Format/Structure

This will be a traditional panel with presented papers. We will endeavour to have range of different perspectives.

Long Abstract

Scholarship in political ecology has long critiqued causal framings linking climate change to conflict and those positioning the former as a ‘threat multiplier’ to the latter, instead, arguing that any relationship between climate and conflict is determined by a complex set of social, historical and political factors that are inevitably dependent on the timeframe and scale at which analysis takes place. The role of critical political ecology scholarship – including from post-colonial, feminist, and other perspectives – has thus far been to challenge mainstream securitised framings of climate change-leads-to-displacement-and-conflict that have significantly shaped the world we inhabit today and most especially mainstream understandings of ‘(climate) security’.

This panel asks: What are the possibilities for and politics of a meta-theoretical openness that may enable dialogue between political ecology (of climate and conflict) with mainstream security studies? Where traditional security actors are seeking to better understand critique, is it our intellectual responsibility to refuse or accept this challenge? Can such an engagement take place without compromising our ontological or moral position, especially at a time of intensified militarisation and militarised violence? What are the terms on which generative dialogue can take place between critical political ecology and mainstream security studies? Is such dialogue desirable or possible?

Submissions can include (but are not limited to):

- Research based on empirical cases of dialogue (generative or otherwise) between political ecology and security studies.

- Agendas or roadmaps for starting this dialogue.

- Examples of political ecology in dialogue with other hegemonic discourses.

- Discussions of ‘responsible’ scholarship in political ecology of climate and conflict, and beyond, when hegemonic power structures ask for critique.

- The dangers of appropriating critique to greenwash or otherwise legitimise security interventions.

- Perspectives on refusal and not being ‘generative’.

This Panel has 8 pending paper proposals.
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