Description
In the 1990s when environmental security first gained mainstream prominence, environmentally-minded academics viewed the involvement of the military into this agenda negatively. Nowadays, these same academics have shed their reservations. They, and a younger generation of scholars, embrace the military’s role in climate security. But what has changed so that the military has moved from pariah to a valued leader on matters of environmental and climate security? Drawing on lived experience, observation and readings of the literature, this paper proposes a series of hypotheses that together aim to explain why this shift in perception occurred. The hypotheses relative explanatory value is established via informal interviews with leading academics and cross-referenced with the relevant literature. The paper ends by warning that consensus on the military’s role ought not breed complacency. It ends by identifying existing examples of how being critical is reconcilable with consensus.
