Dugong v. Rumsfeld: social movements and the construction of ecological security
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120950013 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Claudia Junghyun Kim |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120950013
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(1) 258 –280
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120950013
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Dugong v. Rumsfeld: social
movements and the
construction of ecological
security
Claudia Junghyun Kim
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
Two high-profile social movements against the construction of military bases in Jeju,
South Korea, and Okinawa, Japan, represent a contest between anti-militarist ecological
security and traditional military security. At the heart of these movements, which went
from a local phenomenon to a transnational cause célèbre, are two iconic movement
symbols: Gureombi, a unique lava rock formation, and the dugong, an endangered marine
mammal. By analyzing the emergence and resonance of the two nonhuman movement
symbols, the paper joins the continuing debates in International Relations (IR) over
what constitutes security and who deserves protection. The contributions are twofold.
First, it employs theories of social and transnational movements to establish movement
actors as practitioners of ecological security, showing how recent theoretical debates
in IR on ecological security parallel new developments in social movements against
military bases. Second, by analyzing the emergence and resonance of nonhuman beings
as anti-militarist ecological symbols, the paper also contributes to the growing literature
on ecological security that currently lacks empirical examinations.
Keywords
Militarization, security, civil society, social movement, transnational civil society,
nonstate actor
Corresponding author:
Claudia Junghyun Kim, Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon
Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Email: c.kim@cityu.edu.hk.
950013EJT0010.1177/1354066120950013European Journal of International RelationsKim
research-article2020
Article
Kim 259
Introduction
On 7 March 2012, activists chained themselves, jumped into the water, and climbed onto
excavators as the South Korean Navy moved to demolish one gigantic, contiguous piece
of lava rock in the southernmost island of Jeju to make room for a new naval base. On 25
September 2003, the dugong, an endangered marine mammal inhabiting waters off
Okinawa, Japan, became a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense
(DoD) over the construction of a U.S. Marine air facility. In these seemingly unrelated
events, social movement actors seeking to stop the construction of military bases resorted
to the same tactic: placing an explicit emphasis on nonhuman beings as subjects deserv-
ing protection, thereby going beyond their traditional focus on their own human security
as an antithesis to military-enabled security.
These episodes have broader implications for continuing debates in International
Relations (IR) over the question of what constitutes security and who deserves protec-
tion. The question has prompted the problematization and the reimagining of the human–
nonhuman divide in security studies (for a theoretical overview, see Fagan, 2017),
leading to recent calls for embracing ecological security (McDonald, 2018). This paper
seeks to add to these debates in two ways. First, it employs theories of social and trans-
national movements to establish movement actors as practitioners of ecological security.
In doing so, the paper shows how recent theoretical debates in IR on ecological security
parallel new developments in social movements against military bases, an enabler of
traditional military security. Second, by analyzing the emergence of nonhuman beings as
anti-militarist ecological symbols, as well as the mixed success they achieved in terms of
broad resonance, the paper makes an empirical contribution to the growing literature on
ecological security. This is a timely exercise, as scholars have produced a number of
theoretical and normative insights on ecological security but have yet to empirically
examine their real-world implications.
With these tasks in mind, the paper investigates two high-profile movements against
military bases in Jeju, South Korea and Okinawa, Japan, both of which went from a
largely localized contestation to a cause célèbre among transnational communities of
peace and environmental activists. Central to this rapid ascension was the construction of
anti-militarist ecological symbols: for Jeju, a volcanic rock formation known as Gureombi,
and for Okinawa, a marine mammal called the dugong. Social movement actors made
deliberate, conscious efforts to imbue them with ecological significance, which helped
broaden the movement’s constituents and induced changes in the behavior of the move-
ment’s foes. At the same time, these nonhuman movement symbols – one sentient and
another non-sentient – indicate a shift in the hitherto human-centric discourses and prac-
tices of security that had prevailed even among anti-militarist activists, let alone state
authorities pushing for military expansion as a means of security. These findings—con-
sistent across two different sites of discursive contention—resonate with the growing aca-
demic chorus stressing the urgency of viewing both the vulnerable human and nonhuman
beings as equally deserving members of the biosphere (Barnett, 2001; McDonald, 2018;
Mische, 1989). Ultimately, however, the partial success in the acceptance of these sym-
bols attests to real-world challenges that lie ahead for the increasingly inclusive conceptu-
alization of what constitutes security and who deserves protection.
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