Climate change and the transformation of security: securitization and beyond

The chapter has three main objectives. First, it shows how securitization provides the tools to explore how the link between climate change and security emerged. Second, it questions whether and how engaging with environmental and climate change provides the opportunity to rework securitization theory. Finally, the chapter clarifies some of the concepts and debates that are considered in other chapters in this volume. Securitization theory - which considers threats as socially constructed and security as a specific form of social practice - provides a relevant tool to explore how climate change has become a security issue. At the same time, despite the framing of climate change as a security issue, the exceptional measures securitization implies have not materialized. The chapter engages with these issues, showing how securitization provides a relevant analytical tool to explore which threats and whose security have been prioritized as well as an instrument to question a specific and historically contingent security formation associated with exceptional, reactive measures and the realist tradition. This creates the space for conceptual refining and reworking, which are explored.