Abstract
Some commentators have recently sought to cast climate change as primarily an issue of national security, thereby necessitating a “war on climate change.” In this article, we argue that the adoption of a securitizing and war-making approach is problematic in that it proposes solutions that parallel the very human actions that contribute to climate change. Because the securitizing responses to the problem of climate change only further the hierarchical domination that contributes to the problem, we contend that we must approach climate change from a critical perspective informed by peacemaking and liberation rather than war-making. Given the harms attendant to war, neoliberal capitalism, security and domination, we maintain that solutions to climate change that rely on making war, securitizing and commoditizing are likely to only exacerbate and extend the negative impacts of anthropogenic climate change. As such, this article proposes that peacemaking and liberation be integrated into human–environment interaction(s) by calling for the rejection of a “war on climate change” and by suggesting what a “peace treaty with the earth” would look like.
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Notes
It should be noted that there are significant problems with critical framings of security that contend that any problems with security lie with current security practices, rather than with the conceptual foundations of “security” and the various sorts of political work performed by the language and practice of security. As has been demonstrated elsewhere (Neocleous 2010, 2011; Neocleous and Rigakos 2011), the problems of security are fundamental. Put simply, “security” is not a noble condition thwarted by missteps and miscalculations, but is itself a misstep.
While it is true that humanity as a whole, to some extent, is implicated in climate change, there is ample reason to resist emerging concepts such as that of “the Anthropocene” that overstate individual culpability while mostly ignoring the offenses of the state, corporations, and capital. These frameworks are often blind to the vast difference of scale between harms caused by individuals and those caused by states and corporations, and fail to question the degree to which most individuals can rightly be implicated in climate change and other global ecological problems (Malm 2015).
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Acknowledgments
An embryonic version of this article, entitled “A Piece on Climate Change,” appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of The Critical Criminologist. Based on the feedback we received from that piece, we continued to develop our ideas, which we presented as a paper, “Climate Change and Peacemaking Criminology,” at the “Criminological Perspectives on Climate Change” thematic session at the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in November 2014 in San Francisco, CA. We are grateful for the constructive comments we received on our earlier piece, as well as for the helpful suggestions from the audience in San Francisco.
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McClanahan, B., Brisman, A. Climate Change and Peacemaking Criminology: Ecophilosophy, Peace and Security in the “War on Climate Change”. Crit Crim 23, 417–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-015-9291-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-015-9291-6