Description
As climate change literally transforms our world, mainstream security discourses centre around how global warming and environmental degradation heighten the risk of armed conflict, constructing climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’. Many states respond to the securitisation of climate change through militarised responses. Yet, this is inherently contradictory. Not only does militarisation create insecurities for women, girls and other marginalised groups, it diverts attention from tackling root causes of climate change. In this work we put forth two key arguments: climate change simultaneously exacerbates existing inequalities and disproportionately impacts marginalised individuals, and second, capitalism reflects masculinist modes of domination, through extraction and exploitation of people, nature and resources. We illustrate our arguments by focusing on feminist foreign policy (FFP). FFP challenges traditional, realist perceptions of foreign and security policies, emphasising a wide array of insecurities experienced by women and marginalised individuals, who feel the full brunt of the climate and eco-crises. By drawing on its feminist roots, FFPs could shed light on power structures fuelling the climate crisis: patriarchy and capitalism. We turn to the illustrative case of Sweden and the rise and fall of its pioneering policy, exploring key documents on FFP, national security strategies and declarations of foreign policy, using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to be approach. In so doing, we seek to understand how climate related problems are defined and the extent to which those problematisations employ the language of securitisation and militarisation. Our findings suggest a tendency to privilege orthodox and militarised notions of national security, which prioritise the well-being of institutions above that of the environment and the many species nested in it. Instead, we argue that it is vital to move beyond state-centric security notions, towards not just human but ecological security.
