Environmental Security / Edition 1

by Simon Dalby

Overview

A critical look at the relationship between environmental degradation and international relations.

Since the end of the Cold War, environmental matters-especially the international implications of environmental degradation-have figured prominently in debates about rethinking security. But do the assumptions underlying such discussions hold up under close scrutiny? In this first treatment of environmental security from a truly critical perspective, Simon Dalby shows how attempts to explain contemporary insecurity falter over unexamined notions of both environment and security.

Adding environmental history, aboriginal perspectives, and geopolitics to the analysis explicitly suggests that the growing disruptions caused by a carbon-fueled and expanding modernity are at the root of contemporary difficulties. Environmental Security argues that rethinking security means revisiting questions of how we conceive identities as endangered and how we perceive threats to these identities. The book clearly demonstrates that the conceptual basis for critical security studies requires an extended engagement with political theory and with the assumptions of the modern subject as progressive political agent. Viewed thus on a global scale, the environmental security discourse raises profoundly troubling political questions as to who we are and what kind of world we are collectively making in our efforts to be secure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816640263
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/01/2002
Series:	Barrows Lectures , #20
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Simon Dalby is professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction: Environment, Security, and Geopolitical Discourse	xix
1.	Rethinking Security Studies	1
2.	The Environment as Geopolitical Threat	21
3.	Environment, Conflict, and Violence	41
4.	Geopolitics and History: Contexts of Change	63
5.	Imperial Legacies, Indigenous Lives	83
6.	Shadows, Footprints, and Environmental Space	101
7.	Ecological Metaphors of Security	123
8.	Ecology and Security Studies	143
9.	Securing What Future?	163
	Notes	185
	Index	233