Common security? Geopolitics, development, South Asia and the Indian Ocean

Critical geopolitics seeks to problematise the concept of environmental security and its relationship to social and political practices of dominance in local, national and international politics. While environmental problems do undoubtedly exist in the Indian Ocean, conflicting perspectives and future prospects for common security within and between countries, subregions and social groups, suggest that a better understanding of how ecological threats are described, prioritised, and globalised and how knowledge about environmental degradation and sustainable development is produced as a political resource, is possible only by contesting, or at least by going beyond, the conventional categories and typologies which privilege and protect certain actors, interests and priorities.