ABSTRACT
As is regularly evident in the issues discussed in the previous chapters, the question of whether environmental problems merit the politically significant label of ‘security’ is a complex one and highly contested. On one hand, the complexity and uneven impact of environmental issues leads to disputes about the scale of threat they pose or an attitude of denial in the face of ‘inconvenient truths’ often geographically or chronologically distant. On the other hand, there is a lack of consensus on what ‘security’ actually means. For some, unable to break free of a militarized and state-centric view of IR forged in the three global wars of the 20th century, environmental challenges can only be considered the stuff of security if they can be seen to cause wars or threaten the sovereign apparatus of states. For others, receptive to ontological and epistemological challenges to the conventions of IR that emerged following the end of the Cold War, environmental threats can and should be securitized by abandoning the preoccupation with the state and the military and facing up to a different nature of threat. A third perspective agrees with the second in terms the scale of threat posed by environmental problems but resists securitization through concerns that this risks invoking inappropriate, militaristic ‘national security’ responses.
