Book Review: Contemporary Traditional, Critical, and Critical Environmental Security Studies Explained and Evaluated Via Three Books
Publisher: Environment and Security
Author(s): Rita Floyd
Date: 2023
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes
In order to negotiate the complexity of a field of study, it is often useful to put labels onto ideas, authors and books. If one did this for the three books under review here, one would place Mark Beeson’s Environmental Anarchy? Security in the 21stCentury, Bristol University Press, 2021 firmly within traditional environmental security studies, whereby this label aims to capture eco-determinism, state-centrism and a focus on violent conflict. By contrast, Jan Selby, Gabrielle Daoust and Clemens Hoffman’s Divided Environments: An international political ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security, Cambridge University Press, 2022 is positioned at the small ‘c’critical end of environmental security studies, that aims at deconstructing the narratives and assumptions of their traditional neo-Malthusian counterparts. Finally, the multi-authored (Black, R., Busby, J., Dabelko, G.D., de Coning, C., Maalim, H., McAllister, C., Ndiloseh, M., Smith, D., Alvarado, J., Barnhoorn, A., Bell, N., Bell-Moran, D., Broek, E., Eberlein, A., Eklöw, K., Faller, J., Gadnert, A., Hegazi, F., Kim, K., Krampe, F., Michel, D., Pattison, C., Ray, C., Remling, E., Salas Alfaro, E., Smith, E. and Staudenmann, J., Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk (SIPRI: Stockholm, 2022), https://doi.org/10.55163/LCLS7037 might be described as capital ‘C’Critical environmental security studies, resolved on finding solutions to inter alia problems identified by scholars in the two other camps, including climate insecurity, conflict, but also unjust policies. In what follows, I shall discuss each book in turn, drawing parallels and cross references where applicable.