly to military infrastructure too over the last few years. The focus on climate has revived the earlier discussions of environmental security (Dalby 2002) and added an immediacy and urgency to addressing these issues (Floyd and Matthew 2013). Once again the arguments were that political instability in the Global South would be caused by environmental change, and fear of hordes of refugees in motion to the North were assumed to present crises that the military might be called upon to address.

Much of this discussion in the U.S. was focused on tropes of national security, asking questions about what climate change would do to American interests and how the American military would be called on to act (Chalecki 2013; National Intelligence Council 2016). The danger here is that traditional rhetoric of national security will be invoked to specify poor, marginal, and endangered populations as a threat to stability that requires military interventions to stop migration or deal with local violence deemed a security threat. Insecurity “over there” might spill over boundaries and disrupt trade or threaten regimes unable to handle the influx. Climate migration is thus on the policy agenda (White 2011). It is important to emphasize that there is little serious research that suggests that environmental scarcities will lead to full-scale war, whatever social vulnerabilities might occur and however frequently neo-Malthusian fears are reproduced in media accounts of imminent catastrophe (Theisen, Holtermann, and Buhaug 2012). But large-scale disruptions of the climate system, and simultaneous global financial crises, might indeed cause conflict if states act unilaterally to try to control food supplies or other key factors that disrupt the often tenuous links in the international system (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015).

Dealing with humanitarian crises, especially in the Asia-Pacific theatre, has long been a growing concern for Pentagon planners (Briggs 2012), given the vulnerability of many island states to both rising sea levels and increased typhoon intensity. These events might cause political instabilities that generate conflict too. But as chapter 4 made clear, in the case of many island states their inundation is a problem that needs urgent attention, and migration is going to continue to be necessary; this is an existential threat to island states but one that has not generated much international sympathy despite repeated calls to understand this as a security threat. This is a matter of survival for low-lying atoll states, a new matter of national security as states face the prospect of obliteration by rising sea water.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.