Main Argument and Key Findings

The theoretical core of this thesis is a three-part conception of securitisation as resting on sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power, which are respectively linked to national security, human security and risk conceptions. The main argument is that this framework allows me to better capture the ambiguous and diverse variants of securitisation and the ever-changing concept of security as well as to come to a more thorough understanding of the political consequences of constructing issues in terms of security.

Empirical Findings: Tracing Multiple Securitisations and Consequences

Applying this theoretical lens to my three distinct cases has allowed me to trace very different forms of the securitisation of climate change in diverse political and cultural context and has thus generated a range of novel empirical findings.

In the US, the securitisation of climate change was highly successful in terms of redefining what climate change meant as a matter of political debate and had considerable political consequences. With several defence policy focused think tanks playing a key role in the debate, climate change was primarily constructed as a threat to US national security, hence within the sovereign discourse. This helped to put climate change on the political agenda in the first place, fuelled its politicisation and eventually contributed to a range of legislative attempts.

Rearticulating climate change as tangible national security threat increased the attention paid to the issue and particularly helped to reach new conservative audiences, which in the end contributed to partly bridging the heavily polarised debate on climate change in the early to mid-2000s. While ultimately failing to legitimise progressive climate legislation on the federal level, it nevertheless was instrumental in enabling a range of far-reaching changes in the defence sector, which included a transformation of institutional practices as well as an

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integration of climate change in almost all relevant strategy documents. Others have fittingly described this process as a ‘climatisation’ of the defence sector (Oels 2012a). In general, the US case exemplifies the twofaced effects of national security and sovereign power. On the one hand, it has drawn attention towards climate change and reconstituted it as issue of ‘high politics’. On the other hand, it focused the debate on tackling the symptoms with rather short-term adaptation measures instead of engaging with the root causes of climate change.

In stark contrast, the securitisation of climate change in Germany included a much broader spectrum of actors and primarily rested on a representation of climate change as a human security issue and long-term risk. Consequently, it did not have a larger impact on defence policy but has led to Germany becoming one of the international climate vanguards and had a decisive influence on the concrete configuration of Germany’s climate policies. It enabled Germany’s legislators to justify a range of mitigation policies, which included an influential ecological tax reform, an energy transition and some of the most ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction commitments worldwide. The specific securitisation also helped to transform climate change from a predominantly environmental concern towards a key foreign policy priority. Finally, the focus on the direct threats for vulnerable populations in the Global South firmly established climate change as a core crosscutting theme in Germany’s development aid portfolio. While this helped to draw attention towards the problems of the most affected people, it also exemplified some of the more ambiguous consequences of evoking human security and disciplinary power such as constructing people as powerless victims, legitimising behavioural control, and paternalistic policy measures.

While in general being less intense and influential than in the US and Germany, securitising climate change still played a significant role in Mexico. Similar to Germany, it primarily rested on a construction of climate change as a threat to human security and as a diffuse risk. However, lacking a longstanding tradition of linking environment to security concerns as well as influential securitising actors, this representation was in parts overshadowed by a politicisation of climate change as environmental issue, economic opportunity and question of global justice. Thus, while climate security discourses were not without effect for Mexico becoming a surprising international champion of climate abatement, other factors played a more important role. Nonetheless, the specific construction of climate change as a direct threat to Mexico’s population and as a key long-term risk had a discernible impact on concrete policies and governance practices. It led to an extensive integration of climate change into Mexico’s

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civil protection and disaster response sector and to various policies that tried to deal with climate change through risk management and resilience strategies. Beyond these case specific findings, the Mexican example offers some general insights into the conditions under which politicisation and securitisation reinforce or cancel each other out, illustrates the emancipatory effects of human security discourses and exemplifies some of the peculiarities of securitisation processes in the Global South (see also Boas 2014; Bilgin 2010).

Theoretical Insights: Securitisation as Political Power

Besides the empirical insights, linking securitisation to (different forms of) political power has allowed me to single out and better understand key characteristics of securitisation. At the centre stands Foucault’s conceptualisation of power and discourse as productive, which helps to make sense of securitisation as a process of rendering issues governable i.e. as constructing them as political issues (Opitz 2008b: 216) and thus producing a specific ‘security truth’

(Burgess 2011: 39–40). In this sense, securitisation is not an isolated speech act that (always) abruptly pulls issues out of the normal and into extraordinary territory. Instead it is a process of exercising power that shifts the political meaning of issues alongside a continuum of different security truths and thereby coins what this normal means in the first place.

More concretely, securitisation is linked to power by acting as a catalyst, which includes an acceleration of political procedures, placing issues on the agenda and eventually contributing to their politicisation, all of which can be observed in the US and German cases. Secondly, it can also narrow down the debate by constituting specific objects and subjects of governance and suggesting specific ‘solutions’ to the problem as logical and without feasible alternatives (Opitz 2008b: 217). This also entails a considerable constriction of the political scope of issues and an empowerment or marginalisation of specific actors and their knowledge and understanding of a given issue. The US debate again serves as an illustrative example. The prevailing form of securitisation led to an increasing importance of defence policy specialised think tanks and their specific forms of knowledge, while environmental organisations and scientists and their ‘solutions’ were progressively marginalised. Finally, securitisation has powerful substantive consequences. On the one hand, this concerns the direct legitimisation of policies. On the other hand, it also entails an impact on the content of policies and their chances of being enacted by government institutions and private actors. Thus, while for example most climate policies in Mexico were not directly legitimised through climate security discourses,

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specific political practices such as risk management strategies or insurance schemes increasingly found their way into key policies.

Based on Foucault’s original idea of ‘governmentalisation’ as a constant rearrangement of political power within the triangle of sovereignty, discipline and governmental management, the framework has also proven valuable in conceptualising the continuous transformation of conceptions of security and securitisation processes (Opitz 2008b: 206). The empirical cases and theoretical discussion in chapter 7 show that although we can find different discourses of climate security, which heavily lean towards specific conceptions of security and have led to diverse political consequences, their internal characteristics are never entirely fixed. Instead, in all cases I found instances where different discourses where closely linked together and in this process were able to transform the prevalent meaning of specific conceptions of security (and power) (Opitz 2008b: 202, 205). For instance, while national security played some role in Germany and Mexico, compared to the US its meaning was much broader and mostly subservient to human security considerations. At the same time, in the US debate, constructing climate change as a threat to human security, most of the time was only an argumentative entry point for introducing fairly traditional national security concerns. Besides underscoring the relevance of Foucault’s tripartite conceptualisation of power for thinking about security, these findings underline the argument that securitisation neither only consists of the CS’s extraordinary measures, nor of low-key Paris School like riskification processes (see Opitz 2008b: 204).

My findings also underscore that the concept of security and associated governance practices in specific policy fields are never fixed and cannot be understood from an a-historic perspective (Opitz 2008b: 204, 206; Elbe 2009: 64). Instead, the very process of securitisation alongside different forms of power and different issue areas has a discernible impact on the political concept of security itself (Trombetta 2011a). Linking securitisation to governmentality is hence particularly helpful to uncover these bidirectional qualities of securitisation and to understand the ever changing nature of security itself (Oels 2012a; Elbe 2011). Thus, the securitisation of climate change has not only had an impact on how climate change is governed but also initiated changes in how security was understood and practiced in different policy fields. The diverse understandings of national security in my case studies, the adoption of specific policy practices (e.g. associated with human security or risk) in the US defence sector and the ‘greening’ of the military exemplify this argument.

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Normative Questions: The Ambiguous Ethical Consequences of Climate Security Discourses

Approaching the securitisation of climate change from a power sensitive governmentality perspective has also given some insights into the ethical dimension of securitisation and has underscored the usefulness of a case-sensitive ex-post normative assessment (Floyd 2007b, 2011; Elbe 2009: 157). My own normative yardstick in this respect is an aspiration to keep the global temperature rise below two degrees and to prevent human suffering. Thus, based on the findings from the three empirical cases and on a discussion of the alternatives to securitisation, I conclude that the securitisation of climate change has had advantages, at least in the short and middle-term. In general, it has incited rather than closed necessary political debates and has helped to legitimise progressive policies while largely avoiding depoliticising panic politics or undemocratic extraordinary measures. At the same time, alternatives to securitisation such as an outright de-securitisation, or politicisations without reference to threats, e.g. a representation as issue of global justice or economic problem, come with their own sets of problems and in general have so far failed to stimulate necessary political momentum. Nonetheless, the analysis has also revealed that constructing climate change as (any kind of) security issue has very problematic side-effects. Most importantly, it refocuses the attention towards short to middle-term adaptation measures and hence distracts from more long-middle-term mitigation measures that aim at the root causes of climate change, which in the end could seriously diminish its normative value.

This becomes even more relevant with a view on different discourses of climate security. Thus, with a view on the US case, especially the sovereign discourse has revealed a tendency to emphasise direct counter measures often in the defence sector that lack a future oriented mitigation perspective. Looking at Germany and Mexico, the disciplinary and governmental discourse at the other hand seem to be better compatible with a much-needed holistic strategy to halt global warming and at the same time protect vulnerable populations around the globe. Yet, even representations of climate change as human security issue or risk come with their own sets of problems. Focusing on human security and dividing the globe into vulnerable populations in the Global South and climate saviours in the Global North can construct or reactivate problematic identities and dependencies and legitimise paternalistic ‘the West knows best’ (Donnelly and Özkazanç-Pan 2014) approaches. Constructing climate change as a matter of risk can constitute specific risk groups as obsolete and predominantly focus on resilience and insurance measures that in the end as well do not tackle the root causes of climate change.

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Having said that, it always depends on the specific context whether one conception of climate security can be considered more favourable than another and especially in (climate-wise) difficult political environments such as the US under George W. Bush (or Donald Trump), a sovereign securitisation might have been the only chance to re-start the political debate. In the end, while securitisation is no silver bullet, a careful construction of climate change as a threat that takes into account the specific political context and is vigilant of the dangers of evoking security, seems to be worth the risk.