Crit Climate,Env,HumanSecurity

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Nothing about climate change is apolitical. While its origins lie in long-term carbon emissions, the impacts show how climate change’s most devastating human effects are a function of political choices. Conventional climate security narratives typically posit that increased climate change will encourage human migration from vulnerable areas of the world to the Global North, increasing conflict and insecurity everywhere. Critical-security stances are essential in those debates as they outline the structural inequalities of power and distribution of resources while also considering the role of class, states and economic systems as providers of insecurity. An exclusive focus on the relation between climate and conflict obfuscates other important, empirical drivers of conflict, including historical legacies of colonialism, the nexus between climate security and capitalism, policies regarding food, water, and land; property rights regimes; and repressive, authoritarian systems. This advanced graduate class invites students to rethink climate security from the perspective of human security and critical perspectives from the fields of environmental history, post-colonial studies, development and environmental justice. Some of the security implications under consideration will include climate change in the context of armed conflict and settler-colonialism, new forms of Green Colonialism, the Capitalocene, food and health security, climate displacement/migration and racialized borders. The main focus will be on the Middle East and North Africa, with examples drawn from Europe and Africa.