Security, Risk, and Securitization of Climate Change
Article type: Research Article
Authors: Gaan, Narottama
Affiliations: [a] Professor of Political Science, PG Department of Political Science, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar 751 004. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: The proponents of risk- security risk view that risk is effectively the new security. Risk widens securitization whereby exceptional measures are introduced and made permanent to deal with merely potential, hypothetical, and less than existential dangers. A transformation in the political logic of the security field of this kind is potentially problematic and has not been properly reflected in the primary theory of what security is, namely the Copenhagen School’s Theory of Securitization. This article addresses this question by identifying the distinct logic of speech act that turns issues into questions of risk politics. A separate kind of speech act—‘riskification’—is identified, based on a re-theorization of what distinguishes risks from threats. Threat-based security deals with direct causes of harm whereas risk-security is oriented towards the conditions of possibility or constitutive causes of harm of second order security politics harping on long term precautionary measures. While separating securitization and ‘riskification’, the analytical precision of the Copenhagen School notion of securitization is maintained. On the basis of this new framework, a critical understanding of literature has been suggested such that climate change has been securitized. The end of the bipolar cold war structure with its ironically comfortable definition of global geopolitics as conflict between capitalist and communist global ideologies has led to more fragmented, complex, and de-territorialized multi-centric concentrations in which state power coexists with a myriad non-state actors, such as international organizations, NGOs, media, web, multinational corporations, the nascent governments, as well as the ‘failed states’. Thus, the previously submerged and down played issues, crises, and local and regional tensions emerge. The dominant paradigm of development premised on fossil fuel-based industrialization, limitless consumerism driven by revolutionary nature of the globalizing liberal market economy at the expense of nature is for the first time fundamentally affecting a number of basic global and regional physical, chemical, and biological systems. Thus, the foreign policy, security policy, economic policy, and science and technology policy, designed with a short-term focus and on the interests of specific spatial areas seem to be challenged. The unity between geographical space and psychological space was the Westphalian foundation on which national security and identity was carved. Now this unity has cracked and territory no more exhausts the possible ways of delineating political space than the state exhausts the people themselves for political ends. The political space has been re-conceptualized in terms of psychological distance or “the degree of dissimilarity between cognitive frameworks or ways of looking at, assigning meaning to and coping with the world”. As territory and identity are separate and identities and loyalties overlap and intersect, the geographic and psychological distance have been decoupled, thus, diminishing greatly the prospect of the state as moves of exclusion and spatial exercise in distancing and boundary making and also in forming and sustaining a moral community. Thus, the conventional understanding of national security in the parlance of realism and neo-realism centering on state and its military apparatus was felt inadequate to provide protection to the individual human beings threatened by non-static and non-traditional sources. Many of the natural and human systems with which national security and environmental policy in the broadest sense are to deal with, however, lie beyond these geographical and intuitive boundaries and beyond any time horizon and space. For example, the natural systems whose perturbations cause global climate change have responses measured on time scales from decades, to centuries, to millennia. If human life is something more than just what a separate, disparate, and disjointed atomistic individual life informs and is confined to a specific spatial and time horizon, not at the expense of but in interconnection with the surrounding inanimate and animate nature, then, the integration of environmental issues into a broader framework of national and global security policy may well be novel but slightly oxymoronic. Despite this momentum, the link between environmental change and security remains contested and challenged.
Keywords: Risk-security, Theory of Securitization, ‘riskification’, global geopolitics, environmental change and security
DOI: 10.3233/RED-120118
Journal: Journal of Resources, Energy and Development, vol. 12, no. 1-2, pp. 51-74, 2015
