Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how assumptions about “human nature” shape climate-security debates and how ethnographic insights from India challenge securitized narratives, thereby illustrating how political ecology can open the way to more reflexive approaches to climate (in)security and future-making.

Presentation long abstract

Debates on climate, conflict, and the future rest on deeply embedded assumptions about “human nature,” from Hobbesian and Randian imaginaries of competition to Kropotkin’s and Rousseau’s traditions of mutual aid and cooperation. These philosophical lineages quietly structure today’s climate-security discourse, shaping whether climate change is framed as a threat multiplier leading to violence or as a catalyst for solidarity and collective resilience. This paper argues that divergent interpretations of these foundational discourses form one of the principal divides between mainstream security studies and political ecology. These discourses about human nature also mediate how we interpret the past and see the future. Making these assumptions explicit collaboratively and opening them to scrutiny offers a productive starting point for dialogue.

During my three months of ethnographic fieldwork in Varanasi, India, I explored how locals view “climate change”, “resilience”, “security”, and other discourses. My paper describes how local realities challenge the basic assumptions underlying many classic security discourses. These dynamics reveal not only the limits of securitized, state-centric frameworks but also the importance of acknowledging multiple local and global knowledge systems that unsettle dominant climate-security imaginaries. Rather than evidence of “climate conflict,” the Varanasi case illuminates historically rooted inter-communal relations, harm done by state power, and everyday practices of coexistence, agency, and resilience that resist causal narratives favored in classical security studies.

Political ecology can enrich security studies by offering alternative narratives of agency and cooperation that conventional metrics miss, proposing a meta-theoretical openness that enables dialogue without collapsing critique into utility.