ABSTRACT
This book started from the proposition that there are problems with the focus on state security and general marginalization of human security that characterizes the more orthodox or traditional literature on the relationship between climate change and security. First, it runs the risk of militarizing non-traditional insecurities, drawing attention away from the underlying causes. Second, it overlooks the extent to which various forms of non-traditional insecurities – such as environmental degradation – might be amenable to cooperation rather than conflict. Third, it restricts who is able to contribute to the security discourse and precludes ideas and concepts that do not have states as the key structures or agents. Finally, focusing only on the macro-level of state and regional security “runs the risk of ignoring the concerns of the most vulnerable people” (GLCA 2009: 22). Thus traditional security models have been thought not only inappropriate as a basis for dealing with non-traditional threats, such as those involved with environmental degradation and climate change, but as standing in the way of creative and successful solutions. As Pinar Bilgin (2002: 100) puts it, the supposed “commonsense” of statism “forclos[es] alternative nonstatist conceptions of security and the constitution of alternative futures.”
