The past, present and future(s) of environmental security studies
| Author | Peter Haldén |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836711407660 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Review Article |
407660CAC46310.1177/0010836711407660HaldénCooperation and Conflict
Review Article
Cooperation and Conflict
46(3) 406 –414
The past, present and
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
future(s) of environmental
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836711407660
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security studies
Peter Haldén
University of Uppsala, Sweden
Introduction
Research on the connection between environmental factors and conflict has received
increasing attention in the past decade, in part due to the interest in the political and
social effects of climate change. Environmental security in the widest sense has two
meanings: securitizing the environment (ranging from ecosystems, species, biotopes to
the entire biosphere) or the environment–civilization nexus (Buzan et al., 1998: 75 ff.).
The former deals with how, for example, environmental issues in the Arctic region are
gradually understood to be security issues. Ultimately, the latter concerns the survival of
human civilization itself. A subset of this field of inquiry is research on whether armed
conflict will ensue from changes in natural systems. While recognizing the interdepend-
ence of these three areas, this review focuses on the connection between natural systems
(e.g. ‘the environment’) and armed conflict. The purpose is to review the subfield of
Environmental Security Studies (ESS) and its theoretical and methodological underpin-
nings. It also identifies ESS’s lacunae. In the choice between relating and interpreting, a
preference has been made to err on the side of the latter for heuristic purposes and to
chart possible future developments. To show the field’s current status rather than its ori-
gins, the review is biased towards more recent research and debates dealing with climate
change. Because of the size of this field, this review is not intended to be all-encompassing,
but an attempt to evaluate ESS; it thus relies on a selection of key texts and issues.1
A shift of modernities or a dubious sub-discipline?
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 is
often taken as a starting-point of the environment as a political issue. Concerns about the
vulnerability of the human environment and of human civilization to degradation of
natural resources grew during the 1980s, spurred by events such as acid rain, the Exxon
Corresponding author:
Peter Haldén, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, University of Uppsala, SE-751 20, Sweden
Email: peter.halden@pcr.uu.se
Haldén
407
Valdez oil spill and the Chernobyl disaster. In this context, thinking developed about the
propensity of modern socio-technical systems to generate risks to the viability of society.
Ulrich Beck (1985) first coined the term ‘risk society’ to denote a shift in modernity as
modern societies increasingly were forced to deal with the consequences of their own
development in the form of pollution and environmental degradation (see also Giddens
(1990) and Luhmann (1993)). Reflexivity, in terms of having to handle the consequences
of the manipulation and crafting of nature, had become a feature of political and social
life. The risk society can be understood as change in the organizational properties of
societies, but also as a shift in collective mentalities.
For our purposes, it is useful to distinguish between threats and risks. The former is a
measurable entity, like a rival actor, whose defeat will bring security. The latter is a ‘sce-
nario followed by a policy proposal for how to prevent this scenario from becoming real’
(Rasmussen, 2006: 4). Threats can be defeated, but no such comfort is available in rela-
tion to risks, since tackling a risk creates new ones. Security thus becomes perpetual
risk-management. Reflections on the risk society belong to the broader context of ESS
and some scholars explicitly use its concepts (e.g. Dalby, 2002: 156–9), but as a sociol-
ogy of contemporary modernity it offers a framework to understanding ESS and its
emergence as a separate field in itself. Most writers concur that conflicts in connection
with environmental degradation are unlikely to be between states, and in contrast to stra-
tegic studies ESS is not in the business of identifying adversaries. Hence ESS analyses
risks produced by late-modern societies, but it also mirrors these societies’ ways of see-
ing dangers as risks, rather than threats. Thus, from within the field risks are the analy-
sandum of ESS, but seen from the outside the evolution of ESS can be understood as a
story of ideational change in Western societies. As I develop further below, one way
forward would be to engage with reflexivity as an object of inquiry.
Debates on the environmental degradation and security began in the early 1990s.
Positions that came to dominate the debate were demonstrated when Deudney (1991)
argued against connecting the environment to national security and Gleick (1991) in
favour of linking it to a broader conception of security which related to individual human
beings rather than states. The widening of security beyond traditional national/state secu-
rity cannot be recounted here, but the concept of ‘human security’, which was coined by
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1994 has been very important
for the debate on the environmental as a security issue. Simply put, human security refers
to the welfare and life of individual human beings which can be threatened by disease,
hunger, and a lack of development as well as by armed violence. Hence, whether degra-
dation of the environment was, ought to be, or might become a security issue, depended
very much...
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