Criticality,subalternity and postcoloniality in climate security: Broadening perspectives through ‘epistemological deepening’?

Abstract

Scholars have highlighted a need for ‘epistemological pluralism’ in the climate security literature as essential to truly capture contextual and socio-ecological complexities. At the same time, the field is facing criticism for reproducing a Western-dominated and Eurocentric ‘epistemic bias’ ignoring insights from subaltern epistemic communities. This article explores how the ethos of epistemological pluralism could be used as an analytical ‘mediator’ to bridge perspectives from the critical and mainstream climate security literature and, by doing so, contributing to deepening the insights on climate security interlinkages. To enable such cross-fertilization, the article argues that climate security not only requires epistemological pluralism but also ‘epistemological deepening’: insights from subaltern epistemic communities.

1. Introduction

The academic literature seeking to understand the interlinkages between climate change and security is growing (Von Uexkull & Buhaug, 2021). The climate security nexus is also increasingly recognized and addressed in the policy world (Bremberg et al., 2022). As a result, several high-level institutions dedicated to addressing climate-related security risks have emerged. Some examples are for instance the United Nations Climate Security Mechanism and the NATO Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence.

The existing literature covers a diverse range of empirical topics. Some examples are the causal relationships between climate change and conflict (Benjaminsen et al., 2012; Buhaug, 2010; Mach et al., 2019; Selby, 2014; Selby & Hoffmann, 2014; Von Uexkull & Buhaug, 2021); discourse on climate security in the United Nations Security Council (Çelenk, 2024; Maertens, 2021; McDonald, 2023, 2024; Scott, 2015); security considerations concerning climate-induced forced migration (Baldwin et al., 2014; Boas et al., 2019, 2022; Trombetta, 2008); impacts of climate change on livelihoods and food security (Connolly-Boutin & Smit, 2016); implications of climate change on peacebuilding (Krampe et al., 2024) and on national and military security (Ide, 2023); unforeseen adverse effects of climate adaptation and mitigation on already marginalized groups (Swatuk et al., 2021) and more.

The field tends to describe the interlinkages between climate change and security risks as indirect and mutually reinforcing. Climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ alludes to how adverse impacts of climate change feeds into and worsen existing vulnerabilities to conflict. Weak state institutions are perceived to pose limitations to the resilience and capacities for efficient and necessary climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Armed conflict therefore increases the vulnerabilities to climate change, and we see a loop of negative spiraling effects. Also, on the micro-scale, the literature points to how existing vulnerabilities are exacerbated by climate change, disproportionately affecting already marginalized groups such as women and youth, financially marginalized communities, Indigenous peoples, minorities, elderly and people with disabilities (Ngcamu, 2023).

Despite the growing policy relevance and diversity of empirical areas covered in the climate security literature, the climate–conflict nexus has come to define the field, and particularly ‘the limited question of whether or how climate change causes conflict’ (Krampe et al., 2024:1). The scholarly disagreements concerning this question, and the extent to which that is a meaningful question to ask in the first place, have been subjected to much scholarly contestation (Busby, 2021; Deudney, 1990; Selby, 2014; Selby & Hoffmann, 2014; Von Uexkull & Buhaug, 2021).

A key takeaway is nevertheless that the root to these scholarly disagreements could be seen as related to differences in epistemological underpinnings where positivism and constructivism dominate the field (Beaumont & de Coning, 2022). These epistemological differences lead to perceptions of partly incompatible approaches, where the positivist side of the coin insists on pointing out limitations to the ‘evidence’ proving direct causal connections between climate change and conflict, whereas the constructivist side of the coin dismisses the premise of causality altogether (Selby, 2014).

An insightful effort to overcome this stalemate was recently put forward in the shape of a proposed guiding research ethos referred to as ‘epistemological pluralism’ by Beaumont and de Coning (2022). They contend that the climate–conflict interlinkages are uncertain because of the complexities in the social and ecological systems embedded in climate change and conflict dynamics alike. A broader recognition for this inherent unpredictability and complexity would provide ‘a firmer basis for both knowledge production and policymaking’ (Beaumont & Coning, 2022: 3). To avoid what they identify as epistemological ‘tunnel vision’ and ‘epistemological monism’, where insights from the constructivist and positivist camps fail to cross-fertilize, the ethos of epistemological pluralism acknowledges that the field requires insights from at least two distinct epistemological approaches – both constructivism and positivism – to truly capture the complex nature of climate–conflict interrelations. Epistemological pluralism guides climate security scholars to recognize epistemological uncertainty, embrace epistemological diversity and practice humility and dialogue across epistemic differences (Beaumont & Coning, 2022: 3).

At the same time, a recent review article points at the field largely failing to include insights from critical research traditions and perspectives, as climate security has come to replace the related and more critically oriented earlier field of environmental security, which, according to the authors, to a larger degree draw insights from critical research traditions such as political ecology and human geography (Selby et al. 2024). This resonates well with the reasonings in a growing body of critically informed climate security literature, neither widely addressed nor referenced in the mainstream literature, contending that the field could be seen as characterized by a Eurocentric ‘epistemic bias’, ignoring subaltern perspectives (Siddiqi, 2022). This poses unfortunate limitations to our understanding of the climate security nexus, considering that ‘Epistemologies are how we perceive the world; they shape what we are able to know’ (O’Lear, 2024).

In the spirit of epistemological pluralism, and as an attempt to build on and expand on this useful guiding ethos, this article aims to systematize some of the emerging criticisms to the mainstream climate security literature, centring the following discussions around three critical perspectives as an attempt to synthesize some of the reoccurring topics. These concerns (a) the Eurocentric ‘epistemic bias’ understood to be dominating the field of climate security and its consequences; (b) the ways in which narrow understandings of security as ‘conflict’ pose unfortunate constraints in the scope of empirical scrutiny and (c) the potential reproduction of unfortunate stereotypes about communities in the Global South, and the lack of engagement with subaltern and marginalized communities, including in the Global North.

By doing so, the article concludes with the proposition that due to the complexities in the climate security interlinkages, the efficiency of climate security policy will suffer if not informed by a more diverse and multifaceted set of scientific perspectives and informed by a larger diversity of epistemological underpinnings. The article illuminates therefore the need to further expand the ethos of ‘epistemological pluralism’ by incorporating a third and additional dimension. This will be termed ‘epistemological deepening’ and refers to insights from subaltern and alternative epistemic communities. The article concludes with some concrete propositions for ways in which the principle of epistemological deepening could be incorporated in climate security research. By doing so, the article argues that the concept of ‘epistemological deepening’ could be used as a tool to bridge much-needed perspectives from the mainstream and critical climate security scholarship.

1.1. Eurocentric ‘epistemic bias’?

While the causality centred climate–conflict debate has come to define the mainstream climate security literature, an alternative and explicitly critical body of literature has been growing in parallel (e.g. Austin et al., 2024; Daoudy et al., 2022; Jayaram, 2023; Lamain, 2022, 2024; McDonald, 2021; O’Lear, 2024; Siddiqi, 2022;). Often informed by postcolonial and critical theory or Global Southern perspectives, the critical literature similarly identifies epistemological shortcomings as central to its contestations but does so from radically different perspectives. Critical studies on climate security challenge instead what is perceived as the Eurocentric, Western and Global North-dominated epistemological, methodological, normative and/or contextual underpinnings of the field. What is seen as a narrow epistemological gaze running through the mainstream scholarship unintentionally obfuscates alternative insights into how climate vulnerabilities unfold and their impact on security and conflict.

For instance, in her postcolonial assessment of review articles available on climate security, Siddiqi observes that, although a (small) number of (often African) countries in the Global South tend to form the empirical focus in much of the literature, ‘The voices of the postcolonial, subaltern, marginalised subject, living with the precarity of climate change and insecurity, is conspicuously absent’ (Siddiqi, 2022: 4). She suggests that the field needs studies that more explicitly explore the lived experiences of insecurity and climate change and contend that ethnographic granularity would offer new insights to the understanding of the climate–conflict nexus.

Referring to a study by Saublet and Larivière (2018) she also pinpoints how the overwhelming majority of the climate security scholars are located at research institutions in the Global North. As a result, she argues, the climate security scholarship is ‘a product of a particular system of knowledge production’ rooted in Western and Eurocentric priorities, perspectives and methodologies (Siddiqi, 2022: 2). This reflects what she terms an ‘epistemic bias’ in mainstream climate security scholarship, favouring Western epistemological traditions and failing to consider ‘how knowledge on climate–conflict is produced and whose knowledge counts’ (Siddiqi, 2022: 4).

Based on long term ethnographic field research with vulnerable communities in Colombia and the Philippines, Siddiqi furthermore shows that in the experience of her interlocutors, it was not primarily climate change nor insurgent groups that informed their experiences of threats and insecurity, it was the fear of forced relocations by the state as efforts to protect them from natural hazards. Violent uprisings between tribes or ethnic groups over resource scarcity caused by climate change were largely irrelevant risk factors.

These propositions speak well to insights by O’Lear (2024). In her critical analysis of representations of climate-related risk in the sixth IPCC Assessment Report, she argues that the IPCC engages in a form ‘world-making’, shaping the way societies and policy makers understand and relate to climate change-related risks. That is because the IPCC reports are utilized as a guiding tool informing actual decision-making and climate policy, thereby exercising a form of power with real-life implications for already vulnerable and marginalized individuals, communities, countries and ecosystems.

Like Siddiqi, O’Lear too points toward how the IPCC reflects the positionalities of its authors despite often portrayed as value neutral. The IPCC authorship, O’Lear contends, tends to be dominated, firstly by men, and secondly by a ‘geographical bias’ towards the Global North (O’Lear, 2024). This is problematic as it limits how ‘security and risk are conceptualized, what kinds of prioritizations are made clear, and what kinds of assumptions are left unexplored’ (O’Lear, 2024: 2). It also risk reproducing narratives in the interest of already privileged actors and corporations, excluding the voices, perspectives and interests of the subaltern.

Drawing on the work by Spivak (1988), O’Lear therefore terms the IPCC silencing of alternative voices and nondominant perspectives as a form of epistemic violence. The interest of marginalized and vulnerable communities might be rendered invisible in policy and political decision-making. Such harm could also be viewed as a form of slow violence.

This leads us to the next critical observation concerning conventional understandings of security as conflict in the mainstream climate security literature.

1.2. A narrow definition of security as (violent) conflict and its limitations

In their widely referenced literature review that takes stock over the last decade of climate security literature, Von Uexkull and Buhaug observe that the majority of ‘the first generation of statistical climate-conflict research’ centres on open, armed conflicts or civil wars with an explicitly state-centred focus, predominantly in the Global South (Von Uexkull & Buhaug, 2021: 6).

Although some of the later climate security studies have opened the gaze to aspects like communal violence or social unrest, the focus on violent conflict due to climate change still dominates the field. This observation is shared by Ide which in a useful, recent work, points out that the field ‘so far almost exclusively focused on high-intensity intergroup conflicts related to the impacts of climate change … in the Global South’ (Ide, 2025: 1). Common understandings view such conflicts as resulting from resource scarcity resulting of climate change or extreme weather events.

However, Lamain observes that ‘it matters deeply in what manner conflict is defined, also for the way that policy and practice responses are designed’ (Lamain, 2024: 654). I argue that the narrow understanding of security as open, violent conflict is problematic as it narrows down the scope of empirical inquiry in climate security scholarship. Siddiqi (2022) criticized the state-centric and sovereignty focused understandings of conflict characterizing the climate security scholarship for resulting in knowledge that ‘is produced at safe physical and epistemological distance from where different forms and typologies of climate conflict are taking place’ (p. 3).

In addition to open armed and violent manifestations, ‘conflicts’ could also take on low-intense, nonviolent, latent, overt and covert characteristics (Galtung, 1969). ‘Conflict’ could in this way be seen as a process consisting of several dimensions such as attitudes, behaviour and contradictions and be characterized by imbalances in power, resources and inequities between different social groups. Ide, for instance, usefully points out that other types of climate conflicts could manifest in the shape of popular resistance against government climate inaction, and alternatively, resistance against (perceived unjust) climate policy implementation or malmitigation (Ide, 2025).

While it is true that violence tends to characterize conflicts, violence could be understood more broadly than its direct form. Violence could for instance also take structural and cultural forms that justify or in other ways lead to systematic or structural injustices including inequalities in power and resources between individuals or groups (Galtung, 1969). Especially for marginalized and powerless groups, I argue, ‘conflicts’ might not translate into open, let alone violent uprisings, especially not when one party are particularly powerful, such as national security forces representing a state, which often have the monopoly to exercise (unpunishable) violence in the name of either ‘stability’ or ‘national security’ (Peoples & Vaughan-Williams, 2021).

Especially in authoritarian or repressive regimes, it might be perceived as strategically sounder to instead engage in unarmed forms of everyday resistance to avoid or minimize possibilities for violent backlash (Scott, 2009). These are symptoms of conflicts that are not as easily detectable for outside researchers without in-depth contextually specialized knowledge. In extremely repressive regimes, expressions of overt dissent, including its unspectacular and nonviolent manifestations, might be impossible to conduct without risking violent repression. Therefore, if uniquely engaging with open, violent conflicts researchers might be misled to believe that a society is characterized by social cohesion and popular content, whereas in reality there are underlying tensions and popular grievances.

I argue therefore that when ‘conflict’ is understood more broadly, the question of whether and how climate change cause conflict changes the vision of the researcher and brings it down from the macro, state-centred, open and violent to the micro or meso, people-centred, latent and unarmed spheres of complex conflict dynamics and power dynamics. Hence, the ontological understanding of the concepts of ‘conflict’ in the climate–conflict nexus would inform which research methods to adopt. Furthermore, the narrow, empirical focus on open, violent conflict resulting from climate change may also conceal contextually specific, culturally sensitive and multifaceted complexities in underlying conflict dynamics.

This resonates with the insights by Ide suggesting that such a broadened understanding of the term could ‘reveal that climate conflicts are widespread and inevitable, including in the Global North’ enabling ‘productive exchanges across different streams of research, including securitisation, political ecology, and decolonial approaches’ (Ide, 2025).

This leads to the fourth and last category of contentions that could be drawn from the critical climate security scholarship: the reproduction of colonial stereotypes in climate security.

1.3. Colonial stereotypes, ‘othering’ and the absence of the Global North

A third point frequently discussed in the critical climate security literature concerns the perception that colonial stereotypes, racialized ‘othering’ and otherwise racist underpinnings are sometimes, often indirectly, reproduced in the narratives and scopes embedded in the mainstream climate security literature.

This relates to an observation in a systematic review over the climate–conflict literature, where Adams et al. (2018) showed how contexts located in the Global South, and most often in particularly conflict prone regions in the sub-Saharan Africa, the Sahel and the Middle East dominated the empirical scope of the field. Only six studies under review were addressing contexts in Europe. Some reasons behind the narrow empirical focus concerned the tendency to choose cases where violent conflict as the dependent variable was already present, as well as the most convenient regions in terms of data availability and field access (Adams et al., 2018).

However, as they also pointed out, the narrow geographical focus is problematic because it risks reproducing unfortunate, negative and colonial stereotypes of ‘the colonial other’ as violent, irrational and uncivil (Adams et al., 2018). Some go far in their critique suggesting that the field ‘has less to do with multidisciplinary inquiry into the complexities of climate change, development and conflict, and more with historically established paradigms of thinking about Africa’ (Verhoeven, 2014: 784). This resonates with the findings of Ide (2016) who in a critical study on the representations of links between climate and conflict in German school textbooks, concludes that people from the Global South are portrayed as ‘irresponsible and threatening’ (p. 60). Selby (2014) too criticized the field for reflecting and reproducing ‘an ensemble of Northern stereotypes, ideologies and policy agendas’ through its epistemic, empirical and methodological underpinnings (p. 829).

I argue that another problem with the limited geographical focus in the climate security literature is that climate security considerations in the Global North tend to be left unexplored. This is symptomatic for both the mainstream and critical climate security scholarship, although subaltern communities such as Indigenous peoples in the Global North would fit well into the broader concerns addressed in the critical climate security literature.

I will now turn to a synthesizing and concluding discussion where I seek to present some reflections and propositions for what I hope could become a fruitful tool to bridge insights from critical and mainstream studies in climate security and thereby contribute to a deepening of the insights in climate–conflict interconnections: the concept of ‘epistemological deepening’.

2. Broadening perspectives through epistemological deepening?

Critical and mainstream perspectives in the climate security scholarship both identify epistemological shortcomings, but from radically different positionalities. The critical literature identifies the need to include a greater diversity in knowledge systems and nondominant epistemologies where alternative, subaltern and marginalized voices and insights are consulted, considered and engaged with.

The ethos of epistemological pluralism could open the ontological and epistemological gaze that eventually determines what types of conflicts to examine, from whose perspective and what type of security, thereby offering a useful guiding thinking tool that has the potential to more adequately capture the actual complexities concerning climate change and security interlinkages.

However, by predominantly addressing the positivist-constructivist divide in the mainstream body of climate security research, the ethos of epistemological pluralism becomes less helpful to address the epistemological pitfalls highlighted in the critical literature. For instance, embracing insights from constructivist and positivist approaches reflecting mainstream perspectives alone, would be insufficient to address the Eurocentric ‘epistemic bias’ identified in the critical scholarship.

This article therefore suggests expanding the ethos of epistemological pluralism by incorporating a third and additional epistemological dimension to this ethos: the principle of epistemological deepening. The principle of epistemological deepening would entail that we as climate security researchers, in addition to insights drawing on constructivist and positivist research, also take into account perspectives rooted in subaltern, alternative or non-Western epistemological positionalities. Various concrete measures could be taken to increase the likelihood that such perspectives are not left unaddressed. The consultation and incorporation of insights drawn from scholarly literature produced from outside the Western hemisphere, as well as by scholars from the Global South, or scholars who otherwise self-identify as representing colonial or subaltern subjectivities, would be a useful minimum standard and initial such effort. Another measure could be to consult relevant non-academic knowledge production produced by representative local and community-based organizations and movements emerging from within communities and social groups who are directly affected by climate-related insecurities themselves, or to incorporate insights from community-based fieldworks where lived experiences of climate vulnerabilities and (in)securities among subjects and social groups directly impacted by climate change, mitigation, or adaptation policy are explicitly included in the empirical datasets involved in the research. Epistemological deepening could in that way be applied a third guiding dimension to epistemological pluralism, as a way to increase the likelihood of accessing alternative perspectives and epistemologies, and therefore also useful as a means to triangulate, question, nuance, or challenge the Eurocentric assumptions characteristic of some of the mainstream climate security literature. Furthermore, epistemological deepening should also entail transparency around definitions of key terms applied such as ‘conflict’, ‘security’, ‘violence’, etc., acknowledging that the way we understand these terms feeds into, informs, shapes – and therefore also potentially serves to exclude – those understandings and perspectives deriving from ascribing other meanings to these terms. By failing to define multifaceted and essentially contested concepts in climate security, we risk indirectly misleading the reader to believing that they ways they are used reflects unquestioned or exclusive truths, thereby narrowing complexity.

When adding epistemological deepening as one of the guiding principles to this research ethos, epistemological pluralism could serve a multidimensional purpose. It could then not only bridge insights from the positivist and constructivist positioned climate security scholarship, but it could also serve as a conceptual ‘mediator’ to bridge insights from the dominant epistemologically anchored climate scholarship on the one hand, with the emerging body of critical climate security scholarship on the other, and by so doing ensuring a maximization of perspectives.

The maximization and diversification of perspectives in climate security is key if we are to find relevant and appropriate policy solutions to the many complex and multifaceted environmental, climate and security challenges the world is confronted with today. Or in the words of Lamain, ‘it matters greatly in what ways climate security is understood, for how its action is defined, and thus who stands to benefit and who does not’ (Lamain 2024: 653).