Abstract
Abstract. The science of climate security and conflict is replete with controversies. Yet the increasing vulnerability of politically fragile countries to the security consequences of climate change is widely acknowledged. Although climate conflict reflects a continuum of conditional forces that coalesce around the notion of vulnerability, how different portrayals of vulnerability influence the discursive formation of climate conflict relations remains an exceptional but under-researched issue. This paper combines a systematic discourse analysis with a vulnerability interpretation diagnostic tool to explore (i) how discourses of climate conflict are constructed and represented, (ii) how vulnerability is communicated across discourse lines, and (iii) the strength of contextual vulnerability against a deterministic narrative of scarcity-induced conflict, such as that pertaining to land. Systematically characterising climate conflict discourses based on the central issues constructed, assumptions about mechanistic relationships, implicit normative judgements and vulnerability portrayals, provides a useful way of understanding where discourses differ. While discourses show a wide range of opinions "for" and "against" climate conflict relations, engagement with vulnerability has been less pronounced – except for the dominant context centrism discourse concerned about human security (particularly in Africa). In exploring this discourse, we observe an increasing sense of contextual vulnerability that is oriented towards a concern for complexity rather than predictability. The article concludes by illustrating that a turn towards contextual vulnerability thinking will help advance a constructivist theory-informed climate conflict scholarship that recognises historicity, specificity, and variability as crucial elements of contextual totalities of any area affected by climate conflict.
Highlights
Several accounts of the relations between climate change and conflict are organised around three sets of ideas: “trends in climatic events”, “presence of conflict triggers” and “dynamics of intervening variables”
The analysis presented here illustrates that there are multiple ways of conceiving how discourses are constructed, with different considerations for how climate conflict phenomena should be understood, including assumptions about causality, normative judgements, and vulnerability portrayals
While there is an absence of a specific interpretation of vulnerability in much of the discourses, we outline an orientation towards contextual vulnerability in both context centrism and denial claims discourses
Summary
Several accounts of the relations between climate change and conflict are organised around three sets of ideas: “trends in climatic events”, “presence of conflict triggers” and “dynamics of intervening variables”. The research identifies discourse categories by laying out discrete expressions that depict homogeneity in messages regarding the (i) roles of climate change in conflict outcomes, (ii) perceptions regarding the referent object whose security is threatened, and (iii) how frameworks of meaning about vulnerability are portrayed (i.e. the vulnerability interpretations underpinning climate conflict discourses). This approach allows for a less subjective search for and characterisation of discourses. – How may we frame climate conflict as a vulnerabilitybased question and what new knowledge can we anticipate with this framing (e.g. for guiding climate, land use, and conflict research)?
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