Remembering and Securitizing Climate Change in Russian and British Media

Abstract

This chapter examines how national news media outlets in Russia and the United Kindom (UK) address climate change issues in terms of risk and security. Barry Buzan (Coop Confl 32, 1997: 14) argues that ‘the process of securitization is what in language theory is called a “speech-act”’. Therefore, this chapter analyses media discourse as a representation of a ‘speech-act’. It also considers media outlets as ‘institutions of national memory’ whose approach to recording information creates and re-creates the way the ‘unobtrusive’ issue of climate change is remembered and consequently perceived by the audience. In order to get a clear sense of official positions on the securitization of climate change, the Russian case is approached by analysing news articles produced by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. In the British case, the BBC news is used as the media outlet which predominately reproduces the central and the most popular discourse in the country. The study shows that at the level of government discourse the Russian Federation and the UK differ in their approach to the climate change policy. However, the media discourse shows more similarities than differences.