The Disciplinary Discourse: Recoding Human Security

The disciplinary discourse constitutes the second most important framing in the US debate between 1989 and 2015. As standalone discourse, it was particularly influential in the early 1990s, early 2000s and from 2010 on. Apart from these more archetypical articulations, the disciplinary discourse increasingly has been connected to the sovereign discourse and has been recoded to in the end underscore the sovereign argumentation.

103 Early Traces of the Disciplinary Discourse

In the late 1980s, the disciplinary discourse above all appeared in Congressional debates. At that time, members of Congress often highlighted the serious threats of climate change for the human well-being to legitimise US leadership in the negotiations about the UNFCCC:

Potential climate change presents such a serious threat to human well-being throughout the world, that the United States should undertake urgent action to support and encourage negotiations necessary to bring about a framework convention for international cooperation on limiting the emission of greenhouse gases […] (US Senate 1990c).

However, after this short-lived peak around 1990, the discourse lost in importance in the 103^rd and 104^th Congress between 1993 and 1996. While the Clinton/Gore administration occasionally pointed to it to legitimise their environmental agenda, it was not until 1997 that it became more influential again, especially in the wake of the debates around the Kyoto protocol (US Senate 1997a: S10872). While the human security of people around the world kept playing a role (US Senate 2001b: S8895), Members of Congress also began to focus on the direct implications for US citizens (US House of Representatives 1998b: H6224): ‘Global warming is not just a global challenge; it is also a very local one, impacting lives of Americans in critical and potentially disastrous ways.’ (US Senate 2003b: S13485). During the early 2000s, some proponents of the earlier environmental security debates reappeared and actively participated in the construction of climate change as threat to human security, amongst others Lieberman (US Senate 2001b: S8895, 2003b: S13485) and Kerry (US Senate 2001a: S2301). Beyond these two, particularly former vice-president and presidential candidate Gore kept articulating the disciplinary discourse and was able to reach a broad audience within and outside the US (Grundmann and Scott 2014: 229; Guber and Bosso 2013: 54). He highlighted how climate change threatened the livelihoods of millions of people around the world but also linked this argumentation to the sovereign discourse by mentioning the possibility of conflicts and by urging the entire global civilisation to mobilise against climate change as it would have in times of war (Gore 2007).

The Disciplinary Discourse in Think Tank Reports

Whereas the focus was on the sovereign discourse, think tank reports also contained numerous references to the disciplinary discourse. Thus, most reports discussed the literature and political debates on the transformation of security concepts and acknowledged that: ‘Security cannot be

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defined in purely military terms. Instead, governments must prepare for threats to the security of people, not just states’ (Foley and Holland 2012b: 2). In this vein, they constructed threats to the human security of people in developing countries (Werz and Manlove 2009: 5) and especially in Africa (Stern and Antholis 2007: 176; Werz and Conley 2012: 3) arguing that they would be hit ‘first and also most deeply’ (Campbell et al. 2007: 7, 56, 72) and therefore were in need of help from industrialised countries. Concerning the concrete threats, the think tank reports especially emphasised the physical effects of climate change on the daily lives of individuals. Examples were land degradation, water scarcity, the spread of diseases, an increase in bush fires (McGrady et al. 2010: 20; CNA and Oxfam 2011: 5) but also the increase in natural disasters such as severe storms, floods or droughts, which would threaten millions of people around the world (CNA 2007: 6).

The Ambiguity of Human Security and its Links to the Sovereign Discourse

On the one hand, the articulation of the disciplinary discourse refocused the attention on the problems for individuals and away from solely militaristic or statist understandings. It legitimised support for people directly affected by its negative consequences of climate change (Campbell et al. 2007: 106). However, resting on the concept of normation inherent to disciplinary power, this specific construction of climate threats also created a dichotomy between an ideal norm and deviations from it. Thus, while industrialised countries (and their inhabitants) such as the US were constructed as sufficiently prepared and ‘able to cope with such change’ (CNA 2007: 16), poor and underdeveloped nations and people were framed as

‘greatly challenged’ (CNA 2007: 16) and believed to have ‘less stamina to deal with climate change’ (Campbell et al. 2007: 7). In this argumentation, it is not climate change itself that determines the level of the threat to human security, but the insufficient coping capacity of affected populations:

Poverty and underdevelopment are key factors in South Asia’s vulnerability to climate change because they reduce people’s capacity to cope with large-scale disasters as well as adapt for future disruptions (Foley and Holland 2012b: 7).

Consequently, to reduce this deviation from the norm of the climate resilient citizen, reports first and foremost pointed to external interventions coming from industrialised countries, thereby reinforcing existing dependencies of developing countries on external help: ‘Many of the affected areas have large, vulnerable populations requiring international assistance to cope

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with or escape the effects of sea level rise.’ (Campbell et al. 2007: 42). Closely connected, to identify people that deviate from the norm and to transform their behaviour, the disciplinary argumentation legitimised the increased surveillance of the people and groups in problematic countries. Thus, many reports urged to establish ‘early warning systems’ (Werz and Conley 2012: 18) and ‘monitoring activities’ in affected countries (CNA 2007: 23).

Moreover, although not always spelled out directly, this line of argumentation increased the pressure on developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change themselves. It hence added to existing demands to behave in a specific manner perceived favourable by industrialised countries such as democratisation or economic liberalisation. In line with the productive and less direct nature of disciplinary power, the demands for climate abatement in developing countries always were connected to calls for increased support of industrialised countries (CNA and Oxfam 2011: 15; Werz and Conley 2012: 22). However, together with several remarks on the rapidly increasing GHG contributions of developing countries (Campbell et al. 2007: 84, 97), it also deflected the attention away from the responsibility of industrialised countries to first of all mitigate themselves to tackle the root causes of climate change.

Especially in the US debate, pointing towards the human security implications of climate change in the Global South often was directly connected to the interest of industrialised countries. Accordingly, many reports connected the increased vulnerability of poor people towards the direct physical effects of climate change with a threat for industrialised countries and their national security (CNA and Oxfam 2011: 18; see also Methmann and Oels forthcoming; Oels 2011), as this quote from the 2007 CNA report exemplifies:

While the developed world will be far better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change, some of the poorest regions may be affected most. This gap can potentially provide an avenue for extremist ideologies and create the conditions for terrorism (CNA 2007: 13).

Thus, while human security argumentations did not disappear with the rise of the sovereign discourse from 2007 on, they were increasingly recoded to eventually strengthen the dominant sovereign argumentation and to legitimise sovereign military interventions: ‘[…] if climate change expands the scale or scope of such disasters, the need for military response may

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increase’ (McGrady et al. 2010: 9). Due to its global reach and specific gear, the US military was seen as especially well equipped to respond to such disasters:

Because US military forces are most likely to be committed to respond to extreme weather events where local response capacity has been damaged or overwhelmed, an increase in category 4/5 hurricanes could significantly increase the total number of events for which a military response might be appropriate (McGrady et al. 2010: 18).

Ultimately, think tanks reports often framed threats to human security as the first element of a chain reaction, which overburdened local governments (Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 15) and eventually led to threats to the US national security and required a response from the US military:

A health emergency involving large numbers of casualties and deaths from disease can quickly expand into a major regional or global security challenge that may require military support, ranging from distribution of vaccines to full-scale stability operations (CNA 2007: 15).

While this specific disciplinary argumentation entailed demands for adaptation and development measures to help local populations to cope with the effects of climate change (Busby 2007: 15; CNA and Oxfam 2011: 3), it also went beyond that. With reference to the responsibility to protect, it also legitimised military interventions in states such as Sudan that were deemed unable to protect their citizens (see also McCormack 2010; Hartmann 2010: 241) and which hence could become the nucleus of large scale instability and threats to the global order or the national security of industrialised countries (CNA 2007: 15). Thus, although starting out from the other end of the continuum, the disciplinary discourse as well advanced concepts such as ‘networked security’ or ‘sustainable security’ (Werz and Manlove 2009: 5) helped to facilitate a merging of climate, development and disaster response measures with military and security centred approaches (Werz and Conley 2012: 5–34; CNA 2007: 45; CNA and Oxfam 2011: 3; Carmen et al. 2010: 12; Werz and Manlove 2009: 5; McGrady et al. 2010:

3).

Parliamentary Articulations

Echoing the think tank reports, after 2007 articulations of the disciplinary discourse in the US Congress often combined human and national security. The physical effects of climate change were constructed as a threat to the human security of people around the world (US Senate 2008f:

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S5341), which eventually could have geopolitical repercussions for US national security (US Senate 2008a: S4885): ‘A very large percentage of the poor people in the world live at or below sea level. The effect that rising tides will have in disrupting their lives, we should understand will have a very significant geopolitical implication’ (US House of Representatives 2014:

H5346). In addition to looking at poor people in distant places, Congressional debates also constructed the human security of US citizens as threatened by climate change (US House of Representatives 2014: H5346). This refocusing towards the US populations became more common in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005 and particularly pronounced after 2010 (US House of Representatives 2014: H5346, 2011: H2351).

One important trigger for this discursive change was that politicians and media reports had begun to link extreme weather in the United States such as the 2012 ‘superstorm’ Sandy to climate change (Brulle et al. 2012; Bloomberg 2013; US House of Representatives 2013:

H1895). Beyond that, the proponents of the climate security debate also saw a tactical advantage in highlighting the direct security implications of climate change for US citizens because the US American public was increasingly losing interest in problems that only affected distant peoples or futures (Leiserowitz 2005: 1437; Interview 2014q; CNA Military Advisory Board 2014; Melillo et al. 2014). As a consequence of this shift, demands for improved disaster management capabilities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) increased (Werz and Conley 2012: 9; CNA 2007:

7; Foley and Holland 2012b).