ABSTRACT
The foreign policy priorities of the Bush administration present us with a stark puzzle. As the human costs of the Iraq war mount, and as scientific warnings of the catastrophic risks of human-induced climate change become more severe (Stern 2007; IPCC 2007), it is timely to ask: why has the Bush administration pursued such an aggressive policy of prevention and pre-emption in its “War on Terror” yet rejected a concerted, risk-averse approach in response to climate change? It is increasingly acknowledged that human-induced climate change represents a far more serious and enduring threat to national and global security than terrorism or the possession of weapons of mass destruction by so-called “rogue states.” Yet by 2006, the costs to the USA of the Iraq War had exceeded the anticipated costs of the USA conforming to its Kyoto commitments of a 7 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2012 (Sunstein 2007). At the same time, the Iraq War has fanned the flames of resentment against the USA that have helped to foster terrorist networks. The profound disconnect between the Bush administration’s national
security strategy and climate change strategy provides a useful entry point for critically assessing recent attempts to locate environmental degradation in general, and climate change in particular, within a security framework. My purpose is not to juxtapose a scientifically informed risk assessment against the neoconservative politics of miscalculation of the Bush administration. Rather, it is to explore critically the discursive practices of “securitization” and the associated material practices that such discourses seek to legitimate in order to highlight the interests, communities, and values that are served (Weaver 1995). Security, as Ken Booth (2005: 23) observes, is a primordial and deeply
politicized concept. Security is something that everyone desires (indeed, who is against security?). However, there is little agreement about what it is except that it is vital-indeed, sometimes more vital than democracy, freedom, or justice. Framing an event as a security matter rather than a criminal or political matter imbues the event with a sense of gravity and urgency. Ole Weaver (1995) argues that “securitizing” an event provides the basis for justifying special measures outside normal political practices, such as military retaliation and the suspension of civil liberties. If the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 had been framed as criminal
acts that took place in New York and Washington, then the events would have become a police matter (Smith 2005: 34). The appropriate response would have been to bring a transnational criminal network to justice. Instead, the attacks were construed as an invasion of American territory and against the “American people.” This construction turned the events into a matter of national security and justified a major military retaliation and new laws that sanction an encroachment on civil liberties. In contrast, climate change has not been successfully securitized in
America (although it is emerging as a security issue in Europe). Moreover, there is a lively debate in the environmental scholarly community about whether the environment ought to be brought within the security frame. Is anything really to be gained, skeptics ask, that could not have been achieved by working with discourses of sustainability or environmental justice? Is it not merely a rhetorical ploy to capture the attention of political leaders? And might this not backfire by providing a justification for the military to increase its role in ecological problem solving? Although there are certainly dangers associated with securitizing environmental problems, this chapter proceeds on the premise that abandoning, rather than contesting and rethinking, the security frame will concede too much ideological ground to anti-environmental forces (Dalby 1992: 122). As Dalby explains, “linking a multiplicity of non-military threats to the theme of security might have some potential as a political strategy to democratize the state by broadening the ambit of security to prevent its appropriation by secrecy-bound state military structures” (Dalby 1992: 120). This chapter will unfold as follows. First, I briefly trace the emergence of
the environmental security debate against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and clarify the main fault lines that have emerged. Building on the new field of “critical security studies,” I outline a “critical environmental security” framework. This provides a basis for scrutinizing the policy trade-offs and unexamined assumptions embedded in conventional national security strategies that often undermine efforts to promote ecologically sustainable development. I then critically explore Cass Sunstein’s behavioral analysis of the divergent public reactions to terrorism and climate change in the USA, and show how it fails to address the role of political and military elites in managing risks and security threats. Instead, I argue that a critical environmental security framework is able to contest traditional practices of securitization, which typically conceal policy trade-offs and ecologically problematic assumptions about “the national interest” from public scrutiny. Linking this back to the USA, I show how the securitization of energy policy has prevented a concerted response to climate change by the world’s biggest carbon polluter.
