Is global climate change likely to become a significant source of violent conflict, and should it therefore be seen as a national security challenge? Most Northern governments, militaries, think tanks and NGOs believe so, as do many academic researchers, on the grounds that increased temperatures, changing precipitation patterns and rising sea levels will worsen existing social stresses, especially within poor societies and marginal communities across Africa and Asia. This book argues otherwise. The first collection of its kind, it brings together leading scholars of Anthropology, Geography, Development Studies and International Relations to provide a series of critical analyses of mainstream thinking on the climate-security nexus. It shows how policy discourse on climate conflict consistently misrepresents the causes of violence, especially by obscuring its core political dimensions. It demonstrates that quantitative research provides a flawed basis for understanding climate-conflict linkages. It argues that climate security discourse is in hoc with a range of questionable military, authoritarian and developmental agendas. And it reveals that the greening of global capitalism is already having violent consequences across the global South. Climate change, the book argues, does indeed have serious conflict and security implications – but these are quite different from how they are usually imagined. This book was published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

This timely Handbook on Digital Business Ecosystems provides a comprehensive overview of current research and industrial applications as well as suggestions for future developments. Multi-disciplinary in scope, the Handbook includes rigorously researched contributions from over 80 global expert authors from a variety of areas including administration and management, economics, computer science, industrial engineering, and media and communication.

This book explores the relationship between climate change–induced migration and conflict in Bangladesh – one of the most ecologically fragile countries in the world. It explores why people migrate from their original place of land and how the migration of people with a different background to an ethnically distinctive region due to environmental changes can become a source of conflict and violence between the host peoples and migrants. The volume focuses on the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), which has experienced long-standing ethnopolitical conflict due to the settlement and migration of the Bengali people from the plain land of Bangladesh. This settlement and migration were mainly caused climatic events such as floods, cyclones, sealevel rise, and disasters. It traces the history of the ethnic conflict in the region and presents key findings from the field, as well as the dynamics of everyday politics in the region. This volume also highlights how internally climate-displaced people generate violence and civil strife in the major urban cities through their settlements in slums. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of environmental studies, human geography, migration and diaspora studies, public policy, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

In this forward-looking book, the authors consider how the United Nations Security Council could assist in addressing the global security challenges brought about by climate change. Contributing authors contemplate how the UNSC could prepare for this role; progressing the debate from whether and why the council should act on climate insecurity, to how? Scholars, activists, and policy makers will find this book a fertile source of innovative thinking and an invaluable basis on which to develop policy.

In this book 25 authors from the Global South (19) and the Global North (6) address conflicts, security, peace, gender, environment and development. Four parts cover I) peace research epistemology; II) conflicts, families and vulnerable people; III) peacekeeping, peacebuilding and transitional justice; and IV) peace and education. Part I deals with peace ecology, transformative peace, peaceful societies, Gandhi’s non-violent policy and disobedient peace. Part II discusses urban climate change, climate rituals, conflicts in Kenya, the sexual abuse of girls, farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria, wartime sexual violence facing refugees, the traditional conflict and peacemakingprocess of Kurdish tribes, Hindustani family shame, and communication with Roma. Part III analyses norms of peacekeeping, violent non-state actors in Brazil, the art of peace in Mexico, grass-roots post-conflict peacebuilding in Sulawesi, hydrodiplomacyin the Indus River Basin, the Rohingya refugee crisis, and transitional justice. Part IV assesses SDGs and peace in India, peace education in Nepal, and infrastructure-based development and peace in West Papua. • Peer-reviewed texts prepared for the 27th Conference of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) in 2018 in Ahmedabad in India.• Contributions from two pioneers of global peace research:a foreword by Johan Galtung from Norway and a preface by Betty Reardon from the United States.• Innovative case studies by peace researchers on decolonising conflicts, security, peace, gender, environment and development in the Anthropocene, the new epoch of earth and human history.• New theoretical perspectives by senior and junior scholars from Europe and Latin America on peace ecology, transformative peace, peaceful societies, and Gandhi’s non-violence policy.• Case studies on climate change, SDGs and peace in India; conflicts in Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico; Roma in Hungary;the refugee crisis in Bangladesh; peace action in Indonesia and India/Pakistan; and peace education in Nepal.

This book provides the first systematic comparative analysis of climate security discourses. It analyses the securitisation of climate change in four different countries: USA, Germany, Turkey, and Mexico. The empirical analysis traces how specific climate-security discourses have become dominant, which actors have driven this process, what political consequences this has had and what role the broader context has played in enabling these specific securitisations. In doing so, the book outlines a new and systematic theoretical framework that distinguishes between different referent objects of securitisation (territorial, individual and planetary) and between a security and risk dimension. It thereby clarifies the ever-increasing literature on different forms of securitisation and the relationship between security, risk and politics. Whereas securitisation studies have traditionally focused on either a single country case study or a global overview, consequently failing to reconstruct detailed securitisation dynamics, this is the first book to provide a systematic comparative analysis of climate security discourses in four countries and thus closes an empirical gap in the present literature. In addition, this comparative framework allows the drawing of conclusions about the conditions for and consequences of successful securitisation based on empirical and comparative analysis rather than theoretical debate only. This book will of interest to students of climate change, environmental studies, critical security, global governance, and IR in general.

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a large body of research examining the linkage between environmental scarcity, violent conflict, and cooperation. However, this environmental security polemic is still trying to deliver a well-defined approach to achieving peace. Studies are being undertaken to find the precise pathways by which cooperative actions are expected not only to pre-empt or moderate resource conflicts but also to help diffuse cooperative behaviour to other disputed issues. The recognition that environmental resources can contribute to violent conflict accentuates their potential significance as pathways for cooperation and the consolidation of peace in post-conflict societies. Conceived as a single and reliable reference source which will be a vital resource for students, researchers, and policy makers alike, the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding presents a wide range of chapters written by key thinkers in the field, organised into four key parts: Part I: Review of the concept and theories; Part II: Review of thematic approaches (resources, scarcity, intervention, adaptation, and peacebuilding); Part III: Case studies (Middle East, Iraq, Jordan, Liberia, Nepal, Colombia, Philippines); Part IV: Analytical challenges and future-oriented perspectives. Enabling the reader to find a concise expert review on topics that are most likely to arise in the course of conducting research or policy making, this volume presents a truly global overview of the key issues and debates in environmental conflict and peacebuilding.

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.

"[The author] draws out the complex relationship between religion and climate change. He shows that the religious movements and ideas that emerge from climate shocks often last for many decades, and become a familiar part of the religious landscape, even though their origins in particular moments of crisis may be increasingly consigned to remote memory" -- From jacket flap.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Bringing climate security and climate justice into dialogue, this topical book uses the Sahel as a case study to discuss the contrast between these two approaches and how they tend to lack an engagement with social, historical and political contexts. Tor A. Benjaminsen introduces the international debate on climate security, with a particular focus on Mali as a ‘hub’ country of the current security crisis in the Western Sahel.