Fit for purpose? Climate change,security and IR

Abstract

As the contributions to this special issue suggest, IR has had a problematic relationship with environmental issues. Indeed it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that IR has treated environmental change almost as a distraction from important concerns of global politics, and gives us few significant resources for understanding these challenges or addressing them effectively. This is perhaps most starkly evident in the subfield of security studies, despite increasing recognition that environmental change warrants consideration as a security issue. This paper examines this engagement with a particular focus on climate change. Ultimately, the paper advances two arguments. First, examinations of the climate change–security relationship located in traditional security studies struggle to come to terms with the nature of the Anthropocene challenge and more specifically with the questions of who needs securing; what the nature of the threat posed is; and who is capable of or responsible for addressing this threat. Second, however, we can see progressive potential in engagement with the security implications of climate change in IR where such scholarship parts ways with traditional accounts of security; does not allow existing configurations of power to define the conditions for thinking about agency and sites of politics; and reflexively and self-consciously draws on insights from beyond the IR discipline. The increasing volume of work consistent with this more critical engagement is grounds for hope for this field of study in engaging productively even with a challenge as complex and significant as climate change.

Introduction

Environmental change has traditionally occupied a relatively marginal place in international relations scholarship. Of course to some degree this reflects the genesis of the field in concerns with understanding and avoiding large-scale international conflict. IR scholarship remained overwhelmingly focused on the question of conflict and its avoidance in the interwar years, during World War II and throughout the Cold War. Yet the waning and end of the Cold War opened up space for recognising a broader range of issues as important subjects for analysis. Environmental change emerged as one of these issues, with the particular challenge of climate change finding its way on to the international political agenda at about the same time as the Berlin Wall was falling.

The fit between environmental change and IR has never been a particularly comfortable one, however. As a field of scholarship, IR developed in lockstep with changing practices of international politics from the perspective of Western states. Nowhere was this more evident than in the subfield of security studies. As Buzan and Hansen note in their account of the evolution of security studies, this subfield of IR reflected global events but in ways heavily biased towards the experiences of certain (English-speaking, developed) states. ¹ The image here – found in the literature and evident to a significant degree in practice – was of self-contained units (states) doing their best to protect themselves from external (usually military) threats posed by purposive actors. ² While this aligned with Western concerns about Soviet-led military threats and nuclear war, it fit uneasily with the issue of transboundary environmental change, most clearly climate change. This is widely and increasingly recognised as a threat at the national and international level, as will be noted. But climate change is driven by unintentional, everyday practices; it is beyond the capacity of any state (regardless of material power) to effectively address unilaterally; and the precise nature of the threat is open to significant degrees of interpretation and contestation. What chance do existing accounts of security within IR have, then, for understanding or directing responses to challenges like climate change?

This paper examines this question, exploring the extent to which the subfield of security studies within IR has resources that enable us to understand the nature of ecological threat or guide effective responses to it. In the process I focus on the issue of climate change. I first outline how the discipline has approached the concept of security, noting what is at stake in debates about the meaning of security. I then examine the core contours of engagement with the relationship between climate change and security in IR. Here I note that those approaches to this relationship more consistent with traditional security studies – concerned with the threat and use of force and with the preservation of state sovereignty or international stability – struggle to come to terms with the fundamental challenge posed by climate change (and the broader Anthropocene context) for traditional modes of conceptualising or responding to threat. ³ This applies in particular to challenges of making sense of who or what needs securing (referent); who is capable of or responsible for providing security in the face of a transnational issue like climate change (agent); and how we should approach the nature of the threat posed (threat).

The following section then outlines attempts to address these limitations in the context of the climate crisis, particularly identifying interventions with alternative (and more defensible) approaches to the three issues noted above: referent, agent and the nature of the threat. In the process I make the case for progressive potential in IR to engage productively with the climate–security relationship where such scholarship parts ways with more traditional accounts of security; does not allow existing configurations of power to define the conditions for thinking about agency and sites of politics; and reflexively and self-consciously draws on insights from beyond the IR discipline. The increasing volume of work consistent with this more critical engagement suggests hope for this field of study in engaging productively even with a challenge as fundamental to our discipline – and more importantly as fundamental to the planet and its inhabitants – as climate change.

Why security?

Defining ‘security’ in international relations thought is challenging. On those (surprisingly rare) occasions when scholars have engaged this question this directly, ⁴ they are often at pains to emphasise just how contested the concept is, even if stopping short of applying Gallie’s notion of an ‘essentially contested concept’ to it. ⁵ Others have conceptualised security in broad terms as the protection of ‘cherished values’, ‘relative safety from harm’ or ‘freedom from danger or harm’. ⁶ These broad definitions may be less likely to provoke a critical response on ethical, political or ideological grounds, but of course risk telling us little about whose security is under consideration, from what threats, through what means it is to be protected or advanced or which actors are capable of (or responsible for) addressing it. The more specific answers to such questions can be understood as security discourses, ⁷ which might vary significantly from a focus on the preservation of state sovereignty to a concern with the resilience of ecosystems and much in between. A compelling case can be made that a particular national security discourse – linked to Realist thought – has emerged as the dominant discourse of security in IR and in global politics, to the point where the politics of the choices made (to prioritise states and military threats to sovereignty, for example) are not necessarily identified or questioned. For Walt, ⁸ it simply made sense to approach security studies as the study of the ‘threat and use of force’ between states in the international system. Here, the focus is on the territorial preservation of the nation-state and protection of its sovereignty from external (usually military) threat. This is the dominant image or account of security in international relations, one consistent with a traditional approach to the study of security.

But why does this matter? Is the ink spilled over the meaning of security in international relations thought really that important, and do we need to engage with the concept at all to make sense of either the climate crisis or responses to it? In this context, the politics of security is particularly important to note, in two senses.

First, key institutions of global politics define their legitimacy and their reason for being as founded upon the promise of providing security. This is central to the United Nations, with Article 1 of the UN Charter committing the institution to the maintenance of international peace and security. And it is central too to states, with state leaders consistently noting that their most important obligation is to provide security for their citizens. Indeed this is fundamental to the social contract itself, with individuals giving up some degree of autonomy to the Leviathan (in this case the state) in exchange for the protection provided by the state in an anarchic state of nature. ⁹ In this sense, the question of how security is defined and approached in practice is crucial in providing a standard against which the legitimacy and functionality of those institutions can be judged.

Second, and following directly from this, defining an issue as an issue of security can be significant in terms of how that issue is dealt with. For some, the centrality of security to political legitimacy makes security issues ‘first order’ or ‘high politics’ issues, suggesting a level of attention, priority and funding that might not be evident in the case of ‘normal’ political issues. ¹⁰ In simple terms, if an issue is seen as a ‘matter of national security’, for example, it is seen (and presented) as important. For others, defining and approaching an issue as a security issue means potentially enabling exceptional or emergency measures to deal with that issue, measures that might not have been possible within the security framing. This is, of course, a central point made by architects of the ‘securitisation’ framework, to be discussed. ¹¹ Whichever of these accounts is closer to capturing the politics of security, what is clear in these interventions is the suggestion that there is potentially plenty at stake in practical terms for defining, understanding and approaching security (and threats to it) in particular ways. The meaning and scope of security therefore matters, and arguably compels us to interrogate exactly how it is given meaning in practice and to what end.

This conception of security – as political, and as a social construction defined in different ways by different political communities over time with different sets of implications – is a defining feature of critical approaches to security. ¹² It suggests the need to avoid allowing our object of study or scope of analysis to be determined by the contemporary institutions of global politics and their interests, and rather to interrogate the choices made to define and approach particular issues (like climate change) as issues of security, along with the implications of doing so. Indeed as will be discussed, this is an increasing feature of (critical) scholarship on the climate security relationship in IR. ¹³

Security and climate change in IR

Much like broader debates in IR, issues of environmental change were relatively late to the party in terms of scholarship on security. With a small number of exceptions, ¹⁴ environmental change really only found its way into discussions of security in the 1980s, and in particular the later part of that decade. Early advocates at this time suggested that issues of ‘survival’ associated with environmental change necessarily warranted their consideration as first-order security issues. ¹⁵ Normative considerations were clearly at the heart of this push, with those in favour of redefining security to include environmental issues appearing to believe that approaching these issues as issues of ‘security’ would mean priority, attention and funding usually attached to the ‘high politics’ arena of security. Indeed as Betsy Hartman has noted, a range of advocates making this case were affiliated with environmental organisations with a vested interest in such prioritisation. ¹⁶

While the above account would clearly constitute a challenge to the traditional association of security with ‘the threat and use of force’, ¹⁷ a second wave of scholars began to explore the ways in which environmental issues might intersect with that more traditional agenda. Thomas Homer-Dixon, for example, examined the role of environmental issues in contributing to contestation and conflict, pointing to dynamics like deforestation that could trigger population displacement, state fragility and violence. ¹⁸ In the process this analysis preceded much subsequent research on the relationship between climate change and conflict that emerged in subsequent years, particularly in the mid-2000s. The suggestion that climate change had contributed to conflict in Darfur ¹⁹ or in Syria ²⁰ – with climate-induced drought playing a central role in both – were high-profile albeit contentious claims that brought climate change squarely into conversation with key debates in international security. ²¹

By the time claims were being made about the role of climate change in contributing to instability or even conflict in Syria, a significant body of literature had emerged that suggested it was important to consider the role of climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’. ²² The focus of this literature was the potential implications of climate change for key institutions of global politics, especially states, the military and national security agencies. This scholarship, it should be noted, was driven less by academics in the field of IR than by analysts based in public policy-oriented thinktanks, particularly in the United States. Indeed the ‘threat multiplier’ concept advanced by one of these thinktanks – the CNA – was subsequently embraced by governments in recognition of the security implications of climate change. ²³

The mid-2000s debates about the specific role of climate change in contributing to fragility and instability both drove and followed initial discussions of the international security implications of climate change in the UN Security Council. ²⁴ The first of these debates, sponsored by the United Kingdom, took place in 2007, and built also on growing international concern with the issue in broader terms at this time. Preceding years had seen record temperatures and large-scale natural disasters, but had also seen the publication of the Stern Review outlining the catastrophic implications of climate change for the global economy; the release of high profile films on climate change such as The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth; while the subject of the latter, Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2007 alongside the IPCC. ²⁵ These dynamics drove concern with climate change at the international political level and engagement with the issue in scholarship on global politics, but also fed into recognition of the security implications of climate change in both theory and practice. So what exactly has been the focus of scholarship on the relationship between climate change and security in IR? There have arguably been three core themes of climate-security research.

First, climate security scholarship has focused significantly on the question of whether, and how, climate change might contribute to fragility, instability, displacement and conflict. Throughout the 1990s a number of interventions had suggested that environmental degradation in general might make conflict more likely. This was evident in Homer-Dixon’s work noted earlier, which more carefully explored the possibility of degradation contributing to state fragility and even potentially conflict, at least at the domestic level. But a range of other accounts went further, making often sweeping (and speculative) claims about the descent into chaos and international conflict that would accompany environmental change. This was most starkly evident in Robert Kaplan’s discussion of a ‘coming anarchy’, in which environmental change was seen as potentially contributing to a likely future of state collapse, criminality and significant violence, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. ²⁶ But it was evident too in the suggestion that access to transboundary water resources might trigger water wars, ²⁷ speculation that itself produced a significant body of literature challenging the methodological and empirical basis for these claims ²⁸ and even pointing to the (greater) likelihood for cooperation in response to challenges of transboundary water management. ²⁹ In the process, this research drew attention to the (often realist) assumptions underpinning accounts linking scarcity or degradation to violence. ³⁰

Similar trends were evident in examinations of the role of climate change in contributing to displacement or ‘climate refugees’. Indeed, as per the example of Darfur, analysts often linked displacement triggered by climate change with conflict, with the suggestion that large-scale population movement (caused by natural disasters like droughts or rising sea levels) risked being a trigger for large-scale violence. Early, and alarmist, accounts of millions displaced by the effects of ecological crisis were prominent, ³¹ but also served to encourage a range of critical scholars interrogating these claims on political and methodological grounds. ³² Among other points of criticism, some scholars here noted a tendency to downplay the agency and capacity of those populations particularly affected by the onset of climate change. ³³

Concern with the potential for environmental change to precipitate armed conflict, including through displacement, has ultimately come to occupy a central place in scholarship on climate security in IR. Some sweeping accounts of a future defined by ‘climate wars’ emerged, but like Kaplan’s assessment these were largely produced by journalists rather than IR scholars. ³⁴ In general terms more nuanced and careful analyses characterised attempts to link climate change with conflict in IR, with scholars downplaying a causal connection between climate change and violence, and developing more methodologically rigorous bases for examining the relationship between climate change, displacement and war. ³⁵ While most analyses were careful to avoid suggesting a future defined by climate-induced violence, this engagement tended towards validating the idea that climate change was likely to contribute to and reinforce state fragility, rendering conflict more likely (even if far from inevitable).

A second core focus in scholarship on climate change and security in IR has been the question of what key institutions – especially states but also the UNSC – have done or should do in response to the threat posed by climate change. In the context of states and their response, a number of analysts have increasingly pointed to the ways in which climate change has been incorporated into national security thinking, the dynamics through which that process has evolved in different countries and the implications of approaching climate security in particular ways. ³⁶ Others have made the case that those states that have not recognised this relationship ultimately should, and have noted the nature of the threat posed by climate change to national security. ³⁷ More detailed analyses have pointed to the imperative for states to address climate change through effective management of defence estates and assets, preparation for particular types of military missions (such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions in response to climate-induced natural disasters), and the incorporation of these concerns into long-term approaches to procurement, training and strategic assessments, for example. ³⁸ Much of this scholarship has been policy-oriented in focus, arguably reflecting opportunities for funding and substantive policy impact. And it is telling that in this scholarship the focus is rarely on mitigation strategies in preventing the effects of climate change in the first instance, or on the imperative for militaries themselves to reduce their climate ‘bootprint’. ³⁹ Rather, the emphasis is more frequently on adaptation or responses to the onset of the climate crisis for particular states. ⁴⁰

On the United Nations, a number of analysts have provided assessments of engagement with climate change in the Security Council in particular. As noted, since 2007 the UNSC has discussed the issue in thematic debates on several occasions with increasing frequency – with a resolution tabled (but voted down) in 2021 – and has developed the Climate Security Mechanism to coordinate UN responses to the security implications of climate change. The general focus of this IR scholarship has been interrogating the contours of these debates, assessing the likelihood for institutionalisation of a role for the UNSC and making a case for how the organisation can or should address the implications of climate change as an issue of international security. ⁴¹

A third core theme in climate security research in IR has explored the pros and cons of securitisation. As noted, a range of advocates initially made a case for approaching environmental issues as security issues on normative grounds. For them, these issues – if treated as core issues of national security – might ultimately receive the attention, priority and funding consistent with the scale of the problem. Clearly, such a position works with assumptions about the politics of security: about what the security framing does. ⁴²

This position was challenged from the outset by Daniel Deudney, ⁴³ who suggested that such a framing risked militarising the environment, ushering in responses ill-suited to addressing the challenges of environmental change. This critique presaged the development and articulation of the ‘securitisation’ framework by Ole Wæver. ⁴⁴ Wæver’s framework made the case that we should explore how political communities themselves give meaning to security and especially threats to it, suggesting that this occurs through speech acts that, if endorsed by relevant audiences, ultimately enable exceptional measures to deal with that existential threat. Wæver went on to argue, however, that securitisation was usually best avoided because the logic of security was defined by emergency, exceptionalism and illiberal measures inconsistent with ‘normal’ political deliberation that should define political responses to issues such as climate change. ⁴⁵

Deudney and Wæver’s positions, on environmental issues and the politics of securitisation respectively, find support in a range of accounts of the potential dangers associated with approaching climate change as a security issue. Some accounts have suggested that the embrace of this threat by Defence establishments amounts to little more than attempts for militaries to secure budgets in a post-Cold War world, and will likely usher in responses that are wholly inconsistent with the imperative for urgent and preventative-focused responses to the challenges of climate change. ⁴⁶ Other approaches have attempted to examine the dynamics and effects of this process of securitisation in different settings, ⁴⁷ often developing less categorical and more empirically-situated accounts of the politics of securitisation. More recent scholarship has pointed to the conditions in which climate securitisation can be justified (or is even morally necessary) in normative terms. ⁴⁸ And a range of scholarship has focused on the dynamics and implications of securitisation of climate change at the international level, particularly within the UN Security Council. ⁴⁹

The above constitutes a necessarily brief and partial account of the core contours of engagement with climate change and security IR. ⁵⁰ Scholars have certainly addressed other sets of issues in examining this relationship and approaching the intersection between climate change and security in IR, but the above captures the most prominent contours of this engagement. But what, if anything, does this tell us about the prospects for IR to give us resources for understanding the (security) implications of climate change or guiding effective responses to it? Ultimately, the remainder of this paper makes the case that the track record and potential of security scholarship in IR- in giving us resources for coming to terms with the nature of the climate change threat and addressing it effectively – is patchy and mixed. Traditional approaches to security are unlikely to take us very far in this context, whereas emerging critical scholarship on security – and climate security more broadly – appears decidedly more promising.

Climate change: the challenge for traditional security studies

Scholarship consistent with traditional approaches to the study and practice of security – in which the focus is on the preservation of existing institutions in the face of external threat – give us important insights into the challenges facing these institutions in the context of climate change. Recent detailed empirical analysis of the contribution of climate change to state fragility, population displacement and/or violence has allowed a more sophisticated understanding of exactly how climate change functions as a ‘threat multiplier’, including allowing us to appreciate why we see displacement or violence as a feature of some climate-affected spaces but not others. ⁵¹ Analyses of national and international responses to climate change also allow us to identify not only what these organisations (including national establishments) are doing in response to the challenge of climate change but also help paint a picture of what might constitute ‘best practice’ in this context. ⁵² But scholarship in the area of traditional security studies is far more limited in coming to terms with the nature of the Anthropocene context, and there are at least three central limitations to this scholarship in providing us with resources for understanding or addressing the key (security) implications of climate change.

The first core limitation for traditional approaches to security concerns the predilection to endorse key contemporary institutions as the referent object of security – of who needs securing – in the face of a global challenge. This challenge is, as noted, particularly acute in the Anthropocene context. The Anthropocene, the mooted geological epoch defined by recognition of humanity as a planetary force, ⁵³ challenges the very possibility of separation between humanity (and its institutions) and nature. ⁵⁴ On these grounds, Clark and Szerzynski suggest that the challenge of the Anthropocene is a fundamental one given the centrality of the nature-human divide to modern thought in the social sciences more broadly. ⁵⁵ They further argue that assumptions of a ‘quiescent earth’ as a backdrop to human activity are no longer tenable.

The challenge to traditional approaches to security in IR – which focus on human institutions that attempt to protect or insulate themselves from external threat – is clearly apparent. Even settling on human security, for example, arguably limits our register to currently-living human populations, potentially excluding moral consideration for the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: future generations and other living beings. In the face of ongoing change there are surely questions here about whether the language of national or international security fits with recognition of the key and direct harms associated with climate change, which may not pose an immediate challenge to territorial integrity or sovereignty but certainly pose fundamental and direct threats to life on the planet. And certainly, there are big questions about whether the embeddedness and entanglement that define the contemporary ecological crisis and the Anthropocene context are consistent with the way in which traditional approaches have approached, or even can approach, the question of who or what it is that needs securing.

Closely related to this is a second core challenge for traditional approaches to security: the question of who provides security in response to the threat posed by climate change. These are inter-related challenges for traditional approaches to security in IR in the sense that answers to the question of security agents tend towards settling on referent and agent as one and the same: the state. Here, the state is the actor threatened and the state is the actor (usually through its military) capable of and responsible for addressing that threat. There is a simplicity and elegance to this conflation, but it works poorly in the face of environmental change generally and climate change specifically. Here, contributions to climate change are evident in everyday action (including within the state itself), and the nature of the challenge is beyond the capacity of any state to effectively address. Even states disproportionately responsible for the problem of climate change in terms of volume of emissions (the United States and China, for example), cannot stop or prevent climate change and its associated impacts, even through immediate cessation of all domestic emissions. And regardless of a state’s wealth and capacity, the fact that some degree of climate change is locked in means even the best-endowed states cannot wholly insulate themselves from the effects of climate change. ⁵⁶ In this context, significant and sustained global action is clearly necessary, but that is not especially consistent with how traditional approaches to security approach the question of responses to security threats. A key challenge in this context is that the agents traditional approaches would normally identify as security providers, and those to whom they assign responsibility for providing security, are demonstrably unable to do so in the sense of addressing the challenge of climate change. Indeed many have seemed unwilling to even recognise a responsibility to protect their populations from the (security) implications of climate change despite the apparent challenge this can – and perhaps should – pose to their legitimacy. ⁵⁷

A possible response to the above would be of course to focus less on the immediate and direct effects of climate change, or the imperative of mitigation to prevent (or more accurately minimise) harm, and more on the traditional threat agenda of instability and violence arising from climate effects. This points, however, to a third key challenge associated with traditional forms of engagement with the security implications of climate change: the nature of the threat itself. In a model in which our focus is on the secondary or indirect effects of climate change – for displacement, state fragility, instability and warfare – the immediate, direct and harmful effects of climate change – whether desertification, natural disasters, rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, changing rainfall patterns or the spread of vector borne disease – are ultimately ignored except when they contribute to ‘first order’ security challenges. ⁵⁸

In rare contexts – where the territorial integrity of a particular island-state is threatened by rising sea levels (as is the case in Tuvalu or Kiribati, for example) – it might be possible to imagine the threat of climate change as a direct one to an entity such as a nation-state. ⁵⁹ In most cases, however, the ‘securityness’ of climate change would not be recognised until it fits within traditional assumptions about the threat agenda and the purview or capacity of traditional security agents. Even if the challenge posed by climate change is catastrophic in terms of loss of life, it risks only entering debates about security for traditional approaches if these immediate and direct threats translate into fragility, instability and violence. In short, as the immediate harms of climate change increase and the existential nature of the challenge becomes ever more apparent, traditional approaches to the study of security appear particularly poorly endowed for either coming to terms with the nature of the threat faced or the possibility of effectively responding to it.

Climate change and critical approaches to security

While the above account suggests fundamental limitations of traditional security scholarship in coming to terms with – or giving us resources for responding to – the nature of the challenge of climate change, it is important to differentiate such limitations from the field of security studies in IR more broadly defined. In this context, critical approaches to the climate security relationship have developed more promising responses to the challenge of climate change to the extent that such approaches have been willing to challenge assumptions about the nature and scope of security; to approach questions of agency and sites of politics beyond the confines of existing configurations of power; and have reflexively and self-consciously drawn on insights from beyond the IR discipline. More directly, they have developed responses to the three key limitations identified above.

On the question of the referent object of security, various interventions have called for a focus on ecosystems and their resilience, ⁶⁰ the biosphere, ecosphere or the planet and its integrity more broadly, ⁶¹ or for a focus on ‘post-human’ ⁶² or ‘worldly’ security. ⁶³ While all developing distinct accounts of whose security matters, all these approaches ultimately point to the limitations of a focus on the preservation of contemporary political institutions and call for extending our moral gaze beyond currently living human populations. And some focus specifically on the issue of climate change in making this case. ⁶⁴

Related to this attempt to redefine the referent object of security has been the challenge made to anthropocentrism in the field of IR more broadly. ⁶⁵ In this context a range of accounts have pointed to the ways in which the Anthropocene constitutes a ‘game-changer’ for IR thought (and institutional arrangements in global politics), which remains wedded to the separation between humans and nature and the unquestioned moral primacy of the former over the latter. ⁶⁶ Harrington and Shearing, ⁶⁷ for example, argue that the Anthropocene compels orienting our conceptions of security towards interconnectedness and networks of relationships.

The various approaches noted above also, in the process of developing alternative accounts of whose security matters, shift our register when it comes to the question of the nature of the threat posed by climate change. These accounts all suggest the need to move away from a limited and limiting focus on the indirect or secondary implications of climate change – the fixation with the moments at which climate change’s effects might spill over into (at least national level) fragility, instability, displacement and conflict. If our focus is on the vulnerability of ecosystems or other living beings, of course we immediately recognise that threats associated with climate change are direct, immediate and existential. ⁶⁸ This applies too to a human security lens, ⁶⁹ even if such an approach tends to reaffirm some of the same anthropocentric tendencies of more traditional conceptions of security tied to political institutions (national and international security, for example).

Finally, on the issue of agency, a range of critical approaches have identified a much wider array of agents and actors capable of – or even responsible for – responding to elements of the climate crisis. Various approaches identify the role of (security) agents at the level of civil society, ⁷⁰ private corporations, ⁷¹ Indigenous and local actors ⁷² or even point to the agency of other living beings, for example. ⁷³ While recognising a continued role for effective actions through states, ⁷⁴ such approaches are careful to avoid allowing existing institutions, configurations or distributions of power to define the limits of our imagination when it comes to questions of agency, capacity and response. ⁷⁵ This is especially important if these institutions have at best failed in guiding effective responses to this crisis, and at worst are impediments to effective responses to the climate emergency.

These are of course not the limits of productive engagement with the climate change–security relationship in the critical tradition. Those concerned with the implications of approaching climate change as a security issues – its securitisation – also help furnish us with important resources for understanding whether particular communities come to understand and approach climate change as a security issue, how this relationship is viewed and the implications of doing so. ⁷⁶ Scholarship in the broader IR tradition of constructivism, for example, has been helpful in allowing us to get a sense of why some states appear to embrace this relationship while others are sceptical of it, including why states or regional organisations emphasise particular dimensions of this threat and prioritise specific responses to it. ⁷⁷ Some authors have drawn on these traditions to examine the variegated effects of framing the climate change–security relationship in different ways in different social and political contexts. ⁷⁸ And while elements of the securitisation framework could be and have been contested, this framework enables us to examine the constitution or construction of the security agenda in particular settings, and the effects of doing so. ⁷⁹ In short, this scholarship has proven useful in giving us resources for examining whether political communities view climate change as an issue of security and what sets of practices particular conceptions of this relationship encourage.

While the prospects for engaging productively with climate change through a critical security lens therefore appear promising in light of existing scholarship and trends, two final notes of caution are worth making here on the nature of the challenge facing such scholarship when it comes to the climate–security relationship.

First, it appears clear that those most effectively challenging the limitations of traditional approaches and giving us resources for both understanding and addressing the security implications of climate change draw extensively from disciplines beyond political science and international studies. Whether drawing on philosophy, ⁸⁰ sociology, ⁸¹ anthropology ⁸² or geography, ⁸³ for example, scholarship on the climate–security relationship that questions the nature-politics divide, the focus on indirect threats or the fixation on existing political institutions seems to necessitate drawing on intellectual resources not immediately available in IR. This is indeed productive work, but comes with risks and costs. Disciplinary norms in the academy (associated with prospects for publication in leading journals, employment prospects and funding opportunities, for example) arguably all serve to militate against genuinely cross-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary research.

Second, for all these interventions, engaging with existing institutional arrangements – even broader realities of global politics and the distribution of power and resources within it – will remain a challenge. ⁸⁴ The fundamental nature of the critique involved, with its associated critique of those institutional arrangements, suggests that ‘take-up’ of these ideas in corridors of power will be limited. In this sense, translating ideas into political strategies or ideas to be adopted by those with the capacity to enact change may be limited. These more critical interventions may help us understand the challenges that we face, but significant question marks remain over their capacity to inform responses undertaken by those actors (i.e. states) with the resources consistent with acting urgently and effectively to address these challenges. Sustained examination of the prospects for these critical perspectives to inform the way key institutions perceive and approach the security implications of climate change would seem an appropriate – even urgent – research agenda in IR scholarship.

Conclusion

This special issue reflects on the contribution that IR has made and can make to understanding the climate crisis and informing effective responses to it. In focusing on the ‘master concept’ of security, this paper has reflected on the extent to which scholarship on security in IR gives us resources for coming to terms with or effectively addressing climate change, ultimately pointing to a crucial distinction here between traditional and critical approaches to climate security. While a necessarily partial and selective account of a now significant volume of work examining the relationship between climate change and security in IR, this account suggests important insights into this relationship, and important foundations upon which further research might be built.

Clearly, the nature of the Anthropocene, the ecological crisis and climate change specifically takes us into a challenging space when we attempt to align this context with existing resources for making sense of the world and guiding responses to these challenges. This is, clearly, a big challenge for IR as a field. ⁸⁵ If anything, however, the challenge for political institutions themselves is even more fundamental. When it comes to security, the focus of this paper, it is worth reiterating that the provision of security underpins the legitimacy of key institutions of world politics, especially states. Yet the failure of these institutions to come to terms with the direct threat of climate change, their inability to actually prevent harm associated with it, and even their unwillingness to accept responsibility for the provision of security should lead us to ask whether these institutions are fit for purpose in the context of contemporary ecological crisis. ⁸⁶ We might need to work with powerful institutions in an immediate sense to respond to environmental change, but as Lövbrand et al. argue, ⁸⁷ we cannot allow the existing configurations of power in the international system to determine the limits of our imagination when it comes to responding to the realities of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis.

Ultimately, scholarship on the climate–security relationship consistent with critical approaches to security gives us grounds for optimism regarding the contribution IR can make in coming to terms with the nature of the challenge climate change poses to security and the types of responses that should be prioritised in response. Such approaches face challenges to their immediate political purchase or take-up, and disciplinary norms in the academy arguably serve to disincentivise the type of inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary work that has been most productive in this context. But the apparent willingness of scholars to challenge the association of security with the state and military threat, to avoid allowing existing configurations of power from determining the limits of their accounts of agency and sites of politics, and their willingness to draw from insights beyond the IR field suggest a capacity for productive scholarship on the climate change–security relationship.