Recomposing the climate-security nexus: A conceptual introduction

What is security in an age of catastrophic climate change? This conceptual introduction to the special issue “Critical Climate Security” develops a new theoretical approach to studying the complex linkages between climate change, security, and conflict. Through a comprehensive review, it identifies three ways of theorizing the climate-security nexus in the existing literature: as a set of causal relations, as a discourse, and as a field of practice. To transcend these ideal types and capture the climate-security nexus in its multiplicity, we propose to theorize it as a composition. This approach is attentive to the material, discursive, affective, practical, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the nexus and puts a focus on change through processes of composing and recomposing. Acknowledging the crucial role of the researcher in composing climate security, it also offers new ways of practicing critique. While critical research on climate security in the past often focused on debunking taken-for-granted knowledge and deconstructing hegemonic discourses, our perspective outlines how climate security could be recomposed around new “matters of care”, and thus be gradually reoriented toward more progressive goals. In this way, our approach is also a proposal to think differently about the future of climate security: beyond the established pathways of either dystopian catastrophe or utopian promise. Instead, a compositional approach requires a constant commitment to practices of protecting, caring, and repairing, also in the sense of reparation: not just as compensation for past damages but as a future-oriented project of world-making in which redistribution and just transformation matter.