Cosmopolitan Justice and Global Climate Change: Toward Perpetual Peace or War in a Resource-Challenged World?

Abstract

Can inclinations towards democratic peace be maintained within the international community when competition between states for diminishing natural resource reserves and the threat of military conflict grows ever more intense? Implicit in recent policy discourse on the security implications of climate change is the notion that war, in certain circumstances, is a legitimate response to threat and given the inevitability of shortages amongst many climate-vulnerable states in the future, highly likely. This paper assesses the ‘uncomfortable paradox’ (Beck 2008: 131) that emerges alongside the institutionalisation of a liberal democratic regime that in principle supports global peace under conditions of resource scarcity but in practice, offers legitimation occasionally to its opposite – war. From a critical normative cosmopolitan perspective, the notion that natural resource conflict can be considered ‘just’ or even ‘inevitable’ is objectionable. Ultimately, it is a regressive form of liberalism that allows a war mentality to condition how universal principles of freedom, justice and self-determination are applied to issues of resource distribution in this age of climate adversity when global cooperation is a prerequisite for humanity's long-term survival.