The Task of Envisioning Security for the Anthropocene

Abstract

Our Anthropocene age is defined by a wide array of anthropogenic pressures on planet Earth, which have produced multiple human and environmental insecurities. From climate change to population displacements, from ecosystem degradation to global pandemics, we are faced with unprecedented human and environmental emergencies. Safeguarding the future hinges on generating a wider understanding of ‘security’ that sees the need for holistic strategy, global solidarity and multilateral cooperation. We need a security imaginary transformed by critical and responsible thinking on economic production and planetary precarity, and we require such a vision to manifest in new governmentalities that set us on the right path towards a shared future. This paper reflects on the challenge of establishing holistic understandings of security which can be drawn upon more effectively to respond to the intersecting crises unfolding on the planet. In seeking to reframe global security strategy, the paper underscores an interlinked sense of human-environmental security which extends the UN’s human security concept to address the overlapping precarities of our human and non-human worlds. It considers in particular the role of legal and regulatory mechanisms in curbing the ecological excesses of late modern capitalism; and in seeking to transcend narrow statist formulations of security, the paper illuminates our global interconnections, which require us to renew and support networks of international solidarity and multilateral cooperation.