Research, ideas, and leadership for a more secure, peaceful world
Is climate change a valid national security issue for the United States?
Is climate change a valid national security issue for the United States? Questions like this one entered the academic debate and remain a subject of introspection in the policy and advocacy community. The attraction of a security frame for environmental problems is somewhat understandable, but a number of scholars have questioned the usefulness of such an unlimited definition. While a return to the definitional disputes of the 1990s of just what is "environmental security" would be a cul-de-sac, the study of environmentally-inspired violent conflict is not the only direction for scholars interested in environment, national security, and grand strategy. Indeed, even taking a narrow definition of what constitutes national security—threats to core values of a state for which it would be willing to go to war or use force, one can identify a rich research agenda that relies upon robust empirics and, from the perspective of the great powers, more politically relevant substantive topics such as energy security; nuclear proliferation; disasters, complex emergencies, and humanitarian intervention; and, finally, reputational concerns and soft power.
The paper to be presented at this seminar seeks to link the issue of climate change to those four topics and thereby demonstrate that climate change has connections to high politics, that the solutions pro-offered by the environmental community to climate change have consequences for national security and grand strategic concerns of great powers. Furthermore, while the physical effects are unlikely to pose an existential threat to the United States in the short to medium term, Dr. Busby makes the claim that the problem of global climate change substantively already poses challenges for the United States in terms of its effects on U.S. interests outside its borders, both physical and symbolic. The main objective of this paper is to open up a line of new climate change political science research that speaks to the ambitions of the original proponents of "environmental security" but that is also sufficiently recognizable to the conventional security community to be of interest to it.
Please join us! Coffee and tea provided.
Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come – first served basis.
