“Climate change and security. Administrations facing the global and uncertainty” – 9 March 2022

While academics and policy-makers increasingly argue for a relationship between climate change and security, significant differences in terms of how climate change is represented, whose security is considered to be threatened/at risk, from what threats/risk and by what means it is to be protected/advanced/anticipated have been noticed and documented in the literature. As such, it appears that there are multiple and competing climate security discourses. My own research focuses on France’s climate security approach and aims to explore and understand its specificities and evolution through time. By combining a sociological approach to security (structured and semi-structured interviews) to an archaeological approach (discourse analysis), I explore the complex, discursive and non-discursive processes by which climate change is constructed as a security issue. More specifically, I will discuss the interactions of climate change with the characteristics of administrations and delineate points of enquiry relating to the implications of such interactions for the practice and concept of sovereignty, and our relationship as humans to nature.

Sofia Kabbej is a Ph.D candidate at the School of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia.