How Environmental Geopolitics Expands Our Understanding of Risk and Security

Jun 15, 2020 | Shannon O'Lear
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The coronavirus has everyone weighing risk and security within a sliding scale of geographic connections and boundaries. Dots and circles of infection pack our virus maps. We more clearly see the fragility of commodity chains that structure our food systems and energy supplies. The virus easily crosses state borders while security protocols within states have been focused on boundaries between individuals and speech droplets. In many ways, human interaction with this microbe illustrates why an environmental geopolitics perspective is powerful.

A new book, A Research Agenda for Environmental Geopolitics, shows how environmental geopolitics, as a perspective, disrupts our understanding of environment-related risk and security. Environmental geopolitics offers a way to break down or decode political statements about environmental features. Concepts such as “climate security” or “resource conflict” may initially seem clear or obvious, but environmental geopolitics allows us to see what kinds of assumptions, knowledge, and agendas hold those statements together. Once we see how those concepts are held together to promote a certain understanding of the world, we can also see how those concepts may limit our understanding or silence alternative perspectives. In short, environmental geopolitics offers a way to question mainstream understandings of human-environment interactions so that we have a more complete picture of political and physical processes and why how we fit those together matters.