Description
Climate change has increasingly been framed as a security issue, with scholars exploring its securitization and implications. The issue with investigating the securitization of climate change is that the referent object and subject appear to be the same: humanity, by polluting the Earth, threatens humanity itself. Yet, by generally considering climate change as the threat itself, the literature has overlooked how agency is actually located within the actors responsible for climate change rather than with climate change itself. This raises the question of how we can possibly conceptualize that the threatening entity is the same as the threatened one – in this case, humanity? This paper answers that question by distinguishing between the present "we" and the future "us." The present "we" reflects current patterns of identification, while the future "us" is a projection shaped by present decisions and aspirations. In cases of fundamental threats like climate change, the present "we" may be identified as a threat to the future "us." Understanding the differentiation between these two temporal entities is critical to grasp how the temporal dynamics of identity influence responses to global challenges like climate change. Action is therefore dependent on the intensity of people’s identification to our future “us”.
