ABSTRACT
This chapter provides anticipate and refute the charge by demonstrating how the concept of environmental security can be usefully applied to the post-Cold War agenda in East-West affairs. It presents the new evolution of scholarship on the nature and meaning of security in world politics and considers the ways in which environmental issues have been integrated into this work. The chapter explores some of the hazards involved in linking the environment and security, focusing in particular on the problems that emerge when this linkage is introduced to the study of East-West relations. Those who frame East-West relations after communism in terms of environmental security might be accused of engaging in a semantic sleight-of-hand in order to salvage the familiar analytical categories of the Cold War. The chapter concludes with identification of the merits of a properly qualified application of the concept of environmental security to a world transformed by the end of the Cold War.
