Security in the Anthropocene

Environmental issues, ranging from climate change to scarcity of resources and diminishing biodiversity, present a set of challenges that suggest that we are now living in the Anthropocene. Many of these issues are expressed in security terms, with a growing emphasis on energy, environmental and water security. Analytical frameworks and existing institutions become dysfunctional, and problems cannot be dealt with in the old ways. Security needs to be rethought. This chapter provides an overview of the attempts and the challenges to reconceptualize security in the Anthropocene. How does a growing awareness of complex relations involving humans, non-humans and things question the very subject of security? Whose security is at stake, against what threats, by what means? It engages with the challenges that environmental problems pose to the discipline of international relations, its ontological and epistemological foundations and its categories of analysis and to security studies more specifically.