Presentation short abstract

Why is climate security discourse dominated by a concern with climate impacts on security, whilst saying so much less on the converse relationship - the impacts of conflict and security, and more broadly war and militarism, on climate change and climate policy?

Presentation long abstract

Interest in the linkages between climate change and security is dominated by concern with one particular causal pathway, namely how climate change affects or might come to affect security (plus the many intervening variables and mechanisms that might link them). By contrast, sustained analyses of how security – or more broadly violence, armed conflict, war and militarism – affect or might come to affect climate change are few and far between. What explains this pattern, which applies especially to mainstream policy-oriented climate security research and advocacy, but holds also for more critical scholarship, in political ecology included? Drawing on dedicated interviews with climate policymakers and campaigners, as well as 15 or so years’ work on climate security issues, this paper argues that this pattern has nothing to do with the importance, directness or clarity of the respective pathways – but is rather a function of the political and funding priorities of Western militaries, and of those development, humanitarian and environmental organisations (both governmental and non-governmental) which are connected to them. These political interests have exerted such a pull, the paper argues, that even critical including political ecology research in the area has been decisively shaped by it. The paper concludes by calling for political ecologists and other critical climate security scholars to work to correct this imbalance, so that both discourse and politics in this area come to focus much more than presently on the impacts and implications of militarism and war.