Naturally insecure: critical environmental security and critical security studies in Canada

Abstract

The field of critical environmental security (CES) has been contributed to by a variety of Canadian and Canada-based scholars, and has engaged with several themes of particular significance to the political and territorial space of the Canadian state. Despite this, CES has been largely absent from the emergence of a self-consciously Canadian critical security studies (CCSS). This paper attempts to bridge these two fields, arguing that CCSS cannot be complete without taking account of the central themes of CES. The paper is organized in three main sections. First, it investigates the conceptual terrain of CES, situating it within several key turns and texts in international and Canadian scholarship. Second, it argues that CES can be characterized by inquiry into the security-related aspects of five overlapping domains: anthropogenic climate change; industry, natural resource extraction, and pollution; the lived insecurities of indigenous peoples and other non-dominant groups; the Arctic region where these three themes most notably and acutely overlap; and re-theorizations of the established literature on the environment, violence, and social conflict. The paper maps these five-issue areas within the past two decades of Canadian scholarship, suggesting that the development of CES has been marginal to the disciplinary cores of political science, international relations, and security studies. Third, it concludes that there is nonetheless a discernible field of CES that has grown within the disciplinary and publishing interstices of Canadian academia. As a result, it can be said that there is a particular heterogeneous, syncretic, and emancipatory domain of CES in Canada, and that it should form a central pillar of any understanding of a particularly Canadian approach to critical security studies.

Keywords:

• environmental security
• critical security studies
• Canada
• security theory

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited greatly from comments by Matthew Hoffmann, Steven Bernstein, Doug McDonald, Hamish van der Ven, Heather Millar, and Teresa Kramarz at the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, as well as two anonymous reviewers. Any errors or omissions are the author’s alone.

Notes

^1. I refer to ‘in/security’ because of the inherent duality of the term: the construction of one object as ‘secure’ entails the construction of others as ‘insecure’, or beyond the boundaries of the security being sought. Thus, what is secure (Inside) is only comprehensible in relation to what is insecure (Outside). Referring to ‘in/security’ recognizes both aspects of this dynamic, acknowledging that security for some usually entails insecurity for Others.

^2. In this paper, the term ‘critical environmental security’ is used to refer conceptually to critical inquiry into the human–environment security relationship, while ‘Critical Environmental Security’ refers to the academic field of study focused upon these core concepts.

^3. These include inter alia the Environment and Security Program of the Pacific Institute, the Environment and Security Research Group at the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California at Irvine, the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Environmental Security and Peace Program at the UN University for Peace, the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project, the Institute for Environmental Security, and the Millennium Project of the World Federation of UN Associations.

^4. Genealogically, the concept of security has emerged from the disciplines of political science and international relations (Buzan and Hansen 2009), making journals in these fields the appropriate starting points for an investigation into the literature on sectoral variants of security, such as environmental security.

^5. These journals were selected because of their highly ranked stature in the areas of critical security studies and environmental politics, which are the two fields where research on critical environmental security is most likely to appear. The JCR ranks SD 13 of 83 journals on international relations and GEP 12 of 93 journals on environmental studies.

^6. For this study, I examined the online digital archives of all five journals from 1992 to 2012. Articles were coded for whether their focus was on issues related to the environment, and then for whether they discursively constructed their environmental issue as a security issue using the ‘general grammar of security . . . plus the particular dialects of the different sectors, such as talk identity in the societal sector, recognition and sovereignty in the political sector, [and] sustainability in the environmental sector’ (Buzan et al. 1998, 33). Indicators of the generative grammar of securitization include use of terms such as ‘in/security’, ‘threat’, ‘hazard’, ‘danger’, ‘risk’ to clearly articulate: (1) what is threatening, (2) what is threatened, and (3) and a proposed defence-response against the specified threat. All articles that discursively constructed an environmental issue as a security issue by identifying an environmental hazard to a specified referent object were then non-exclusively coded for the five thematic issues of CES that appeared most commonly.

^7. The IPCC’s first assessment report was actually published in 1990, but a supplementary first assessment was released in 1992.

^8. Global Environmental Politics (GEP) has only been published since 2001, CFPJ began publishing in 1992, and, in 1992, the Bulletin of Peace Proposals changed its name to Security Dialogue, meaning this analysis includes the full universe of articles published in CFPJ, GEP, and SD.

^9. The total number of articles by topic or theme does not total 50 because articles that addressed multiple themes were counted multiple times, with a total of nine articles being included more than once.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wilfrid Greaves

Wilfrid Greaves is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. His primary research examines how climate change has been conceptualized and pursued as a security issue in the Canadian and circumpolar Arctic regions. An Ontario Graduate Scholar, SSHRC Doctoral Scholar, and DFAIT Graduate Student Fellow, he is author of several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and working papers. A graduate of the University of Calgary and Bishop’s University, his research interests include security theory, human and environmental security studies, natural resource development and climate change, Canadian foreign policy, and complex peacebuilding operations.