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Video - Climate Change & Security : Practices, Confrontations and Futures

Roundtable at the Centre Marc Bloch - 20th of June 2023

Panellists

Cholpon Aitakhunova, International Climate Protection Fellowship (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung), Collective Leadership Institute, Potsdam

Judith Nora Hardt, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin & Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, Hamburg, Germany

Jürgen Scheffran, Hamburg University, Germany

Marie-Ange Schellekens Gaiffe, La Rochelle Université, La Rochelle, France

Moderator: Dhanasree Jayaram, International Climate Protection Fellowship (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung), Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, Germany

Climate security has been conceptualised and defined in multiple ways, often in relation to the nature of threats identified, the referent objects that need to be protected (ecology, human beings, nation states, etc.), and the approaches that characterise various actors’ approaches to deal with them. Increasingly, climate security is not seen through the prism of national security alone, but also human and ecological security. The role of intergovernmental organizations (for example, United Nations agencies, European Union, etc.), national governments, humanitarian organizations, non-governmental actors, as well as traditional security actors such as the military is pertinent to climate security discourse and practice. This includes security strategies, peace operations, foreign policy/diplomacy, and development planning among others. Yet even though there is large-scale acknowledgement of climate-security nexus, there are diverse perspectives on the interlinkages. For instance, questions of development, justice, colonialism, and gender (among others) have remained under-studied in climate security research. Furthermore, even when the research focusses on or includes these aspects, there is lack of engagement with pre-existing ideas and practices that underlie security logic, especially from the Global South. The roundtable aims to explore climate security from various perspectives – geographic (regional and country-based), theoretical and conceptual (with a focus on interdisciplinary research), actor and issue frames, and policy and security practice. By looking into different aspects of security framing, including power relations, governance mechanisms, geopolitical dynamics, and environment-society interactions, the roundtable proposes to expand the research agenda on climate security.