Climate change is increasingly recognised as a security issue. Yet this recognition belies contestation over what security means and whose security is viewed as threatened. Different accounts – here defined as discourses – of security range from those focused on national sovereignty to those emphasising the vulnerability of human populations. This book examines the ethical assumptions and implications of these 'climate security' discourses, ultimately making a case for moving beyond the protection of human institutions and collectives. Drawing on insights from political ecology, feminism and critical theory, Matt McDonald suggests the need to focus on the resilience of ecosystems themselves when approaching the climate-security relationship, orienting towards the most vulnerable across time, space and species. The book outlines the ethical assumptions and contours of ecological security before exploring how it might find purchase in contemporary political contexts. A shift in this direction could not be more urgent, given the current climate crisis.

An argument that resource scarcity and environmental degradation can provide an impetus for cooperation among countries.

Over the past 20 years scholars, policymakers, and the media have increasingly recognized the links between both traditional and non-traditional security issues and the changing condition of the global environment. Concepts such as 'environmental security' and 'resource conflict' have been used to hint at these significant linkages. While there has been a good deal of scholarly work conducted that seeks to identify the ways that actors link these concepts, there has been little examination of the intersection between approaches to environmental security and gender. This book explores this intersection to provide an insight into the gendered nature of both global environmental politics and security studies. It examines how the issues of security and the environment are linked to theory and practice, and the extent to which gender informs these discussions. By adopting a feminist environmental security discourse, this book provides crucial redefinitions of key concepts and offers new insights into the ways we understand security-environment connections. Case studies evaluate if, and how, environment and security discourses are being used to understand a range of environmental issues, and how a feminist environmental security discourse contributes to our understanding of security-environment connections. This multidisciplinary volume draws on literature from the environmental sciences, security studies and sociology to highlight the complex human insecurities that often accompany environmental change. As conceptualizations of security continue to shift and broaden to include environmental issues and concerns, it is imperative that gender informs the debate.

Jon Barnett takes on the military-industrial interests of those in the establishment to reveal how ordinary human beings must have a safe environment in which security is subordinate to care of the planet and its delicate ecosystems.

Global environmental politics has emerged from its initial incarnation in the arena of 'low politics' and is rapidly becoming a 'high politics' concern. Concern over water pollution, air pollution, deforestation, and related basic environmental issues is giving way to a broader ecological security agenda. In this pathbreaking book, Dennis Clark Pirages and Theresa Manley DeGeest argue for dramatically broadening the context in which security priorities are established in an age of increasing globalization. Addressing the very fundamental question of the sources of premature human deaths and associated insecurity, both historically and in the contemporary world, the authors observe that in the twentieth century starvation killed nearly as many people as did military conflict. But disease was responsible for killing nearly fourteen times as many people as was warfare. And in the contemporary world of the twenty-first century, environmental terrorism and biological warfare are blurring the traditional distinctions between natural disasters, accidental deaths, and military casualties. Ecological Security moves the analysis of global environmental and resource issues to the next level by developing an 'eco-evolutionary' perspective for analyzing emerging problems associated with rapid globalization. Preserving future ecological security will depend upon maintaining dynamic equilibriums among human populations, and between them and pathogenic microorganisms, other species, and the sustaining capabilities of nature. This eco-evolutionary framework is used to anticipate and analyze emerging demographic, ecological, and technological discontinuities and dilemmas associated with rapid globalization. The authors conclude by stressing the need for new kinds of global public goods to mitigate the harshest impacts of these rapid and interrelated changes.

Ecoviolence explores links between environmental scarcities of key renewable resources_such as cropland, fresh water, and forests_and violent rebellions, insurgencies, and ethnic clashes in developing countries. Detailed contemporary studies of civil violence in Chiapas, Gaza, South Africa, Pakistan, and Rwanda show how environmental scarcity has played a limited to significant role in causing social instability in each of these contexts. Drawing upon theory and key findings from the case studies, the authors suggest that environmental scarcity will worsen in many poor countries in coming decades and will become an increasingly important cause of major civil violence.