Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care 9783839433379

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Cameron Harrington, Clifford Shearing Security in the Anthropocene

Political Science | Volume 30

To Hin Wah, who found her wings in the crucible of adversity, and soared

Cameron Harrington (Dr.) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. Clifford Shearing (Dr.) holds professorships at the Universities of Cape Town, Griffith and Montreal and positions at the University of New South Wales and the Durban University of Technology.

Cameron Harrington, Clifford Shearing

Security in the Anthropocene Reflections on Safety and Care

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Abundzu / Fotolia.com Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by CPI – Clausen & Bosse Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3337-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3337-9

Contents

Note on Authorship  | 7 Preface  | 9 Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene  | 13 Bringing deep time into security | 19 The Pleistocene | 20 The Holocene | 23 The Anthropocene | 26 Security in the Anthropocene | 31

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds  | 37 Lineages  | 41 The return of the Great Man | 45 Posthuman security | 49 Safety politics in the posthuman age | 56 Conclusion | 60

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security  | 63 Creating nature  | 66 Nature as purity | 68 Nature as instrumental value | 70 Nature as threat | 74 Niche construction and postnatural security | 78 Conclusion | 83

Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security  | 85 Confronting the new Human Age: securitization and the horizon of Holocene Security  | 88

Reading Schmitt in the Anthropocene | 94 The dawn of Anthropocene security | 97 Conclusion | 105

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene  | 109 The impossible past | 109 Can security be careful? | 117 Care and the Anthropocene | 123 The limits of care | 126 Risk and uncertainty | 127 Towards a micro-politics of care | 131 Conclusion | 139

Chapter Six: Conclusions  | 141 Constructing the World | 142 Defenses and new directions | 145 Omissions and critiques | 145 Future directions | 151

References  | 157 Register  | 189

Note on Authorship

As is almost always the case in jointly authored work our roles were integrated but not equal.  We worked together in conceiving of the idea for the book and in developing both its architecture and its central arguments.  We also worked together in developing the plans for each of the chapters.  Cameron then took on the role of drafting the chapters.  Throughout this writing process we worked together in developing and fleshing out our arguments—more so in some chapters than others as we became more confident of what our arguments were as the writing progressed.  Once first drafts were completed Clifford took each chapter to the next stage.  Sometimes this involved significant rethinking and rewriting.  At other times what was involved was careful tweaking of the way the arguments were expressed.  Cameron then finalised each chapter.

Preface

This was not an easy book to write, as readers will probably guess. Its subject matter is rarely uplifting, and is often dispiriting. Given our backgrounds in the disciplines of international relations and criminology we are often required to think through seemingly tragic, locked-in security dilemmas; ones that seldom deal with the brighter sides of humanity. The Anthropocene is the most daunting security challenge either of us have encountered. We have done our best to make sense of our current predicament without giving in to cynicism or despair, though some days this seemed impossible to do. There are no answers to be found within the following pages. Our hope is that our contribution will provoke debate, discussion, and further consideration of the multifaceted security challenges we face. The genesis of this book came in 2014. Cameron Harrington was working on a postdoctoral project on water security at the University of Cape Town under the supervision of Clifford Shearing. Over discussion we realized that, independent of the other, we had both been thinking deeply about Anthropocene questions. It was decided soon thereafter to begin forming our different thoughts into a cohesive manuscript. The journey has taken over two years and over that time we have become indebted to many. Our ideas have been shaped and reformed through numerous discussions, presentations, workshops, and seminars in the exceptional surrounds of Cape Town. We are grateful for the lively, interdisciplinary community at the University of Cape Town, particularly our colleagues based in the Global Risk Governance programme (GRG), the Faculty of Law, Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), and the Centre of Criminology (now the Institute for Safety Governance and Criminology). Thanks to Elaine Atkins and Francisca Zimmerman in particular for

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their exceptional research and administrative support. Emma Lecavalier and Melani van der Merwe deserve credit for contributing to a lively intellectual atmosphere in the GRG offices. Further thanks go as well to our colleagues at the University of Bergen, including Jan Froestad and Thor Øivind Jensen who have listened, critiqued, and improved many of our ideas. At the end of 2015 Cameron took up a postdoctoral fellowship, under Benoit Dupont’s supervision, at the Centre International de Criminologie Comparée (CICC) at the University of Montreal. Thanks to Samuel Tanner for his sponsorship and support of the project and to Élodie Roy for helping to administer the fellowship. CICC’s innovative and cutting-edge security research environment made for a welcoming and intellectually invigorating environment. At various points, and in different locales, we have shared portions of this book, learning a great deal along the way. We have presented parts of the book at the University of Cape Town, the London School of Economics, the University of Montreal, and the University of Ottawa. Thank you to the participants, discussants, and chairs at various conferences, including the 2015 and 2016 International Studies Association Conferences in New Orleans, and Atlanta, and the 2015 Millennium Journal Annual Conference in London, UK. We have benefited from numerous discussions with inspiring scholars. In particular thanks to Ken Booth, John Braithwaite, Anthony Burke, Barry Buzan, Simon Dalby, Scott Hamilton, Jonna Nyman, and Mark Salter for reading and commenting on draft chapters, related articles or presentations. Further thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers who commented upon and critiqued various aspects of this manuscript. We are also indebted to Ricky Röntsch for her excellent editing assistance. Finally, we must also single out and thank Jakob Horstmann, our editor at Transcript-Verlag, for his enthusiasm for this project and for his unending patience as many of our overly optimistic deadlines came and went. A few of the ideas in this book appear in other academic outlets. See Shearing, Clifford. (2015). “Criminology and the Anthropocene.” In: Criminology and Criminal Justice 15/3, pp. 255-269; Harrington, Cameron. (2016). “The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene.” In: Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44/3, pp. 478-498; Harrington, Cameron. (Forthcoming 2017). “Posthuman Security and Care in the Anthropocene.” In: Clara Eroukhmanoff and

Preface

Matt Harker (eds), Posthumanism. E-International Relations Publishing. Readers familiar with these articles will find overlap throughout this book. The book would not have been possible without funding support from the South Africa-Norway Research Cooperation (SANCOOP) Fund, the National Research Foundation of South Africa along with Griffith University and the University of Cape Town. Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are ours alone and the agencies do not accept any liability in regard thereto. Cameron Harrington Clifford Shearing Toronto and Cape Town, January 2017.

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Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene “No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical.” (Niels Bohr quoted in Frisch 1979:95)

What does it mean to live and die in a world that is ending? What happens to our ideas and practices of security when much of what we have taken for granted—including the requirements for our safety and our very survival—now ceases to be? Security references a state of protection—where threats are absent, insignificant, or managed. It is the condition of feeling safe. A state of being without care, of being carefree, because all is well (Hamilton 2013: 32). Yet, if we are to take seriously all of the warning signs that tell us that humanity is careening headfirst into a new world that offers no platform of stability, no guarantees of safety or survival, what then? These are the questions that face us as we move through, the 21st century. They are the questions we consider in this book. For almost all of our entire existence we humans have been “in­ significant animals with no more impact on [our] environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish” (Harari 2014: 11). This insignificance produced profound effects on our security ideas. This insignificance has granted us the “safe operating spaces” (Rockström 2009) we have enjoyed for millennia. It has allowed us to be carefree and careless about the earth and the safety it has provided. We are no longer insignificant. This, in Naomi Klein‘s words,“ changes everything”. We have become, through labor and technique, powerful ‘geological agents’ (Chakrabarty 2009) who are actively shaping the Earth system in ways that seriously undermine our safe spaces. There has been, in Pat O’Malley’s phrase, a “collapse of nature into society” (O’Malley forthcoming). This has happened before and with dire consequences but never on this scale. In 2015, for the first time in human history atmospheric

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carbon dioxide (CO2) levels reached 400 parts per million (PPM) on average across the whole year. This is a remarkable increase when compared to the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution, which stood at around 278 PPM. This can be traced largely to human activities: a growing population; intensified agricultural practices; increase in land use and deforestation; industrialization and energy use from fossil sources. The increase in CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide) is of course the main driver behind global warming. By the end of 2015 the warming influence of greenhouse gases had increased by 37 per cent since 1990 (Dahlman 2016). While estimates vary, the prevailing wisdom is that feedback from the Earth system will increase the rate of climate change in the near and long-term future. As future climate change impacts drought, it will weaken the land carbon sink and amplify atmospheric CO2 growth. By century’s end the world will probably be warmer by 2-4 degrees Celsius in spite of the global pledge at the 2015 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—commonly referred to as COP 21—in Paris to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (hereafter °C) (UNFCCC 2015). The election of Donald Trump, an avowed climate change-denier, in November 2016 as President of the US, with an economy that produces roughly 16 per cent of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions (Boden et al 2015), signals to us that 1.5 degrees seems to be an increasingly unlikely outcome, while 4 degrees, and its devastating consequences for planetary life, has become more likely. Trying to construct a political response for a cumulative series of events over the course of a century, let alone a millennium, seems impossible. The difficulty is magnified by the uncertainty, unpredictability, and the inequality of climate change. As the world slowly and inadequately prepares for a world that will be 2°C warmer by the end of the century, we are simultaneously tasked with preparing for a world that could very likely be 4°C warmer, which would equal the same temperature change that occurred between the ice age and the Holocene. If we hit 4°C, a number of interrelated catastrophes are expected: the tropics will become uninhabitable; the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be guaranteed, together with a subsequent rising of the oceans by upwards of 70 meters (National Snow and Ice Data Center 2015; World Meteorological Organization 2016: 24); there is likely to be a vast diminishment of crop yields, threatening food production and human health; there will ensue

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

a massive loss of biodiversity; an increase in the spread of vector-borne diseases; and overall water scarcity. Even if governments of the world are successful at limiting warming to between 2-3°C, the long-term impacts will be severe. Over the next two millennia, 20 per cent of the world’s population will be forced to move from coasts, which will be swallowed up by the sea. Cities including New York, Calcutta, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro are likely to be under water (Clark et al. 2016). Responding to these scenarios seems beyond the realm of our security thinking. Our future will demand the impossible.1 It has been claimed that we are now witnessing the onset of a mass extinction event, the first in 56 million years (Kolbert 2014). While there have been previous mass extinctions—science fiction stories notwithstanding—we have not, until now, always considered this as a possibility for us.2 The end of the world. Not through divine intervention, or nuclear annihilation (which still haunts us), but through the slow, insidious actions of our everyday. We are finding it hard to acknowledge this change in our circumstances and to change our ways. This predicament invites criminology and international relations, two disciplines that focus their attention on security, to consider what security might mean, and how it might be practiced, within our new realities. Finding a way of doing this will not be easy for either discipline. Both areas of enquiry have developed within the shadow of Emile Durkheim’s radical separation of nature and society as two sui generis domains, where a collapse of one into the other has been by definition impossible. And yet this is what has happened. 1 | See the special theme issue, edited by New et al. of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2011), entitled “Four Degrees and Beyond: Potential for a Global Temperature Increase of Four Degrees and its Implications.” 2 | For many, international relations as a discipline came of age during the Cold War, when the world existed under the threat of nuclear war and total annihilation. The apocalyptic visions of nuclear attacks and the prospects of a resulting ‘nuclear winter’ is the closest we have come in our disciplines to dealing with the material and emotional components of global extinction. The Anthropocene offers a similarly catastrophic threat landscape as a nuclear winter, but its vision of extinction—slow, latent, barely discerned, and yet violently effective—exists in stark contrast to the spectacular immediacy of nuclear war and deterrence logics. The Anthropocene extinction isn’t solved with a telephone hotline. See Colebrook (2014: 40).

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How this challenge is conceived, and met, within these disciplines will define their contributions to our emerging age and its unique insecurities. For most classical security theorists—from Thucydides to Hobbes, Clauesewitz to Morgenthau—human social worlds have been, at root, an anarchic realm that has guaranteed a constant level of insecurity that could only be temporarily assuaged. How this ‘social’ insecurity has been, and may be moderated, has been at the center of the concerns of criminology and international relations. Within both disciplines, humans have been conceived as, in John Gray’s (2002) phase, “rapacious primates” who constantly endanger each other in a Hobbesian “war of all against all”. Dangers lurk around every corner. Security, a constantly shifting phantom, can be realized only to the extent that humans can reign in their innate, violent, tendencies stoked by self-interest. This story of (in)security has been posited, critiqued, and repeated ad nauseam for centuries. It has formed the basis for the thinking about intrastate societal security (criminology) and interstate national security (international relations). It has been used to understand sovereign power and authority as source of security. Fear of the barbarism inherent in the state of nature has been thought of as strong enough that, “whatever the sovereign does cannot be as bad as the condition of unrestrained competition” (Walker 1997: 67). By large measure, our contemporary theories and practices of security adhere to these established assumptions. But as is becoming clearer, strange and fantastic things are happening; a consequence of our failure to shift our sensibilities and practices as we have moved from being insignificant to significant animals. Rising oceans, record temperatures, ocean gyres of plastic garbage, climatealtering oil spills and methane leaks—the Earth and its inhabitants are defying expectations. The remarkable transformation of the Earth system into a wholly new geologic epoch is unthinkable and nonsensical for contemporary approaches to security—approaches that have viewed our planet as a stable system that operates independently of humans. Our unquestioned confidence in the security provided by nature, regardless of what we did, has been and is being shattered. We have discovered the unthinkable: how we act matters not just for us but for Earth itself. We are, to our surprise, deeply and irrevocably entangled. And there is no going back because the world of our ancestors has vanished. What once was can never again be. The scale and speed of shifts in the Earth system is unprecedented, unpredictable, uncertain and profoundly dangerous for

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

human life, for our fellow earthlings, and for our institutions. We have no choice but to alter our pursuit of a secure coexistence. Gaia, to use James Lovelock’s term for our living Earth, has spoken forcefully and eloquently. Security, both as a practice and as an analytical category, is more complex than we ever imagined. As a consequence we are compelled to revisit our core ideas and reorient our practices as we make sense of the planet’s inter-permeable systems of humans, animals, things, and processes. The idea of an ‘Earth system’—the planet’s interlocked, interacting physical, chemical, and biological processes—has been absent from almost all security approaches. Our purely anthropocentric framings are no longer viable—they were a luxury that cannot be maintained. If our metamorphosis teaches us anything, it is that we are entangled in a complex set of assemblages—one set of interlinked things among many. The name that has been proposed for our new geological age that we are entering is the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans—an age of humans as consequential, interlinked things that impact not only themselves but the systems of which they, like all other things, are a part. By most metrics, individual security and well-being have risen rapidly as we have accessed, and used, fossil fuels. Over the past 25 years, two billion people have been lifted out of low development levels (UN Development Programme 2015). Extending back even further, life expectancy has risen dramatically over the last few centuries, with rapid improvements occurring in developing countries in recent decades. Today, the countries with the lowest life expectancy (Swaziland, Lesotho, Central African Republic) are better off today than any country in the year 1820 (van Zanden et al. 2014). Many human risks have been drastically reduced. Sidestepping for the moment persistent violence and rising inequality, the Anthropocene has arrived at a time when humans have never had it so good. A comforting calm before the coming storm. There is no question that for all earthlings the Anthropocene is an age of new and monumental risks that threatens to rapidly undo the security gains of the past several centuries. The impacts of human behavior extend into deep time and have buried themselves in Earth’s crust. Exactly what this means, and will mean, may never be fully known. What is known is that the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions, together with a host of other, often related, environmental effects, promise a future (across short-, medium- , and long-term) that is unlike anything earthlings have

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ever experienced. This will be a future where humans are metaphysically and literally at the center of the world. The term Anthropocene offers a clear vision of the source of these developments—anthropos. That we have indeed entered the Age of the Anthropocene is revealed when unravelling this claim. The human has radically seeped into every corner. Every discipline—from philosophy to atmospheric chemistry, from visual arts to stratigraphy—is affected. And yet surprisingly, the concept has yet to take hold in the two disciplines that have foregrounded security studies. It is true that a small subset of international relations scholars and a growing number of ‘green’ criminologists are producing insightful work on the Anthropocene and its security implications.3 But these have contributed largely as a tentative beginning. The Anthropocene is still overwhelmingly absent from security studies. This is all the more curious given the fact that according to the most comprehensive global survey of international relations scholars—the 2014 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey—the most important foreign policy issue the world will face over the next ten years is global climate change (TRIP 2015). The same poll however revealed that only about two per cent of the nearly 4000 scholars surveyed listed the international/ global environment as their main area of research (Teaching Research and International Policy 2014). Both disciplines, with the exceptions of small islands of new thinking, remain virtually unchanged. The signals are clear; security is still deeply rooted in Holocene-bred understandings of security. The reasons for this are varied and complex and will be examined throughout this book. For established security studies, wedded as they have been to anthropocentrism and visions of geography as political territory, the Anthropocene is ontologically and epistemologically weird. Exploring how security is related to animals, nitrogen, microbes, deep time, and niche constructions of environmental impacts that include all ‘earthlings’—as the Anthropocene demands—is an altogether foreign task.4 A task that requires the disciplinary divides to transcend the established socialnature divide. It will also undoubtedly require the enrolling of a variety of 3 | A small sampling would include international relations scholars such as Simon Dalby, Frank Biermann, and Audra Mitchell, and criminologists such as Avril Brisman, Michael Lynch, Nigel South and Rob White. 4 | The lack of traction in the niche field of ‘green criminology’ illustrates this.

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

emerging technologies that can detect, measure, simulate and model on scales that are too vast and complex to be transposed and communicated via the cognition of humans alone (Weart 2010; Weart 2003). We cannot study climate change, forecast future global pandemics and so on without nonhuman technologies/intelligences, including computer-based modelling on supercomputers (Chun 2011; Thomas 2014). The hybrid nature of the Anthropocene requires the pluralization of security and of security studies. Our survival and well-being are bound together with others– across species, time, and objects. This entanglement, so fundamental to the Anthropocene, is a mystery to security studies. A principal goal of this book is to shed some light on this mystery.

B ringing deep time into securit y The term Anthropocene conveys something profound, though it has taken a while to realize it. Introduced in 2000 as a seemingly benign neologism by the atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen (a Nobel Laureate) and geologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen/Stoermer 2000: 17-18), the term, and the ideas it embodies, have grown into a worldwide phenomenon. It expresses the idea that humans are now fundamentally altering the planet, including its long-term geological processes, at an increasing rate. While it has not been accepted by the official bureaucratic body—the International Commission on Stratigraphy—the Anthropocene is now widely accepted as a suitable moniker for a modern age beset by climate change. The idea that humans can and do change the earth is not new. While Stoermer first used the term in the 1980s, the intellectual history of the idea it seeks to capture stretches far back in time.5 Yet, while the concept is outwardly intuitive, it

5 | The recognition that humans have the power to control the Earth system had been acknowledged as early as 1873 by the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani who spoke of the “anthropozoic era”, describing it as, “a new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth” (Stoppani quoted in Crutzen 2002: 23). A few decades later, in 1926, V.I. Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin used the term “noösphere,” the “world of thought” to describe how human brain-power shapes the environment and its future (Crutzen 2002: 23).

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holds vast implications. Humans have forever altered the planet; they are historical geo-forces. Declaring the advent of a new geological age is not simply a matter of measuring the hard facts of geological changes. While these geological changes are likely to be found in measurements of extinction impacts or nuclear fallout, we must also recognize that the Anthropocene requires a massive cognitive shift to incorporate relationality and entanglement. If humans are geologic agents the traditional divide between people and an external world of things, which Durkheim’s sociological thinking epitomizes, dissolves. We are found everywhere, with everything. Our traces are found in forests, glaciers, skies, oceans and everywhere in between. We have altered, and are altering, the seasons and the DNA of life-giving matter. We have ended worlds (eg, through extinctions) and have begun new ones, eg. populations of jellyfish ‘bloom’ thanks to high levels of agricultural waste being dumped into the ocean, which leads to the widespread growth of algae and zooplankton (Purcell et al. 2007). Figuring out how to think and act along geological temporal scales is a new task for security studies. Cultivating an ethos that holds us as relational beings in which there is no nature, no ‘out there’, is a crucial task for making sense of security in the Anthropocene. How then, is the Anthropocene any different from what has come before? It is self-evident that it differs in terms of the absolute and relative impacts of humans upon the Earth. As a species, we are wholly dominant, able to shape Earth to meet almost our every need. Understanding how we got here requires us to shift our temporal and spatial scales, bringing deep time, and things big and small (from the cosmological to the quantum) into relation with our emerging security predicaments. We now turn to a brief examination of security through previous geological ages, focusing on the entanglement of nature and society.

The pleistocene The Pleistocene (from about 2.5 million years ago to 11.700 years ago), when we find Earth’s last major ice age, is characterized by the repeated glaciations that overtook the planet over the span of millions of years. It was during the Pleistocene when hominids first emerged and evolved enough to organize themselves in small, tribal societies, displaying a

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

unique level of intelligence lacking in other primate species. As these emerging humans developed they also spread themselves across most parts of the world, particularly during the milder interglacial periods, which left new, open landscapes available for settlement. Archaeological evidence in deep time is scarce and patchy, but the available data suggests that a gradual migration and colonization of ecosystems, by prehistoric hunter-gatherers had occurred in almost all parts of the world, including the Americas and Australia by the late Pleistocene. Thinking about the Pleistocene means more than reiterating the story of painfully slow and methodical evolution of humans and their technology towards greater and greater sophistication. This story, repeated by many traditional archaeological studies, views human evolution primarily as a function of environmental pressures; human evolution emerges as “a story of chimpanzees entering an environmentally driven conveyor belt at one end and emerging at the other as Homo sapiens.” (Coward et al. 2015: xxvii). Recent developments, beginning in the 1980s, have seen Palaeolithic archaeology reorient its traditional study of early humans away from a closed scientific positivism in order to better incorporate complex entanglement through a focus on human relationships with other beings and things. This ‘post-processual’ turn in archaeology, ‘a return to things’, exemplified in the works of Ian Hodder (2012), Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1992), and Clive Gamble (2007), counters cleaner teleological views of human prehistory that has long been the accepted and unquestioned narrative. These authors foreground the social and cognitive aspects of early human life instead of focusing on how environmental pressures cue corresponding changes in human physiology and behavior. They create an archaeology-of-movement, which studies evolutionary changes as a dynamic process of interaction between people as particular kinds of things with other things. The so-called ‘creative explosion’ is used to denote the separation of humans from other hominids. This ‘event’ began somewhere between 100.000-70.000 years ago in parts of Africa, when humans first demonstrated symbolic thought—understood as the ability to identify and craft representations of things. Anthropologists differ in their explanations for the creative explosion: they typically label it as a result of genetic mutation, the culmination of gradual processes of development, or something that rose and fell with climatic disruptions (Wilson 2012). No matter the explanations, modern human behavior

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is correlated with the technical and cognitive ability to express emotive thought via the use of objects—for example, the tools used to etch paintings and patterns onto cave walls and stone fragments. This turn in archaeology shows how humans have always been fully entangled and related with other organisms, technologies, and metaphors. This links all of human history to a broader history of the universe and its physical and chemical processes (Godson 2014). It also means ‘peopling’ the deep past, emphasizing the microscales at which interpersonal and embodied social practice helps materialize personhood (Dobres 2005: 265). This practice explains change on an archaeological timescale by emphasizing the hybridity of prehistorical culture. It means looking at the messy mixtures of materiality and symbolism that goes into making sense of human action. These analyses, harbingers of what the Anthropocene requires, seek to link all of human social history to a broader, deeper history of the universe and its physical and chemical processes (Godson 2014). They guide us to engage the messy mixtures of materiality and symbolism of human life (Dobres 2005: 265). Neolithic houses, masks, and kinship networks are used as examples of social technologies that point to the relatedness between people and material culture. Entanglements are revealed as processes that both enable and entrap (Hodder 2014). For these scholars the earliest houses of the Pleistocene period are not simply dwellings developed by primitive humans to protect against the natural elements (though this is, of course, one use); they are also ‘bodies’—Latour’s ‘actants’. According to Clive Gamble, the entanglement of humans, other beings, materials, culture, and symbolism complicates our stories of prehistoric security. For him, [h]ouses are the ultimate container of people, livestock, tools and memories. Houses are carved, wall-papered, added-to and repaired. They are quintessential biographical objects, growing, changing and eventually dying. They are culturally relative. One person’s Golden Hall is another’s thatched barn. And almost coincidentally, they keep out the wind and rain. (Gamble 2007: 98)

Even the most basic form of personal security—constructing necessary shelter to protect one’s life—becomes a relational endeavor, infused with symbolism, technology, materials, social status, and culture. Our security structures are hybrid entities, composed of multiple, interacting and crosscutting networks of living beings and things. Gamble further explains:

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

In other words, people, manufactured objects and things such as trees are not distinct categories based on biology or the possession of life. Rocks, trees and animals are all examples of material culture and as such can be part of relational networks, as well as relating to each other independently of people. For example, a hen-house is built by people. But the hens that live in it have a relation to those surroundings which conditions their actions when the chicken farmer is far away. Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm depends, once Farmer Jones is expelled, upon the developing relationship between the pigs and the farmhouse and the other animals and their barn: a good example of how, with hybrid culture, the rational distinctions governing relationships quickly break down. What emerges in turn is a network of relationships between people, things and objects or, more simply, networks of material culture. (Gamble 2007: 96) (Internal references omitted)

Even in our deepest history, human security has been correlated to the security of other beings, things, places, and processes. These ideas, and others like them, prefigure the sorts of analyses that the Anthropocene requires: analyses in which humans are recognized as things, affecting and being affected by other things in a single realm that dissolves the natural-social dyad—a dyad that lies at the heart of the carelessness that has been so instrumental in giving rise to the Anthropocene.

The H olocene The Holocene, Greek for “wholly new,” was not formally pronounced until 1967 by the US Geological Survey. It reflects a period of both glacial advance and retreat, with an overall sea-level rise of just a bit more than 35 meters (Wanner et al. 2008). It is also an age with variable warming and cooling trends (depending on the timescale and the hemisphere of measurement), due to orbital changes, solar radiation and volcanic eruptions (Summerhayes/Charman 2015; Wanner et al. 2015). The Holocene has been characterized by relative climate stability. It was during this period that the continents dried out and our contemporary landscape was formed. Changes in geological terms during the Holocene have been negligible. For example, over the entirety of the Holocene (12.000 years) the continents have shifted less than a kilometer. As Jedediah Purdy (2015) puts it, “a reasonably fit person could cover the scale of planetary change in a brisk eight-minute walk.”

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Almost all of our ideas about human history and the development of civilization have occurred in the Holocene. Of course it does matter that the global human population at the start of the Holocene was around two million (Goldewijk et al. 2010). By most estimates, overall population numbers remained at this level until the beginning of the agricultural revolution, some 5000 years ago. The emergence of complex human societies during the Holocene was made possible by its relative climate stability. This provided for large areas of human habitation and the creation of increasingly agricultural systems and higher population densities. While the Pleistocene was characterized by hunter-gatherer societies with low population density, the Holocene saw the onset and the rapid development of agricultural and cooking technologies. This in turn led to the emergence of a series of civilizations, including those present on the planet today. According to Richerson and Boyd: Intensified subsistence and higher population densities multiply the number of people and volume of commodities that societies can mobilize for economic and political purposes. Expanded exchange allows societies to exploit an expanded division of labor. Larger armies are possible to deal with external threats or to coerce neighbors. Expanding the number of people sharing a common language and customs will accelerate the spread of useful ideas. Given appropriate institutions, the denser societies made possible by agriculture can realize considerable returns to better exploitation of the potential of cooperation, coordination, and the division of labor. (Richerson/Boyd 2001: 213)

The fundamental form of security, for humans as for all species, is biophysical well-being, which depends on the ability to extract what is needed for survival from the resources of the planet. Take for instance the role of fire—crucial to the emergence of cooking—which enabled less energy to be spent on digestion and more on brain development (Harari 2014). As humans flourished in the period of climatic stability, a population bomb exploded, though the nearly-exponential growth of global populations did not start until very recently. In fact, the global human population has quadrupled over the last 100 years, soaring to over 7 billion, with global GDP growing twenty-fold during this time (European Environment Agency 2015). Current estimates conclude that by the end of the 21st century the Earth will be home to more than 11 billion people (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

Division 2015). As our numbers have grown, so have our need to extract more and more resources to feed ourselves. A spiral of ‘take, make and waste’ ensued, enabled by climatic stability that supported bio-physical systems and provided humans with safe operating spaces. The irony of the Anthropocene is that, as advances in technology enabled ever greater ‘taking’ and ‘wasting’ to support our ‘making’, the bio-physical systems upon which this all depended have been undermined—a killing of the goose that lays the golden egg on a planetary scale. The crucial piece in this story has been a succession of energy revolutions that began with the mastering of fire (Pyne 2001; Clark/ Yusoff 2014). This burning expanded enormously with the discovery of fossil fuels, these being effectively energy batteries that had been charged by the sun over millennia (Hartmann 1999). As we learned how to burn to extract more and make more, our ‘taking, making and wasting’ expanded through industrialization (Rifkin 2011). A crucial feature of these processes was the generation of electricity—an enormously flexible form of energy that can be produced from a variety of energy sources—on a massive scale, as we burnt coal to “end the night,” drive machines and, most importantly, create a new space—cyber and digital. It is the waste of industrialization, which has brought with it much well-being for humans that more than anything has shaped the shift from the relatively benign conditions of the Holocene to the conditions that are emerging with the Anthropocene.6 Herein lies the profound irony that Ulrich Beck (1992) identified with his risk society. It is the very activities that have allowed for our flourishing during the Holocene that might lead to a sixth mass extinction on Earth. The Holocene may be over but its artefacts—its social systems, its mindsets and its 7 billion humans—still remain embedded in the Earth in the early 21st century. The mind-set that prevails over Holocene Earth resources, along with its institutions, has been built upon a view of the ‘natural’ world as separate from the domain of humans. These resources are viewed abstractly, with no power to interact with humans and vice versa. This has meant that the security of Earth systems, environmental security or, the security that nature provides, was never of concern, and indeed has scarcely been recognized. We humans have long regarded the planet as a sterile stage upon which we act, but do not impact in any 6 | See, for example, Rifkin (2014) and Crosby (2006).

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way. This illusion, which pervades almost all corners of western thought, has had profound consequences for our ideas about security, which are fundamentally anthropocentric and absent of ecological thought. The Holocene mind-set—that nature is self-evidently ‘out there’ and is a dutiful provider to human societies—lingers, despite physical evidence suggesting the world has moved on.7 The Holocene world is “the only state of the Earth system that we know for sure can support contemporary society” (Steffen et al 2011a: 739). Trying to break free of the Holocene world—physically, ontologically, and institutionally—is a fundamentally risky proposition, but we may not have a choice. Thus we are forced to take the defining Holocene artefacts and use them as the bootstraps we humans will have to draw upon as we endeavor to remake ourselves for a new age.

The A nthropocene In contrast to the earlier geologic periods of the Pleistocene and Holocene, the Anthropocene, as we have seen, inverts the view of humans as passive bystanders who take advantage of, respond to, but do not shape Earth systems. The cumulative actions of humans, this relatively young species, have fundamentally transformed the Earth (Steffen et al. 2007; 2011a; 2011b). From climate change to nuclear fallout to biodiversity loss to ocean acidification, the marks of the human on the Earth are indelible and permanent. They will remain long after the last of us turns out the lights (Dodds 2008). The Anthropocene coincides with an increasing awareness of systems thinking and the burgeoning literature on Earth System Science (Steffen et al. 2004). A broad consensus now exists that—taken together— human activities have injected new biophysical factors into the biosphere, modifying the physical parameters that determine the functioning of major Earth systems (Dalby 2014). The world known to us through climatic history is over. We have left the interglacial state of the Holocene and are 7 | Even John Stuart Mill, who presciently warned against the environmental costs of the unlimited, progressive growth of the economy, still felt that the role of nature was to satisfy human desires for security and happiness; see especially Book IV, Chapter VI of Mill (1885).

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

pushing the Earth into terra incognita. While climate change attracts the majority of attention, other environmental transformations are underway simultaneously that also threaten the “safe operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015a). The Earth is rapidly becoming less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, wetter, and stormier (Steffen et al. 2007). As Steffen et al. (2015b: 12) observe: The atmospheric concentrations of the three greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane—are now well above the maximum observed at any time during the Holocene […]. There is no evidence of a significant decrease in stratospheric ozone anytime earlier in the Holocene. Nor is there any evidence that human impact on the marine biosphere, as measured by global tonnage of marine fish capture, has been anywhere near the late 20th-century level at any time earlier in the Holocene. The nitrogen cycle has been massively altered over the past century […]. Ocean carbonate chemistry is likely changing faster than at any other time in the last 300 million years and biodiversity loss may be approaching mass extinction rates.

Despite these remarkable developments, the term Anthropocene has generated significant debate on whether there is enough geological evidence to fully warrant declaring a shift from Holocene to Anthropocene (Autin/Holbrook 2012: 60-61; Fahrenkam-Uppenbrink 2015: 87-88).8 The International Commission on Stratigraphy, established an Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) that looked for ‘golden spikes’ in the geological record that could lead to an official declaration of the Anthropocene as a distinct geological epoch. In mid-2016 the AWG concluded that stratigraphic ‘signatures’ that were either entirely novel or outside of the normal variable ranges for the Holocene period had been identified. These signatures convincingly bore the mark of human action and it seemed as though they were accelerating. They wrote: The driving human forces responsible for many of the anthropogenic signatures are a product of the three linked force multipliers: accelerated technological development, rapid growth of the human population, and increased consumption 8 | Part of the debate revolves around whether it is possible to find the ‘golden spike’—the physical evidence buried in rocks and sediment that demonstrate a major change in the earth system—required for the naming of a new geologic age.

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of resources. These have combined to result in increased use of metals and minerals, fossil fuels, and agricultural fertilizers and increased transformation of land and nearshore marine ecosystems for human use. The net effect has been a loss of natural biomes to agriculture, cities, roads, and other human constructs and the replacement of wild animals and plants by domesticated species to meet growing demands for food. This increase in consumption of natural resources is closely linked to the growth of the human population. (Waters et al. 2016: 1)

Unsurprisingly the process and debate over declaring the Anthropocene has grown highly politicized. There is a technical difficulty in accurately finding geological markers and stratigraphers do not take amendments to the Geological Time Scale lightly. It took over 50 years for the Geological Congress to settle on the Holocene (Chakrabarty 2009: 210). Besides that, the search for the Anthropocene reflects deeply political questions about who is responsible for its emergence and what type of human impact should be considered the most profound. Many thoughtful commentaries have argued that the term Anthropocene, by implicating ‘humanity’ as a singular force of nature, masks deep divisions and inequalities of sex, race, geography, and class. The Anthropocene was not created equally; it was made by a specific subset of humans, namely those on the frontlines of modernization: white, wealthy, males of European heritage. For these reasons, a variety of new labels have been proposed as a way to more accurately reflect the specific characteristics of the human age, including “the Capitalocene” (Moore 2015; Haraway 2015), the “Eurocene” (Grove 2015), the “Technocene” (Hornborg 2015), the “Anthrobscene” (Parikka 2015), the “Oliganthropocene” (Gemenne 2015), the “Manthropocene” (Raworth 2015). Each of these terms carries different implicit diagnoses and thus compels different sets of responses (Baskin 2015). Beyond the question of who is responsible, the social and geological critiques of the Anthropocene have become enmeshed in the significant debate on when it started. Most studies emphasize one of three markers for the starting date: 1) the earliest detectable human impacts; 2) the earliest widespread impacts; and 3) historic events such as the Industrial Revolution or the mid-20th century’s ‘Great Acceleration’.9 However, in 9 | The Great Acceleration’ is the neologism (intentionally echoing Karl Polyani’s ‘Great Transformation’) coined by Will Steffen and others (2015b), which emerged out of their efforts to build a more systematic picture of the human-driven

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

2015, the climate scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin published an article in Nature that rejected those proposals on the basis that they are not derived from a globally synchronous marker. Cumulatively the markers certainly affect the Earth system, but none of those options represent a singular marker in the global geological record (on an annual/decadal scale) (Lewis/Maslin 2015). Indeed, the first two options equate the existence of humans with the Anthropocene—humanity has remade the Earth simply by being human. This drains the term of its political potential. It belies the fact that Crutzen created the term as a way to highlight the damaging choices that humans have made to get us to this point. Lewis and Maslin settle on two main contenders for the Anthropocene starting date. Both reflect global political processes. The first option is found in the impacts from the Great Acceleration, which refers in geological terms to the unprecedented and major expansions in human populations, together with the creation of new, long-lasting materials from minerals to plastics to persistent organic pollutants and inorganic compounds (Lewis/Maslin 2015: 176).10 One of the principle event horizon markers for the ‘Great Acceleration’ is the global fallout from nuclear bomb tests. These tests began in 1945 and steadily increased through atmospheric testing in the 1950s and early 1960s, until the partial test ban treaty came into effect in 1963. Since then, nuclear tests have fallen precipitously. Based on measurements of radionuclide fallout captured by tree rings and glacier ice, 1964 has been identified as being the peak year of radioactivity and thus has been proposed as the year the Anthropocene began. Even though radiocarbon has a relatively short (in geological terms) half-life of 5730 years, the mark of humans upon the sediment changes to the Earth system. As they mapped the imprints of human enterprise they realized that from about 1950 onwards, human effects upon the earth have reached a speed and volume unprecedented in the history of humankind. The Great Acceleration encompasses near-synchronous stratigraphic markers including not just radionuclides, but aluminum metal, fly ash particles, persistent organic pollutants, a variety of biological indicators, and the proliferation of plastic (Zalasiewicz et al. 2016). 10 | The AWG, which holds a measure of authority given its role in convincing the official International Commission on Stratigraphy to formally declare the Anthropocene, has also concluded that the mid-twentieth century (somewhere between 1945-1964) should be designated as the start date.

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of the earth will remain for many, many generations. So too, the AWG has determined that the mid-20th century should mark the onset of the Anthropocene, but based upon the rise in consumption patterns and industrialization, the proliferation of new anthropogenic materials appearing in sediments (including plastics, and concrete), and the spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel consumption (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). The second option, and ultimately the one Lewis and Maslin settle on, is the 1610 ‘Orbis Spike’, which reflects the low point in a decades long dip in atmospheric CO2 , caused by the death of upwards of 61 million people in the Americas from colonial violence and disease brought upon Indigenous inhabitants. The annihilation of the Indigenous population caused a significant decline in farming and other human activities that reduced pre-industrial CO2 levels to their lowest in 2000 years. This global event also contains within it other auxiliary markers. It represents the emergence of the first global trading network, which connected Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and allowed for the mixing of biota, known as the Colombian exchange. The globalization of foodstuffs, including corn, maize, livestock, and wheat, as well as the accidental mixing of other foreign, non-invasive/invasive species of flora and fauna radically reorganized life on Earth without geological precedent (Lewis/ Maslin 2015: 174). In this radical reading, the Anthropocene emerges with the discovery of the New World. It therefore implicates genocide and colonial violence as a physical stamp on and beneath the face of the earth. As the authors write: The Orbis spike implies that colonialism, global trade and coal brought about the Anthropocene. Broadly, this highlights social concerns, particularly the unequal power relationships between different groups of people, economic growth, the impacts of globalized trade, and our current reliance on fossil fuels. (Ibid: 177)

Indeed, both events—the Orbis hypothesis and the zenith of nuclear testing—represent the capacity of humans to enact violence, war, and destruction. Both are perhaps examples of humans simply being “rapacious primates” (Gray 2002), deeply enmeshed with social and material actants. In this reading, the Anthropocene entangles political, economic, cultural, technological and material processes, bridging oft-

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

divided critical discourses of social science and humanities with the natural sciences. Given these and other reasons, it is discomforting, to put it mildly, that the disciplines of international relations and criminology maintain their silence on the Anthropocene. This marginalizes these security disciplines at a time of growing fascination with the Anthropocene as both a popular concept and a scientific concept. Hundreds of articles are written per year on the Anthropocene, from a diverse range of disciplines. It has generated enough publicity and rigorous debate to become something even more than a buzzword; it can now be seen as a true signifier. The performative act of declaring the Anthropocene works to instill or reinforce new understandings of the interactions between humans and the Earth system. While the idea that humans and nature interact is not new, there is something different about the Anthropocene; it ushers in, and reflects, a realization that the dynamic scale and impact of human activities is world-making. While the idea of humans making worlds has long been recognized within the social sciences, the worlds being made have never included the planet itself—this has always been conceived of as immune. The effects of this expansion of world-making are profound; both in terms of the physical earth changes and in terms of the deep philosophical challenges that are raised in a world where distinctions between humans and things are not simply being blurred, but erased. And in this new world, states of normalcy and exception are increasingly indistinguishable. This has enormous consequences for our perceptions of security.

S ecurit y in the A nthropocene Despite significant advancements in well-being, this is an age of profound crisis, not triumph. One need only ask a resident of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, or the town of Kivalina, Alaska, whose communities will soon be swallowed by rising seas, about the risks that accompany the technical ability of humans to appropriate the benefits of nature—risks that, as Ulrich Beck (1992) has argued, we have created, but are outstripping our ability to resolve. These communities are one of the many casualties of carbon.

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Ours is, and will be, a perilous age. We are going to live for some time in this age that we have done so much to make. How might we live? There is much evidence at present to suggest that we will simply continue down the track of carelessness that has gotten us to where we are. For many this is inevitable for both genetic and institutional reasons and thus cause for mourning—a “requiem for a species” according to Clive Hamilton (2010). We are locked into who we are and have become. Our safe spaces are gone, never to return. Instead of learning to live, we must “learn how to die” (Scranton 2015). For others, particularly the optimists of the ‘eco-modernist’ movement, our present age, while perilous, is also an age of opportunity that we can grasp. Our aptitudes for innovation and technology can lead us to co-design a new world that transcends the nature/culture divide. Humans have a historical propensity for resilience and adaptation in the face of adversity. Today and into the future we should ramp up the use of nanotechnology and geoengineering to craft a ‘good Anthropocene’ (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). Lying between these stances is a position that accepts what is, what our Holocene sensibility of sustained carelessness has produced, and then seeks to construct a sensibility, out of which action flows (Shearing/ Ericson 1991) that is appropriate for Anthropocene security—an ethos of care. Its premise is simply that, whether as a species our security is won or lost, or whether as a species we live or die, we have an opportunity to act collectively and virtuously as co-inhabitants of the Anthropocene. Discovering what it means to be co-inhabitants of the Anthropocene is the challenge that Bruno Latour invites us to take when he advocates that we must learn to “love our monsters” and “care for our technologies as we do our children” (Latour 2011a) Fortunately, these are bootstraps upon which we can pull. We know much about how to care and we have done so in many ways. But can we construct visions of care that become part of new logics of security for the Anthropocene? Can we extend caring relations to others beside humans? Perhaps most importantly, can we do so in time? For Rif kin (2009), the question is how might we extend empathy so as to create a “global consciousness” that is as pervasive, and as embedded, as the consciousness of carelessness that has pervaded the Holocene. It is to these possibilities of care and carefulness that this book turns. The book follows a general trajectory that reexamines humans, nature, and security in light of the Anthropocene age. The next chapter, “More-

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

Than-Human Worlds” argues that one of the primary ways that we move security out of the Holocene is through a prolonged investigation of the anthropos in security, both as subject and object. It is clear that our ideas of security have been overwhelmingly anthropocentric, which is to be expected. All the (dis)orders of security (critical, traditional, postcolonial, etc) have been built upon ontological conceptions of the human individual. By creating order through a demarcated inside and outside, security studies have relied upon and perpetuated the dualist understanding that sets humans apart from other species, nature, and each other (Cudworth/Hobden 2011). As the chapter will show, viewing humans as intrinsically linked (though not bound) to other modes of being, including organisms, animals, machines, feedback systems, etc, can open up a new understanding of power, sovereignty, responsibility and harm, as well as new, immanent possibilities for action. Chapter three, “Postnatural Security” begins with the question: what is natural in security? Or, how are ‘nature’ and the ‘planet’ conceived of and used within security disciplines as well as by states and other international actors? We argue that traditional security studies and policies have relied upon an understanding of the natural environment that confirms and abides a homogenous vision of security, whereby the state is the referent object of protection, and the natural environment therefore exists to be managed, controlled, exploited, and preserved at the behest of perceived national and community interests. Conversely it argues that conceptions of the Earth, and nature have conditioned security practice itself—from depictions of natural resource abundance, to control of water, to the natural physical barriers to invasion accorded to some states. In Chapter four, “The Horizon of Holocene Security” we ask: without a coherent conception of nature or the human, what does security mean in the Anthropocene? This chapter tries to answer this by showing how, despite the end of the Cartesian dualism inherent to Holocene security, security remains an absolutely central principle in our lives. However, we argue that the Schmittian-inspired politics of the exception, upon which securitization theory rests, are increasingly challenged by shifts in the Earth system that point toward a future where ecological exception becomes the norm. The effects of this may be for an increase in statelevel securitizations of environmental issues. Or, it may also present new opportunities for theoretical developments and policy-oriented action that considers the normative implications of ecological exception within

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security and challenge nonhuman understandings of security. That is, the growing awareness of complex system-level linkages may help avoid the dualistic logic of securitization where politics exists as either ‘normal’ or ‘exceptional’, actors are either ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’, and life is either ‘secure’ or ‘insecure’. Chapter five, “Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene,” begins by asking: what kind of security should we have in the Anthropocene? We quickly conclude that we cannot offer a blueprint or a political plan of action for righting the ship. The Anthropocene does not allow it. So with what are we left? Nihilism? Despair? Perhaps these have always been quintessential buzzwords of security but they will not get us very far. We instead propose that to live and die in the Anthropocene requires us to probe an abstract and transcendent ethos of security based on the notion of care. Care compels us to act responsibly in relation to others, without relying upon restricted forms of global justice or moral cosmopolitanism that are troubled by Anthropocene logics. Care represents a promising, if also problematic, approach to security in the Anthropocene, the age of ‘shared threat’. It will not save us necessarily (perhaps we are irredeemable) but it can show us that that there exist possibilities of response in a troubled time. Our last chapter, fittingly titled “Conclusions” offers a summary of our positions and puts forth a defense against anticipated criticisms. We finish by briefly outlining potential new directions for further research. If we reduce security to its purest form—the reduction of harm—or what Jeremy Waldron (2010: 117) refers to as the “pure safety question”, then the Anthropocene concept presents some real problems. The scale and scope of global environmental change forces us to confront a torrent of interlinked insecurities with causes that are too complex and emergent to fully comprehend, coming from sources that are at once nonhuman and distinctly human-led. Likewise, these insecurities are temporally distant, cross-species, and often locked in. Even when security is understood outside of its ideal form, whether through traditional or critical approaches, we are still left with hegemonic discourses that are infused with anthropocentrism and linear forms of causality. Security in the Anthropocene offers no promises. It exists neither as protection nor prevention. The realities of the Anthropocene signal to us the urgent need to research and theorize new, diverse understandings of security that can help us cope with expanded forms of existential risk. Sometimes too we

Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene

need to marry these new approaches with very old ways of understanding the world that have, for various reasons, been suppressed. The chapters that follow should be read as necessary provocations for an age that defies easy classification yet demands that we look directly upon it; that we return its gaze.

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Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds “Here is a human being; it’s me!” (Gilbert 1992: 96) “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” (Foucault 1966 [2002]: 422) “What would be a good name? ‘Post-human’ will not do, but why not using [sic] that word that sciencefiction writers have used all along, yes that of Earthlings?” (Latour 2010: 75)

I ntroduction How do we move security out of the Holocene? A first step must be to examine the conception of the human—the ground floor of all security architecture—within security studies. Security in almost all of its forms comes down to protecting and preserving human communities against real or perceived threats. For both criminology and international relations to speak of security absent the human subject has been nonsensical. We can, of course, point to the insecurity of nonhumans like the African Black Rhino, which is threatened with extinction. We can refer to the security of nonliving entities such as ‘cyber security’, ‘water security’, or ‘climate security’. Yet, these are all placed within a human context, encompassing their needs, wants, and causes. The history of criminological theory has always been a history of shifting conceptions of human motivations. Criminologists will look to the insecurity of rhinos insofar as it involves the domestic and transnational criminal challenges of human poaching efforts (Warchol 2004). International relations theory tries to make sense of the rationalities and practices that create international society and the

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humans who exist within it. International relations scholars consider water security a global risk because of its potential to spark violent conflict or ‘water wars’ between states (Gleick 1993; Harrington 2015). There seems to be little interest in actively deciphering the concept of the human, or conversely, the role of the nonhuman in security. This is important because the qualities, capacities, and coherence of the human subject are increasingly discredited through historic, social, and scientific analysis (Frost 2016). And yet, ask a security professional to consider what it means to be human, or how answers to this question have shaped security studies, and you are likely to be met with a blank and unimpressed stare. To ask about the human is to ask about a conception so deeply embedded in the psyches of criminology and international relations that posing the question almost makes no sense. Kant may have called it “the most fundamental question in philosophy” (Wood 2007: 38) but figuring out how to classify, characterize, and assess the human is generally seen as a luxury for idle minds. Better to get on with the pressing questions of crime and geopolitical security than to waste time on such an absurd question. Security is concerned with reducing human vulnerabilities, and protecting human communities, problems that are vexing enough without the added complexity of rethinking the initial subject. We know who the human is: in Gilbert’s words (Gilbert 1992: 96), cited at the outset of this chapter— “it’s me!” And who am I? A thinking, acting, discrete, self who inhabits a body that acts as a kind of ‘space suit’ that enables my existence on this Earth. Most theories of security are premised upon basic conceptions of the autonomous human being—conceptions about who we are and how we act—with little attention paid to the diverse assemblages of things, matter, and nonhuman life that make up the individual subject in the first place. Returning us to the starting point of security—the human—may be an arduous, and not entirely welcome task. But, as Latour argues, “the human […] cannot be grasped and saved unless that other part of itself, the share of things, is restored to it.” (Latour 1993: 136). Like our forebears have done before us, many of us expect (the details vary a little from worldview to worldview) that after some ‘three score years and ten’ that we will move on to some other realm of existence. We live on rather than in the earth or as a part of the earth. We have viewed ourselves as separate from nature. We have assumed that, as ‘insignificant beings’

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

our doings do not affect the Earth system.1 We are so small, and the Earth is so big, that what we do does not matter (Shearing 2015). This has meant that we have not seen ourselves as responsible for the security provided to humans by the Earth system—Rockström et al.’s (2009: 472) “safe operating space”. Whatever security the Earth provides (and sometimes imperils), it has nothing to do with us. This is God’s, or Gaia’s, work, not ours. Unsurprisingly this means that security studies have paid very little attention to the planetary boundaries associated with this operating space. This chapter begins the process of thinking through the so-called ‘first image’ of security: the human. The prevailing common sense that political will and agency derive solely from human beings has constituted the foundation upon which security studies has been built. As such, our practices of security emanate from innate assumptions about humanness—what it is, who holds it, and where it ends. Even the most basic assumption about what security is—a state of safety, derived from the preservation of the self from harm—is predicated upon a belief in the material and ontological constitution of the human being. Out of this the politics and practices of security are built, analyzed, and revised. The Anthropocene teaches us however not simply about a radical otherness that lurks beneath, above, around, and within us. It teaches us about a radical togetherness. As this chapter articulates, it is not simply that the Anthropocene is a unique geological age in which other beings, things, and processes are now to be included in security studies, though that is certainly true. Rather, one of its greatest challenges to our way of thinking is that the human must now be included in virtually everything. The human is in the climate, the soil, the rivers, the extinctions and the thrivings. On and on, we are everywhere. Yet, we are not who we think we are. We have never been human (Haraway 2008). The implications for understanding security are great. Indeed, our security is so often defined by, and dependent upon components—the animals, microbes, technologies and objects—that surround everyday human life. Recent advances in the biophysical sciences, together with a wave of new environmental philosophy and humanities work have fundamentally challenged conventional and settled ideas of rational, autonomous human individuals. We are embroiled, not separated from the diverse worlds of existence. In this sense we are 1 | See, for example, White (1967).

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entering what has been termed a “posthuman age,” an age in which we are beginning to recognize ourselves as simply “Earthlings”. As Earthlings we are not separated from the so-called nonhuman, but are assemblages of human and nonhuman forces—for example, the trillions of microbes that exist within our guts and on our skin—and engaged with other things, that like us, make up the Earth and its systems. The Anthropocene obliges us to accept not simply the status of humans as geological agents, but as entangled agents. This reimagining explodes the western, Cartesian belief in dualism, whereby minds and bodies are separated along with the spiritual and the material, humans and nature: the inside/outside divides that have been so central to security studies.2 This dualism is justified principally via a belief in radically separated reason, which allows for humans to appear different, outside and above an inferiorized and manipulable nature (Plumwood 2002). The effects of this dualism are to present humans as rational, acting, agents fulfilling their desires in a passive, intentional, global environment. The metaphysical poverty of these ‘Cartesian coordinates’ has been highlighted for decades in security studies, particularly within international relations. These critiques have been presented primarily in terms of the breakdown of the Westphalian system and the exploration of alternative political identities beyond the state—such as nations, races, classes, movements, religions, cultures, or genders (Walker 1993). The Anthropocene further breaks down the divide between inside and outside, not simply in terms of political identity, but by emphasizing the ways that nonhuman species, technologies, and natures interact with global security. In an ironic twist, the ‘Human Age’ obliges us to confront the affective power of nonhuman things in the world. It challenges security studies to engage Jane Bennett’s question, […] what would happen to our thinking about politics if we took more seriously the idea that technological and natural materialities were themselves actors alongside and within us—were vitalities, trajectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings intentions, or symbolic values humans invest in them? (Bennett 2010: 47)

2 | The dissolution of the inside/outside dichotomy in security is further explored in Chapter four of this book.

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

Food, water, and other ‘natural’ resources like oil, can no longer be conceived of simply as materials separate from humans, to be used and fought for. Their materiality takes many diverse forms, enlivened via an array of discursive moves, technological development and social relations. Take for instance the infrastructure that develops and transports such resources for use by humans (eg, dams, pumps, drills, sanitation plants, taps etc) and how it interacts with social relations (themselves historically, culturally, economically, environmentally co-determined) to produce environmental concepts and paradigms (eg, abundant, safe water for humans and their industries) that are deemed universal and natural. The relationships between humans, things, and the Earth are therefore powerful enough—indeed are necessary—for the functioning of security. To simply consider the Earth as a background canvas upon which local and global conflicts between humans are played out is no longer feasible. As this chapter argues, viewing humans as intrinsically linked (though not bound) to other modes of being, including microbes, technology, animals, feedback systems, etc, challenges certain fundamental precepts of security, including the roles of human nature and individual agency. The so-called “posthuman” perspective challenges us to see humans as intrinsically linked to other modes of being and exposes us to the varied webs of dependence—what Anna Tsing (2012) terms “unruly edges” that require, indeed compels, new understandings of responsibility and harm. What it does not do, is tell us just what these new understandings should be. This is a challenge that the Anthropocene invites security studies to consider.

L ine ages This background image of humans as fully social beings who exist outside of the Earth and its systems has formed the backdrop against which established conceptions of security have emerged. At the heart of these conceptions has been the issue of just how to conceive of this idea of humans as somehow ‘on’ but ‘apart from’ Earth. This sleight of hand, as we have already suggested, has been managed by first establishing the idea of humans as bifurcated entities—part biophysical and part social (and spiritual)—and then finding a way of relating these parts. How this has been accomplished—largely through appeals to fundamental ‘human

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nature’—has shaped both criminology and international relations. These assumptions about ‘human nature’ have served in both these disciplines as a “full stop at the end of a line of explanation” (Herborth 2015: 236). For both contemporary and historical figures of security scholarship the solution to the dilemma of understanding humans as part biophysical and part social has been to make foundational, explanatory claims of human nature and to relate it to the structural elements (environments) that inhibit or compel action. One such exposition that has lingered remarkably long has been the thinking of Greek scholars such as Thucydides, who in his The History of the Peloponnesian War, defended the Athenian pursuit of an aggressive, power-based foreign policy on the grounds that it followed logically from the bifurcated character of human nature. In Thucydides’ account, which sets the stage for both Machiavelli and Hobbes, biological human nature constitutes foundational reality. As a precursor to Hobbes’ “state of nature” that humans cannot escape but are required to transcend is a cluster of biophysical motivations, primarily fear, honor and interest (Thucydides/Crawley 2012: 109-110). Within this understanding the weaker is always subject to the stronger. All attempts to overcome this are doomed to failure. Tragedy is inevitable. No one—be it the (hu)man or nation-state—who finds themself in a position of strength will choose to build relations of equality. The weaker is always subject to the stronger. Such is natural law. The ordered, stable, fatalism of early realism has since been echoed by scores of political philosophers useful for both international relations and criminology. The central quest of criminology, associated with Durkheim, has been to understand the conditions under which humans have, and might, transcend their biophysical nature, and its sad consequences, and emerge as fully social beings. For Machiavelli, often used (rather onedimensionally) as a father figure of the cold, brutal world of international politics, secure political orders are built in response to the natural human qualities of selfish individualism, deception, and a fear for one’s personal security. His political advice in advance of a secular notion of security derived principally from the belief that human nature is by default wicked. In one of the most oft-cited passages in all of international relation Machiavelli writes: A man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity. (Machiavelli/Bondanella 2005: 53)

This dim image of human nature has since become a cultural figure in the broad western world. Any immoral or amoral action taken to consolidate or increase individual power and prestige is justified as ‘Machiavellian’. The realism of today is built upon the Machiavellian appeal to void politics of ethical idealism, which will lead to individual and societal ruin. This foundation comes from an abstracted (one might say idealized) vision of human nature and behavior that can be scientifically observed. A reasoned view of human nature therefore takes the place of human intuition as the source of morality. Within both criminology and international relations perhaps the key figure in both establishing the bifurcated conception of the human (and relating its elements) has been Hobbes, who like Machiavelli and Thucydides before him, seeks to fully ground human nature in a biophysical existence, but adopts a much more optimistic stance with respect to the possibilities of social transcendence. From all we can learn from Thucydides and Machiavelli, the interrelationship between our contemporary ideas about human nature and security comes primarily from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (Vincent 1981). Whereas Machiavelli instructed rulers and therefore expressed situational notions of necessity in decision-making, Hobbes emphasized the structural components of security that derive from the human capacity for reason. Instead of the pursuit of greatness and the need to satisfy glory for a few powerful men, Hobbes concentrated on structure and the natural condition of humankind, felt by both ruler and ruled alike. For Hobbes, the possibility of transcending the rapaciousness that humans inherit from their biophysical origins and creating a more humane society, comes through the establishment of a sovereign authority (the Leviathan), with the will and capacity to reign in humans’ biophysical nature. Hobbes claims that “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.” (Hobbes/Gaskin 1998: 84). We always exist on the precipice of this barbarity. The desire of humans to use reason to voluntarily restrain their own violent nature is what enables the move from perpetual war to peace. The Leviathan allows them to escape their biophysical bondage and become

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fully social beings who, while they remain rooted in a biophysical reality, are able to free themselves from the limitations of the body, limitations that bring to them nothing but grief. This quest to free humans from the Earth, from their biophysical reality continues to be central to security studies. Within criminology this quest is clearly seen in its key concept, ‘crime’. Crimes are acts (harms) that undermine a Leviathan-led order, and in doing so threaten to unleash the destructive potential of humans’ biophysical foundations—the part of the bifurcated human that must be transcended. These harms, inherent to the human way of life, can be mitigated through awe of the sovereign and the power of his sword. As with criminology, within international relations this dim image of human biophysical nature constitutes a firmly established and deeply embedded cultural backdrop. The anarchical state of nature inherent to the international sphere can only mean the ever-present potential for war, which is assuaged primarily through contractual obligations. Hobbes relies upon the perpetual fear running through nature to define security as “the end wherefore men submit themselves to others.” (Hobbes/Warrender 1983: 93). Security gives rise to the social contract. However, he stands in opposition to a realism that sees humans as inescapably captured by a biophysical reality reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (In Memoriam A.H.H. LVI 15). Hobbes’ optimism was founded upon the western Enlightenment belief in the evolutionary power of humans to employ reason to solve our problems and create peaceful relations: He writes in Chapter V of Leviathan (Hobbes/ Gaskin 1998: 32, emphasis in the original), “reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end.” Humans are capable of using reason to master and control the laws and causal forces of nature. Because we belong to the natural order, it becomes possible to transpose this control onto social relations. There is no difference between the law of nations and the law of nature. It all rests upon a thoroughly Holocene conception of the human, distinct from the rest of Earth and other life-forms.3 The human being is perceived as a universal, singular, and rational subject, whose actions are 3 | It is noted that the ‘Holocene conception of the human’ can be equally read as a strictly ‘western’ or ‘European’ idea of the human relationship to the world. Alternative views of the human-nature relationship of course abound, particularly outside the western canon.

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driven by instrumental passions. For Hobbes and most enlightenmentbred philosophers those passions are fear, greed, and pride, which can be encapsulated within the sole pursuit of all humankind: self-interest. From self-interest, everything else derives (Gauthier 2011). As humans are the only terrestrial being endowed with the potential for rationality, free choice exists alongside biological determinism. Human beings can determine their own ends. Our capacity for reason can create the conditions that allow for the pursuit of freedom, security, or domination.

The re turn of the G re at M an Most contemporary studies of security ignore deeper ontological questions about the human subject. Those that have chosen to focus on how the human comprises a subject of security have done so in two distinct ways. In the first instance, there has been a renewed focus on ‘first image’ of politics: the powerful individual who influences and directs the course of history. The second way that the human has been injected into dominant trends of contemporary security studies has been the development of ‘human security’. The so-called first image of international politics was reserved for human beings, in particular the leaders and citizens who could generate or direct the anarchic forces of the security sector. This perspective, long held by the progenitors of western-led security studies, such as Rousseau and Machiavelli, focused on the individual traits of leaders in resolving or fomenting insecurity. This focus was in contrast to the other two levels of international relations, the nation-state, and the anarchic system of states itself. The level-of-analysis debate that emerged in international relations in the 1950s and 1960s, and the agent-structure debate that followed in the 1980s (and still relevant today) never truly established the individual human subject for the study of security. The overall impact of the individual was overlooked by the discussions on the role/impact of states, the anarchic international system, domestic politics, or institutional dynamics. These powerful impersonal forces are assumed to drive the course of security, above the messy, often unaccountable effects of human behavior. If individual human agents were assumed to wield vast influence over the course of history, it would become almost impossible to construct generalizations and theories of security. As a result, major events and

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developments such as war, diplomacy, or the breakdown of social order are said to be the result of a confluence of structural factors, of which individual human agency is said to account for only a small proportion. Recent calls have been made to move the individual human subject back to a place of analytical prominence (Byman/Pollack 2001). Here, the human is brought into discussions of security largely in terms of the outsized influence of powerful individuals, their specific personality traits and the proclivities for conflict or cooperation. Such exhortations are meant to center the powerful agential role that individual humans may have in shaping security organization, events and outcomes. One may easily speculate that history would be very different if Hitler, Mao, or Gandhi were never born or if circumstances in their lives broke a different way. Likewise, individual personalities have the power to shape structural forces such as our perception of the balance of power or create a particular bureaucratic character. Most studies of the human in security therefore have emphasized the ways in which modern societies are the product of individuals acting through a combination of power, prestige, and personality. This pivot towards the human subject is principally focused on emphasizing the “Great Man” theory of history, whereby highly influential statesmen possess the necessary virtues of honor, intelligence, prudence, and cunning to achieve extraordinary things. According to this view, the human is indeed valuable to understanding security, but only insofar as that human is viewed as an atomized individual who possesses a combination of virtuous characteristics and occupies a prominent position of authority. In this respect, the return of the human to global politics has been limited to highly masculinized studies on the role of decisionmakers, leaders, or dictators (and their personalities) in preventing or fomenting international conflict. Correspondingly, recent studies have examined the human subject in the context of evolving nuclear logics and diplomacy, revolutions, and regime change (Colgan/Weeks 2015; Saunders 2009; Hafner-Burton et al. 2014; Ziv 2015; Weeks 2012). The second prominent absorption of the human subject into contemporary security comes from the development of the ‘human security’ paradigm. Though many of its key ideas have a longer intellectual history, human security was first systematically addressed by the United Nations in its 1994 Human Development Report. Since then it has famously been expounded in policy circles through the work of,

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

among others, former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, who tied it to an interventionist foreign policy based on the ‘responsibility to protect’. Broadly conceived, human security “puts people first and recognizes that their safety is integral to the promotion and maintenance of international peace and security” (Axworthy 2001: 20). The concept of human security shifts the traditional referent object of security from the state to the human. The normative argument is that there are ethical and strategic responsibilities to reorient security around the individual. It emphasizes the crucial role that internationally recognized standards of human rights and governance have on promoting security (Newman 2010: 78). Though it is explicit in its desire to both deepen and broaden the scope of security, it remains tethered to traditional security goals, such as the maintenance of international stability and the primary roles of nationstates in guaranteeing (or subverting) those goals. As is always the case with novel approaches to security, human security has been heavily criticized. It has evolved into an expansive and indistinct term, prescribing everything from physical integrity to emancipation. Because of this analytical vagueness, many question whether it is at all useful. As Roland Paris (2001: 88) remarks: “Human security is like ‘sustainable development’—everyone is for it, but few people have a clear idea of what it means.” Others critique it for its weakness as a policy guide. It also holds potentially adverse effects, including the perpetuation of neocolonial interventions or its potential misuse as a convenient talking-point and engendering false hopes amongst vulnerable human populations. It is telling that Paris’ critique of human security as “hot air” is subsequently the most cited article on the subject. Both approaches—the return to the first image of the human and the development of human security—are meant to highlight the abstractions, shortcomings and contradictions of state-centric theories by grounding security in anthropocentric terms. Though crucial differences abound between the two human-centered approaches to security, they both work to repackage familiar stories of global security. They both remain within the procrustean bed of the nature-social dichotomy rather than move beyond it. None of these developments challenge, or indeed even raise, the profound consequences that these understandings of humans and their security have had in shaping their status as geological actors. When the human subject has arisen as a topic of consideration in security studies, it has almost always been reduced to stories of human

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exceptionalism and biological essentialism or as powerless agents to structural constraints.4 Yet, ideas about the human being are found throughout all security theories (Aalto 2011). In most cases the Cartesian distinction between a self-knowable, human mind and a world governed by strict mechanical laws is upheld (Roden 2015: 10). Human nature may be displayed differently according to the intricacies of local cultures, but its fundamental biological characteristics remain unchanged. The Holocene security stories—on the tragedy of politics, on democratic peace, on the responsibility to protect, on nuclear deterrence strategies—have been upheld by appeals to logic, reason, or cognitive science (Cohen-Cole 2014). They are replete with fundamental assumptions about the human domestication of the world and have been used as props to advance and secure national, racial, and gendered interests. In such tellings, the human shapes the world—from molecule to ecosystem—but does not shift in the wake of nonliving technologies, or living organisms, including plants, animals, or microbes. The process is radically unidirectional. Mainstream approaches to the subject of security, including classical realist positions and structuralist approaches have relied upon fixed, rigid visions of the human agent. Even most constructivist and critical theories of security—while seemingly offering critiques of determinism (eg, human nature, anarchy)—have failed to question the basic ontological borders of humanness. While security theories may differ in terms of the value and character of something called ‘human nature’ and the impact of the human within a social world of anarchy, they repeat the useful fictions of a concretized human agent standing outside the webs of interrelationships that characterize life on Earth. It must be noted that various feminist, queer, and postcolonial texts have long contributed important insights into how human bodies and subjectivities make certain security logics possible and impossible. In Queer International Relations, Cynthia Weber argues: Through modern statecraft as modern mancraft, a modern state (or other political community) attempts to present its sovereign foundation—its phantastical yet presumed-to-be-factual ‘sovereign man’– as if it were the singular, preexisting, 4 | It is for this reason that Daniel Jacobi and Annette Freyberg-Inan’s recent edited volume (2015) is so refreshing, though it too fails to probe in detail the posthuman turn.

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

ahistorical ground that authorizes all sovereign decisions in its political community. Yet ‘modern man’ as ‘sovereign man’ is neither singular nor ahistorical; he is impossibly plural and as much a product of specific histories as the queer subjectivities queer studies scholars investigate. (Weber 2016: 4)

These approaches generally critique the foundational security logics that comprise the modern world, which are focused on binaries of either/ or, friend/enemy, normal/perverse. For those planted in this tradition, important questions need to be asked how gender, race, and sexuality impact our dominant conceptions of who or what is reliably human, and who can be deemed normal and thus knowable. As future chapters will show the Anthropocene similarly provokes us to demystify and contest the binary logics that comprise security. However, whereas the above approaches center the image of the reliably human, our interjection is to view and extend care to “an increasingly fuller world where co-existence with non-humans is a condition not a choice” (Blaser 2014: 55).

P osthuman securit y Our understandings of security clearly rest upon the convenient assumptions about human beings: their self-evidence and self-worth. Traditional security logics hold as self-evident that humans are physically distinct and separate from other species and natures that inhabit the Earth. They are also built upon the belief that humans possess innate moral qualities above and beyond other species and the systems in which they thrive. Humans are superior to all other matter, including the whole Earth. In spite of this, traditional logics of security exhibit a core tension with these understandings because they also hold the belief that humans exhibit fixed qualities of all evolved life: namely that existence can be distilled to a quest for survival and the pursuit of self-defense against real and perceived threats to life. Human beings are superior to ‘outside’ life, yet cannot escape the fixed, natural chaos of life in pursuit of security and survival. As we have argued, this strange tension is buoyed by a consistent disinterest in the parameters of the human subject in security, leading to the dominance of peculiarly western versions of ‘Man’. Maybe some of this can be explained via a caveat: acknowledging the biological and

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ontological borders of the human requires some challenging forays into disciplines far removed from security studies. Indeed, any attempt to answer the fundamental question of all philosophy—“Who are we?”—is bound for failure. Only glimpses abound. For this reason it is necessary to acknowledge that is often unhelpful to ‘translate’ wholesale concepts, theories, and data derived from scientific practice into security studies, at least without adequate levels of reflection and corroboration. There is always a risk that translating complex ideas from the hard sciences will be done poorly, in haste, or without the proper training to make full sense of the conclusions. Andrew Barry (2013: 415) points out that “translation is a process of replication or imitation and differentiation at the same time.” Translating ideas from one discipline to another is not simply a matter of blind application, but one that contains necessary levels of distortion and modification. One must tread carefully when trying to meld foreign discourses into something intelligible for a different audience. Yet, the Anthropocene teaches us that the human world is comprised of a wide range of allies, enemies and indifferent beings—of hybrid intelligences and technologies. Likewise, the nonhuman world is rich with complexity, intelligence, creativity, and influence; ways of being that are wholly alien to dominant modes of thinking. It stands then that our conditions of (in)security are populated by these diverse beings— humans, organisms, machines, materials, planetary forces, and hybrids of all of the above (Mitchell 2016). This perspective coheres with multiple approaches within the humanities and social sciences (two increasingly problematic terms) that are being grouped under signs like “posthuman” or the “nonhuman.”5 The posthuman turn encompasses a diverse field of approaches that are united by arguments against human exceptionalism, which are expressed mostly via conceptual or rhetorical dualisms that separate the human from the nonhuman— conceived of as animals, plants, organisms, climatic systems, technologies, or ecosystems (Grusin 2015). These approaches draw individually from many different theoretical developments of the last decades of the 20th century including actornetwork theory, assemblage theory, new materialism, systems theory, neuroscience, and animal studies.

5 | There is some debate about the appropriate term to employ. We have chosen to use ‘posthuman’ to cohere with its more popular uptake in security studies.

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

That said, even the posthumanism turn is frequently reduced to western, male-dominated literature. If we are to pursue security stories that engage with Anthropocene entanglements then we also need to resist the tendency of some posthumanist texts to universalize their own claims. Zakkiyah Iman Jackson (2013) argues that they often erase the parallel, non-Western genealogies of thought that anticipated, constituted, and disrupted the posthumanist categories of analysis (cf Wynter 2003; Sundberg 2014). Her powerful critiques of posthumanism should guide us as we work through the challenges of thinking through security in the Anthropocene. Post-humanis[m] […] continues to equate humanism with Enlightenment rationality and its peculiar representation of humanity, ‘as if it were the human itself’. Is it possible that the very subjects central to posthumanist inquiry — the binarisms of human/animal, nature/culture, animate/inanimate, organic/inorganic—find their relief outside of the epistemological locus of the West? Perhaps the ‘post’ human is not a temporal location but a geographic one. (Jackson 2013: 673)

To be sure, there is a risk that these seemingly novel posthuman perspectives are guilty of appropriating non-Western philosophies, ignoring the deep contributions made to our ideas about posthumanism by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized categories of authors. By and large posthuman perspectives on security generally take two distinct perspectives. In the first instance are so-called ‘transhumanists’, who focus on physical enhancements to the human body, which includes bio-enhancements that might prolong life or that might improve human capabilities. These figures are fascinated by the science fiction dreams of ‘the singularity’—the moment when humans merge with machine.6 They speculate how the exponential growth in computing power, together with advances in artificial intelligence, nanomanufacture, and genetic manipulation, will change the nature  of humanness. According to this view, humans will either be replaced by sentient machines, or (more likely) merge their brains and bodies with such machines (Shaviro 2009: 103).

6 | Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge are two of the most influential transhumanist authors.

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The alternative reading of posthumanism, one more relevant to our study, emphasizes the evolution of Enlightenment-based ideas on subjectivity. Whereas the ‘Cartesian coordinates’ holds the human subject as self-conscious, self-regulating, and rational, the posthuman perspective emphasizes how ecological thinking disturbs what it means to be human and what it means to be secure. The human, by virtue of its intersections with Earth systems (and its inhabitants) comprise a naturalcultural world (Haraway 2003). Clearly, ecological posthumanism has profound implications for how we view and understand violence, crisis, safety, and harm. If human boundaries become blurred, so too must we trouble the security architectures of law, ethics, and norms. Rosi Braidotti, in her influential book, The Posthuman writes that […] the posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems. (Braidotti 2013: 89) 7

Moving beyond the staid versions of security built upon an edifice of detached and permanent human subjectivity requires us to ecologize agency, viewing it “distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field” (Bennett 2010: 23). We must contemplate a security ecology incorporating multiple, entangled actants, not because our security is any less human than before (though it is), but precisely because we are all a little less human than before. Thus we might appreciate how the human is being repositioned as a type of being-in-relation, strangely enmeshed with a diversity of beings, things, histories and technologies. How are we ‘less human’ than before? First, the perception of the unified human body and mind is increasingly challenged by research demonstrating just how varied, complex, connected and alien the human is. Recent microbiological research suggests that the cultivated image of the human as an autonomous creature, carefully separated from other autonomous, less intelligent living entities like animals and plants, is no longer viable. In these emerging understandings the human body itself 7 | For a useful critique of Braidotti’s posthumanism that labels it as “profoundly impractical”, see van Ingen (2016: 537).

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

is a shared creation, a joint accomplishment, made possible via multiple processes of interaction, intimate symbioses, taking place within shared ecosystems. The human body has emerged as a heterogeneous assemblage constituted by billions of cells making countless decisions as they go about their lives. We live in—to borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase—a “planet of bacteria” (Gould 2016). The human being is home to a whole community of nonhuman components. The human ‘microbiome’ refers to the complete genetic content of the trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses that reside within, provide for, and depend upon the human body. In terms of cell counts, microbes make up somewhere between 5090 per cent of the human body (Savage 1977; Yong 2016). We are, as Jane Bennett (2010: 112) puts it, “populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners.” Perhaps this should not be all that surprising considering that these foreigners (that are of course not really foreigners at all because they are who we are) ruled the Earth for 3.5 billion years before the human being ever arrived. Microbes influence our exposure to disease-causing species. They help control body weight and digest food, assist in the development of the immune systems, determine the risk of catching and resisting infectious diseases, impact the development of the brain, and may even alter behavior (Vetizou et al. 2015). The collective genomes of our microbial symbionts have also influenced human evolution, influencing or restricting the development of particular human traits.8 Our core understanding of evolution—whereby individual animals and plants vary in their phenotype and that competition at the individual level drives gradual changes in the frequency of those phenotypes—remains intact (Bordenstein/Theis 2015). But advances in perspectives and technology have allowed for a new appreciation of the influence of microbiology on evolutionary adaptations and speciation. And beyond the human body, every environment has an unseen community—the microbiome—that works to create, alter, and sustain it. Soil-bound microbes drive planetary nitrogen and carbon cycles. Oxygen is produced via ocean-based microbes. Inanimate objects that are all around us, like rocks and laptops, are teeming 8 | Elizabeth Grosz borrows terms from Charles Darwin in her posthuman work to emphasize how the space between animals and humans is one of shifting degrees rather than kind. She argues that differences are generative forces: “Every thing, every process, every event or encounter is itself a mode of becoming that has its own time, its own movements, its own force.” (Grosz 2011: 2).

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with microbial life. All planetary processes in which human beings and other animals thrive depend upon the work of the microorganisms. We cannot exist without them. They are who we are. This human-microbiome relationship causes us to rethink at a fundamental level how complex, varied, connected, and dependent the human being is. While distinctions between the human and the nonhuman have always been blurred it is only recently that we have begun to understand just how intra- and inter-connected we are.9 It is easy to lose sight of the fact that, until relatively recently, all earthly life was microbial. They have been the basis for everything that has come after. As a result, increasing amounts of research funding are being funneled towards better understanding the increasingly complex nature of the human-nonhuman relationship. Of particular note is the creation of the U.S. National Microbiome Initiative (NMI) in 2016. The NMI, which was granted $ 121 million in federal funding for 2016, has been established to advance the understanding of the microbiome in order to develop useful applications in areas as diverse as food production, health care, and environmental restoration. The diversity of projects being funded by the NMI reflects the seemingly countless ways human, plant, and animal life intersect with the unseen world of microbes. From studies on microbial links to obesity, to how microorganisms influence healthy coral reef ecosystems, the entangled mass of beings and things resists easy assumptions about the autonomy of the life on Earth (The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy 2016). Authors, like Andy Clark, argue that the coevolution of humans and technology render us as “natural-born cyborgs”. In this view, humans have always (at least since the invention of language) been enmeshed with nonhuman technologies (Clark 2003). Others like Anna Tsing (2014) question the preconceived notions of human exceptionalism with regard to nonhuman forms of sentience, intelligence, communication, and sociality. She has used the Matsutake mushroom and mushroompicking (the object and the industry) to tell a story of patchy “landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival.” (Tsing 2015: 20). These emerging research directions are actively investigating crossspecies social relationships and emphasizing the complicated and elusive 9 | Here we are indebted to Karan Barad’s term intra-action; (Barad 2007).

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

ways that humans, other animals, and plants depend upon, engage, and work with one another. As we have claimed repeatedly in this chapter, these developments that trouble our portrait of the human also trouble our understandings of security. Security can be no longer understood exclusively in terms of human-to-human engagements of war and peace. Security within the Anthropocene requires new and transformed understandings that include and engage with heretofore foreign ideas from plant neurobiology and nonhuman anthropology. These unseen and unfelt forms of social life embedded within and around the human have distinct importance for our understanding of security. Stefanie Fishel (2015) likewise argues that microbes force us to revisit foundational questions. Philosophers might again ask: what does it mean to be human? For security scholars the question may be: how do we secure such a human? Policy-makers could ask: how do we respond? Security within the Anthropocene requires recognizing and confronting messy hybridities (both big and small) that blur the borders of subject and object. It requires recognition that nothing acts alone. It requires a recognition of, what John Dupré refers to as, “promiscuous individualism,” which holds that the human organism depends upon an extended set of elements for its proper functioning and sustainability. Indeed, an appreciation of some measure of arbitrariness in drawing boundaries is an important first step in comprehending what security means in the Anthropocene. For Dupré (2012: 241) the blurring of the boundaries between the organism and the environment helps us “move away from the isolated, antagonistic view of our relation to our biological environment, towards a more nuanced one which, while recognizing nature is full of threats, also appreciates the deep interconnections of ourselves and our environment.” Translating this into the realm of security studies disrupts well established path dependencies. Attuning ourselves to our microbial partners or to our dependence upon cyborgian technologies does not immediately suggest solutions to armed conflict. Similarly, acknowledging cross-species relationships and nonhuman anthropology does not suggest ways of making local communities safer. And yet we know, as Nikolas Rose notes, that: […] our way of living, our sense of how we should live as humans, why we should live as humans, of what we owe to ourselves and others, of what we can know, what

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we should do, what we can hope for: all these have become tangled up—maybe always were tangled up—in what we think we are as living creatures. (Rose 2014: 23)

Grasping this emerging understanding of humans and nature as integrated, rather than bifurcated, and then developing ideas as to what this means will take time. In what follows we offer some further ideas about the implications for security studies of moving beyond the humannature divide.

S afe t y politics in the posthuman age Figuring out the implications of a destabilized human subject is not something security studies is prepared for.10 It is difficult to imagine, let alone construct, security ideas and practices that de-center the human or that focus on nonhuman beings and things. All of our Holocene-bred security logics draw from the self-evident nature of humanness and the radical separation of humans and nature. Security has been, and remains, by, for, and about humans. Yet, as the Anthropocene makes clear, our new world is filled with dynamic, intersecting, and immensely powerful forces that are bound to us, that respond to us, in complicated and weird ways. It is relatively easy to debate if established security institutions can or should be used to prepare for climate change, or if authorities should prosecute illegal poaching. But how do we deal with our inner worlds of microbes? How is the security of Earth system to be understood and protected? Even more strangely, how might security scholars respond to kinships—the cosmological assemblages—between humans and plants (Kohn 2013; Haraway 2015)? None of these are questions that sit well with established security ideas. While the historical debates about the referent object of security— states, societies, systems, or individuals—might eventually extend to 10 | This is true, despite a recent small resurgence on the topic of human nature in international relations. Few scholars have bothered themselves unpacking the preeminent subject of the discipline with the exception of Jacobi and Freyberg-Inan (2015). Their edited volume was preceded by forums on human nature and IR in 2006 and 2012 issues of the Journal of International Relations and Development.

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

ecosystems, it is as yet unclear how this can be done, or indeed whether it should be done (McDonald 2016). Nonetheless, an increasing number of scholars are considering alternative security logics that reject established forms of anthropocentrism. This thinking expresses a deep anxiety that established security approaches will be found wanting in the midst of cascading technological and ecological crises in which the human subject appears secondary, absent, or irrelevant. How security disciplines encounter, and respond to, a world that is no longer made exclusively for (or by) humans is question that these discipline must grapple with at the onset of the Anthropocene. One response to these anxieties that we have alluded to has been to emphasize the agency of nonhuman actants. The ‘materialist turn’ in security coincides with diverse philosophical strands that are being broadly defined as ‘object-oriented-ontology’ (OOO). This thinking has (re)opened debates about the political and social agency of objects. OOO puts things (doors, toasters, computers, whatever) at the center of analyses. Thinkers like Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Ian Bogost are some of the most prominent proponents of this approach, which stipulates that entities of varying scales play immense roles throughout the cosmos. In one of the best definitions, Bogost explains: “We humans are elements, but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example.” It draws attention to “things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis) and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.” (Bogost 2012: 6). This counteracts the dominant trends, particularly in critical security studies, that have focused considerable energy on poststructuralist questions of human discourse, and normative questions about reconstructing global society through anthropocentric relations of being. In international relations this ‘new materialism’ has been prompted by a key question: how does matter matter? That is, how are our ideas and practices of security constructed by and through nonhuman actants? Rather than seeing the world as an inert backdrop for social forces, the task has been to foreground material forces—“the climate change-fueled storms, the ubiquitous computational infrastructure, the rapid dispersion of viral epidemics, the renewed importance of the body, and the steady

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march of the sciences—into the inner realms of subjectivity” ( Srnicek et al. 2012). Playing off Bruno Latour’s project Making Things Public, two recent volumes Making Things International I, and II, edited by Mark Salter (2015a; 2016), incorporate materiality into the world of international relations, exposing how the assemblages of things, humans, and nonhumans, configure the practices and understandings of war, diplomacy, security, and the economy. Mark Salter explains in the introduction to the first volume: There is a real utility to flattening the ontology of the international sphere in all of its objects of interest: violence, economy, culture, environment, identity, the everyday. Environmental regimes cannot be understood without giving agency to the non-human actants that make up the biosphere. Global economic relations cannot be understood without reference to the independent agency of algorithms that act too quickly for human oversight or interference. The economy is not an external object, but a set of assumptions, processes, and practices. Security cannot be understood solely as a set of speech-acts, but also requires guns, tanks, drones, tear-gas, badges, and fences. In each of these areas, there are non-human actants that fundamentally alter the condition of human possibility, in ways that are unpredictable and irreducible to their constituent elements. (Salter 2015b: viii-ix)

In tandem with the ‘materialist turn’ has been a growing focus on bringing the posthuman into global security issues, which we referenced earlier. Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden in particular have articulated a posthuman approach for international relations, emphasizing how ‘humans’ and ‘humanity’ are socially and culturally constituted categories (Cudworth/Hobden 2011). They argue that to speak of posthumanism does not mean we should reorient the hierarchy that places humans at the top of ethical consideration or that we need to expand beyond anthropocentrism, though these ideas are present. Rather, these thinkers argue we need to see ourselves as ambiguous beings, existing in tandem and combined with, nonhumans. These scholars implore us to view categories like nature, the individual, society, and the international, as “relational achievements, power-laden constructions emergent from ‘assemblages’ [of] interacting ‘actants’—not all of whom are human or alive.” (Lorimer 2012: 595). For Cudworth and Hobden (2013: 447-449), the three primary impacts of

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

posthuman international relations are: 1) a shifting of the agency-structure debate by including the agency of nonhumans; 2) an incorporation of complexity theory into the structures of world politics, via a focus on non-linearity, causality, and unpredictability (ie, small actions may beget large outcomes), and; 3) a demonstration of the embedded hierarchies of power both within human systems and particularly between human and nonhuman systems. Much less attention is being paid to the issue of the Anthropocene in criminology. 11 For the most part there is little, if any, attention focused on the issue on the issue of the human subject. This opening up of discussions on the agency of the nonhuman within international relations includes a consideration of nonhuman entities, such as animals (Cudworth/Hobden 2014), devices (Noys 2015; Wilcox 2015), materials (Mitchell 2015), and terrain (Gregory 2015; Harrington/Lecavalier 2014) as factors to be considered in discussions of global politics. As Cudworth and Hobden explain, adopting this wider perspective requires a reconsideration of actors such as soldiers and police officer, not as simply socio-cultural beings, but as assemblages of nonhuman “parts” that include night vision goggles, pepper spray, amphetamines, drones etc. That is, as complex cyborgs. Other possible avenues they identify include explorations of the ways in which animals have been absorbed (eg, the war/police horse) and the strategic destruction of the environment in the practice of security (eg, the burning of oil wells during Middle Eastern conflicts) (Cudworth/Hobden 2013: 449). These possibilities attune us to the ecology of security, namely, the interplay between humans, landscapes, and the nonhuman—at times coalescing together and at other times moving apart. Intellectual sojourns by security scholars into other disciplines as varied as quantum physics, science and technology studies, anthropology, and critical geography have disturbed traditional understandings of how humans interact with other modes of being. Scholars deriving insight from outside traditional security studies have initiated a budding movement that provokes and disturbs seemingly settled norms of what it means to speak, read, and act security. As Latour reminds us, the connections between politics and nature are always ever-present: 11 | Exceptions include a recent debate on criminology and the Anthropocene (Shearing; South; Floyd) in the journal of the British Society of Criminology, Criminology and Criminal Justice 15/3: 255-269.

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Never, since the Greeks’ earliest discussions on the excellence of public life, have people spoken about politics without speaking of nature…Conceptions of politics and conceptions of nature have always formed a pair as firmly united as the two seats on a seesaw[…]. (Latour 2004: 28)

C onclusion For most, security is about humans. Produced by humans. For humans. Yet, within the accelerating global transformations in the Anthropocene, “the concept of the human has exploded” (Braidotti 2013: 1). What then to do? A first step as we have argued is to acknowledge how the interplay between security and the human being has historically been ignored or taken for granted. This invites us to recognize how holding the human being as self-evident based upon our capacity for reason and self-awareness has formed the justification for multiple forms of violence and harm against the perceived nonhuman, or anything considered less than human. Using our supposedly unique, and therefore superior, self-reflexive control over life has justified the othering of ‘worlds’ deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or not-fully human. As Audra Mitchell (2014a: 7) puts it: “existing accounts of security—both statist and critical—cannot account for world(s) because they frame the human subject as the only conceivable locus of harm.” This has manifested itself between humans and animals, technology, nature, and between what have been thought of as “lesser humans.” At various points in western history full humanness has been limited to white, male, heterosexual, property-owning, standard language-speaking citizens (Braidotti 2010: 208). The social Darwinists of the late 19th and early 20th century used the pseudo-science of eugenics and combined it with security discourses to justify the building of an international order based upon ruthless competition and hierarchies of race, gender, and class (Bell 2012). The natural world, in which nonhumans, including all plants and animals fall under, has been homogenized in security discourses, rendering the diversity, creativity, and hybridity of earthly life moot in the face of its nonhumanness. The concept of the Anthropocene teaches us that humans are movers of the world—geological actors that can create or destroy new and old worlds of being. Yet, living in the Anthropocene also teaches us that to fully grasp the exceptional magnitude of human influence, we

Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds

must decenter our conceptions of the human being and challenge the persistent forms of anthropocentrism that characterize security studies. Reconfiguring the human in security studies from the perspective of the Anthropocene involves three core processes: acknowledging that human action, not human nature, is responsible for monumental shifts in the Earth system; understanding the entanglement of humans beings within a panarchy of human and nonhuman systems and the inherent fuzziness of the subject-object division (Cudworth/Hobden 2015a); and finally, the necessary inclusion of the nonhuman—animals, plants, technologies, things, machines, and planetary processes—into the realm of security studies.

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Chapter Three: Postnatural Security “What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid 1881) “In Wildness is the preservation of the World” (Henry David Thoreau 1862)

In this chapter we turn our attention to established and emerging views of nature1 and their implications for conceptions of security and its governance. At the heart of our traditional common sense has been an understanding of the Earth as an independent reality, with which humans engage but cannot fundamentally affect. Nature is natural, and therefore immovable. It is this world that the natural sciences have sought to understand. These understandings have enabled humans to adapt to, and protect themselves from, the Earth and its environments. As Barker et al. (2014: 1) note, the notion of “adaptation” has been “central to studies of the natural world even before evolution came onto the scene. It reflects the idea that the environment sets ‘problems’ that organisms must ‘solve’….” With the coming of the Anthropocene we are learning— some more quickly than others—that nature is not natural. Humans, rather than simply adapting to a given world, co-accomplish it. This idea has given birth to notions of “evolutionary-development” and the idea of “niche constructions,” which we explore later in this chapter. At the 1 | Readers will find that we use ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ interchangeably. This is for the sake of brevity and because ‘the environment’ appears more frequently within security studies.

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heart of these developments is the idea of entangled life, which we have already considered and which we push further in this chapter. This idea not only challenges established ideas of what it means to be human but has reshaped, and is reshaping, understandings of nature as a domain of human entanglements with other things. It is to these reshapings, and their implications for security, that we now turn. Not very long ago, the statement that nature is not natural would have been controversial, indeed nonsensical. Today, it is a benign declaration at the heart of the Anthropocene concept. Yet, this shift in ecological awareness has largely escaped the security disciplines. This despite the fact that ideas of nature have always intersected with security in complex ways. The notion that security is dependent upon the natural environment cuts widely across different theories and approaches. This is so because nature is, according to Noel Castree (2013: 320), “part of our collective ‘common sense’, a seemingly timeless piece of intellectual furniture. Indeed, it almost seems natural to believe in nature’s reality and existence.” At a fundamental level, water, soil, land, and climate, are all crucial components to the safety and prosperity of communities. More abstractly, the modern concept of geopolitics emphasizes how power is wielded at a large scale across territory, defined by geographical borders, regions, and administrative zones. The idea of territory, of sovereignty over an environment determines how power is wielded, for what purpose, and to what ends. Nature helped construct and sustain the dominant clichés of international relations, namely the Westphalian system and its effects. In many cases, natural resources, including water, have been weaponized through direct sabotage of water infrastructure or through the cutting of supplies to communities in conflict. In all these wide-ranging cases, the natural world is a fixed point, embedded into modern security architecture. It has continuously been perceived as a stable context or milieu in which human struggles play out— the silent backdrop to the human drama (Dalby 2014). Seen in this way, nature is at once the progenitor of security, the conduit through which it flows, and something superfluous to the machinations of nation-states as they move about the anarchic world in search of safety. The more we learn about the categories of ‘nature’ the more it becomes apparent how mistaken each of these views has been. Instead of being a bastion of purity on Earth, or a silent partner (sometimes enemy) to the great game of security politics, today nature is being recognized as a

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

creation in which humans are deeply implicated. It is shaped by human civilization that intra-acts within wider webs of beings and places. A construction built from “our own unexamined longings and desires” (Cronon 1995: 69). While the Earth exists independently of humans “the way in which nature as an autonomous system behaves depends on how humans behave in relationship to it.” (Merchant 2016: 149) This chapter traces how the environment—a convenient leitmotif—has factored into thinking about security. It begins by arguing that modern, Holocene understandings of the natural environment (rooted in Western thought) confirm and abide security logics that are: anthropocentric, avoid considering the environment as a legitimate referent object of security, or hold the natural environment as primitive—as something that exists to be conquered, claimed, managed, exploited, and preserved at the behest of perceived human interests. Accordingly, while the environment may have been consistently considered as peripheral to security, conceptions of the Earth and the resources it provides have conditioned its security—both ideas and practices. This has included (but is not limited to) depictions of natural environments as integral to national identity (eg, Canada as ‘the Great White North’, Australia as ‘terra nullius’), the necessity of strategic control of essential resources like water, natural geophysical barriers, etc. Within each understanding (and the practices that flow from them) nature is conceived as servicing human wants and/or as a direct threat to human well-being. The extraordinary material and conceptual conditions of the Anthro­ pocene, (which encompasses the emergence of new paradigms of chaos, complexity, and quantum weirdness), force us to reposition nature and humanity not as separate but as entangled, plural entities, embedded in intimate and constitutive relations with each other. The outcome of this has been to push us further into posthuman, postnatural (or multinatural) forms of security that are diverse in character, but share the same commitment to disrupting both the foreground and background of security studies. While the chapters that follow detail the specific security logics that are upended in light of our impacts on the Earth system, our job here is to further consider nature as an emergent security property simultaneously dangerous for, and protective of, humans and our earthly kin. In the words of Isabelle Stengers (2015: 20), “in this new era, we are no longer only dealing with a nature to be ‘protected’ from the damage

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caused by humans, but also with a nature capable of threatening our modes of thinking and of living for good.”

C re ating nature What we mean when we talk about nature is often very unclear. The critic, Raymond Williams (1976: 219), described it as “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language.” It can refer to many different, seemingly distant concepts. Perhaps the clearest distinction is found in the twin ideas of a totality of nature and the multitude of natural things. The idea of nature within Western thought has been traced to the ancient Greeks. As a founding idea, it emerged out of shifting general ideas about the distinct qualities of disparate objects coupled with the notion of an ordered dominion, which comprises all phenomena (Arias-Maldonado 2015a: 21). For example, Homer (c. 7000 BCE) wrote of ‘φύσις’ [Physis] to denote an underlying character to all things and beings and the preSocratic philosopher, Heraclitus, used the term to reference the hidden order that connected all visible material objects and the forces that lay hidden beneath them (Arias-Maldonado 2015a: 21).2 According to Socrates, Heraclitus claimed that “[f]rom all, one; and from one, all” (Sallis 2016: 26). This underlying order could be revealed through careful observation and deduction. These understandings along with the belief that nature fulfilled a divine purpose, helped construct the dominant Western narrative of nature as separate, independent and unaffected by humans. These ideas began to gradually shift over time in Europe, as the Age of Discovery revealed the diversity of environmental conditions around the world. With these developments new trends in Enlightenment philosophy emerged. For example, Charles Darwin and his revolutionary theory of evolution, derived from predecessors like Alexander Humboldt and Thomas Malthus, transformed nature from a static entity filled with hierarchical assemblages into a world that, though governed by universal laws, contained hefty doses of chaos, randomness, and chance. Within 2 | Heraclitus’ most influential treatise, On Nature, influenced many of the most well-known ancient western authors. It has been lost to time, but fragments of his writing continue to provide illuminating views on the nature of the world and of humans in it; see Kahn 1981.

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

this context, the natural world could no longer be reduced to the moral imperative of a cosmic, transcendent builder. Rather it had emerged as a consequence of biophysical interactions—the result of species interacting, creating and adapting to their local environments. These ideas confirmed the suspicions of geologists who had found that the Earth and the earthlings who inhabited it had evolved, sometimes significantly, over periods of time far greater than specified in the Book of Genesis. One consequence was that nature became attached to the general, widespread belief in progress. If the world is the result of the superiority of existing species’ ability to adapt, then it stands to reason that history has a forward march. While there has been considerable debate about any link between Darwinian ideas of evolution and readings that saw evolution in teleological terms (Arias-Maltonado 2015a: 26) Darwin’s theory undoubtedly revolutionized established ideas of humankind and the natural world. In particular, it fundamentally ruptured ideas of a radical separation between humans and other animals, a distinction that had long been a mainstay of western spirituality and philosophy. Darwin demonstrated to many in the western world how humans were deeply enmeshed with other forms of life on Earth; we are kin. Nonetheless, although Darwin’s ideas exploded into the world in 1859, it was the more established ideas of separation of the natural and the social worlds that enabled the processes of industrialization, beginning in the late 1700s in England, and the Earth-shattering forces that these processes unleashed. This brief tour of the historical concept of nature helps foreground how our understandings of security continue to overlook an emerging new ecological awareness in favour of rigid dualism, even when the inclination is to protect and promote environmental concerns. These understandings have shaped security work. To understand nature as nonhuman is to understand it as constituting a material world that has existed, and continues to exist, independent of human touch. This has played out directly in the way nature has been connected to security in related but differing ways. For example within this dualism the natural environment has been understood as a form of cosmic or God-given purity that deserved respect, admiration and protection. This idea of separation also underlies the notion of nature as a useful reservoir, warehouse, and bountiful provider of human security. Finally,—and this is perhaps felt most acutely now—it has been understood as a threat to be protected against. In each case the environment is filtered to become a homogenous

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and inactive entity, waiting for the right combination of fortune and action that properly exchanges its current state for the idealized form.3

Nature as purity Nature has often been portrayed as pure, removed, pristine; an oasis from human fallibility and modern industrialization. As modern societies develop, nature is encroached upon, disrupting the ordained order of things. In this reading its value in the world is intrinsic. It is valuable independent of anything it can do for humans and whether or not we even acknowledge it. This places nature as an objective good, removed from humans’ subjective experience. Adherence to this line of thought implies believing that nature is consistently abused by humans. For a large segment of environmentalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the notion of a wild nature was crucial for resisting and retreating from the ills of modern civilization. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the founding text of American Trancendentalism, declared: “Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve” (1836[2009]: 51) Emerson compared nature to the biblical figure of the ass to show how meekly it offered its kingdom of raw materials to man in order to transform it into useful things. In this reading nature is transformed from something noble and innocent. Man’s curiosity, his capacity for reason, “comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will—the double of man.” (Emerson 1836[2009]: 51-52) Simply by existing, nature provided a moral antidote and spiritual sustenance to the urban-industrial malaise that permeated western societies. Its moral purity was self-evident: …every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal mine, every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. (Emerson 1836[2009]: 52)

3 | We refer here to dominant western traditions which, apart from early pagan traditions that saw the natural world as alive and filled with unseen worlds, have uniformly constructed nature as ordered and purpose-filled.

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

This bounty was a providential blessing to humans from the Creator— whose beauty and purity was a material distillation of divine Truth. This benign interpretation of nature has helped cultivate a widespread spirit of conservation intended to limit the moral and material wrongs of human exploitation by encouraging a deeper reconnection with it. To exist as ‘one with nature’ is to experience the divine—an idea that also looms large in eastern thinking. The outcome of this spread of moral worth to a transcendent nature has been to push for protective custody of it, or to impose restrictions on humans from interfering at all. The ethics of environmental security from this perspective stem from the protection of the environment from human misunderstanding and abuse. The moral imperative becomes focused on preserving nature from human encroachments. The famed conservationist, Aldo Leopold (1987: 224– 225), put it simply: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” This ecological mindset is meant to preserve and support the inherent beauty and intrinsic value of nature and protect it from the wickedness of modern man. John Muir’s oft-quoted passage in favor of a US national park service exemplifies this: Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. (Muir 1901)

The concepts of safety and security are transposed onto the outside world, which holds within it a natural order of things. A return to nature can correct modernity’s fetishism of artificial desires and its destructive impulses. This early transcendental movement shares many similarities with the philosophical tradition of ‘deep ecology’, associated with the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Næss. Næss, and the deep ecology movement, advocated for an ethic of reverence for the natural world and a belief in the inherent value of all living beings—humans and nonhumans alike. Identifying the deep connections between humans and

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the nonhuman world was required not simply for survival (though they thought this true as well) but because there was intrinsic value in a shared existence (Næss/Sessions 1995). Extending holistic logics of security to the natural world is necessary not just for some instrumental preservation of wild spaces, but because it satisfies our obligations to preserve beingin-itself. Take for instance Warwick Fox’s notion of “ontologically based identification,” which argues that experiences of commonality can occur by virtue of the deep-seated realization that things simply are. Realizing this, it becomes possible to radically alter our anthropocentric and egocentric ways: The fact—the utterly astonishing fact—that things are impresses itself upon some people in such a profound way that all that exists seems to stand out as foreground from a background of nonexistence, voidness, or emptiness—a background from which this foreground arises moment by moment. This sense of specialness or privileged nature of all that exists means that ‘the environment’ or ‘the world at large’ is experienced not as a mere backdrop . . . but rather as just as much an expression of the manifesting of Being (i.e. of experience per se) as we ourselves are. (Fox 1990: 251)

The policy outcomes of this ethical position vary, but the turn towards widespread protection of ‘wilderness’ and other so-called natural places is representative. Advocates of this particular view transpose the concept of security onto a particular kind of place, as a way to preserve a specific experience. The protection of wild spaces4 is meant to ensure their existence for future human generations as well as protects the vital affective experience of human connectedness with an outside nature.

Nature as instrumental value An alternative reading emphasizes the human view of nature as a bountiful provider of security and requires human intervention for its protection. From this perspective human civilization is built upon a natural foundation that can and should be exploited strategically for our benefit. It is the duty 4 | As of December 2016, 13 per cent of the terrestrial United States and 41 per cent of its marine area was designated as protected area (United Nations Environment Programme 2016a).

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

of officials to discover, study, accumulate, and preserve the riches provided by available resources, lest they be lost to competing interests, or be left untapped (Harrington/Lecavalier 2014: 109). Because of the importance of the environment for national prosperity and security it is imperative that ecological stewardship be built into governance architecture. The strategic logic employed here has a number of antecedents related to the distribution of care, something we will be turning to in more detail in chapter five. The distribution of care, traced back to Aristotle, refers to who takes care of goods and resources and how. Aristotle posited that: “…what belongs in common to the greatest number, receives the least looking after. People take particular care of their private property, less of the communal, or only in so far as it falls to the individual to do so.” (Aristotle/Saunders 2002: 24) Care is most acute when distributed to individuals, not the commons. The reason, Arisotle observed, is because, “to regard something as one’s own makes an untold difference to one’s pleasure. For it may well be no accident that each individual himself loves himself; on the contrary, this is natural.” (Aristotle/Saunders 2002:28) It is a small leap from Aristotle to Garrett Hardin’s influential parable of the “tragedy of the commons”, which showed how tragic outcomes arise when humans simply exercise pure economic rationality. According to Hardin (1968) humans will always pursue the maximization of short-term individual gain, even when they are aware of the full public costs of their individual actions. Inevitably the commons will be picked apart (Hardin 1968). Hardin’s solution to overcoming the tragedy was mutual coercion, agreed upon by the majority of people affected. The lineage here also points us back to Thomas Hobbes’s (Hobbes/Gaskin 1998) parable about the violent state of nature and the need for a legitimated Leviathan to keep things in proper order. In all these cases, humans are self-interested and will only act in common pursuit towards common ends when a coercive force compels them to do so. As Hardin’s many critics have made clear, even if humans are broadly self-interested this does not inevitably lead to overuse, outright exploitation, or conflict between human communities; in fact it can hold within it the genesis of sustainable use ethics and practices. It is only when environmental goods are held as ‘free’ that market rationality will produce outcomes worse for everyone. The Nobel Prize-winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom showed that humans are both self-interested and cooperative, depending on the time, place, and social context. It is

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irresponsible to argue for a single solution to a single problem, which we might name as ‘environmental security’. Instead, “many solutions exist to cope with different problems” (Ostrom 1990: 14). She wrote that “instead of presuming the optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities, I argue that getting the institutions right is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process” (1990: 14). Ostrom’s measured and precise conclusions contrast with the tragic view of a rapacious human nature that inevitably degrades natural resources. A wide number of specific arrangements, blending both private and public control, can offset the danger of unimpeded access to natural resources. Her focus on design principles shows how possible it is to overcome common-pool resource problems and ensure the long-term security of local communities and ecosystems.5 Despite the wide differences and disagreements in the above approaches, they are representative of a view that places a distinct value on the protection of the environment—held as bounded, exploitable nature—as the means for human security. Regardless of whether humans are self-interested or cooperative there is a strategic logic that can drive humans to protect and preserve the natural environment. Certainly there are numerous examples of tragedies of the commons or the wholesale destruction of natural landscapes and the communities of beings dependent upon them. In each case, nature is a vexing governance problem, not a cosmopolitical drama. Environmental degradation resulting from a tragedy of the commons or the failure of institutions stems usually from a lack of information, the failure to value nature appropriately, and/ or the absence of strong regulatory governance. In sum, some failure in the mechanics of controlling nature from outside. Placing a strategic, instrumental (and often monetary) value on nature—because it provides for the flourishing of our species and societies—creates, it is argued, the necessary incentives and regulatory policies that can sustain nature as an exploitable outside. Our survival, security, and flourishing is dependent upon being the master, possessor, and manipulator of nature. Nature, in this reading, protects humans and provides for all of us.

5 | Given space constraints these are only the distilled impressions of complex and hugely influential observations from Ostrom.

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

Nature’s value stems from its capacity to maximize the common good, not because it evokes a lost purity or is a pristine landscape to escape modern malaise. The latter’s attachment to the inherent goodness of nature may in fact be complicit in perpetuating deep global inequalities. In contrast to the deep ecologists, from this perspective it is both strategically ineffective and ethically problematic to accord rights, duties, and values to nature simply because it exists. Alain Badiou states that “the rise of ‘the rights of Nature’ is a contemporary form of the opium of the people. It is only slightly camouflaged religion: the millennarian terror… It is a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects.” (Badiou quoted in Fletham 2008: 139) Badiou bases this claim on the fact that environmental security is conveniently invoked in the service of developed world priorities. All too often, the pressure applied to the developing world on the basis of environmental protection and sustainability is used to prevent competition and threats to imperial power. China, Brazil, and India, as well as smaller developing countries, are consistently singled out as environmental bad actors and expected to conform to stiff regulations that were never a part of the developed world’s experience. The environment is not pure; it is deeply political. Badiou tells us to look no further than the fact that when we try to save a species of beetle or tulip we rely on state regulations, not nature. Nature is not a norm above humanity, but serves at our will (Badiou quoted in Fletham 2008: 139). This Cartesian response sees nature as a storehouse—a repository—for the needs of humans and other animals and plants. The push for natural restoration and conservation is, of course, much trickier to practice than it is to preach, particularly because it involves distinct trade-offs when our societies are so dependent upon the exploitation of earth resources. Security is a balancing act, where the environment in all its forms (eg, climate, endangered species, oceans) need to be protected from human propensities for exploitation without sacrificing human needs. In this reading, security becomes a matter of constructing effective institutions—governments, corporations, commons—out of crooked human timber. Both of these views—believing nature as worthy of protection based on its instrumental value or purity—have been shaped by, and helped shape, the larger forces of modernity that divide the world between facts and values, or the separation between truth and interpretation.

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The transcendental movement in particular has been criticized as selfcentred—as the canvas to be used for spiritual enlightenment or the context in which self-realization could be obtained, even when it situates the self as a being in relation to a wider global ecology. The perspective on environmental security, which broadly coheres with what Arne Naess (2005) referred to as “shallow environmentalism” is reliant upon a general anthropocentric ecological perspective. Security in this sense becomes a matter of protecting the environment as it provides human communities with the means to achieve emancipation or general fulfilment.

Nature as threat In contrast to the first two approaches, which hold nature as an object of purity to be protected from human intrusion or as a storeroom for human flourishing, a third approach views the natural environment as an object to be feared and ultimately coerced into doing our bidding. In this reading, ancient in origin, nature is not something innocent, pure, or giving, but something to be feared, distrusted, conquered, and transcended. In different iterations, nature might be portrayed as a desolate wasteland, leaving humans vulnerable to exposure. Or, conversely, it might be filled with terrors arising from threatening unknown beasts, or for colonial settlers, hostile indigenous populations who occupy the frontier spaces (and vice versa). Until very recently nature had always established the limits of what humans could achieve. With the onset of the industrial revolution and the harnessing of fossil fuels, it seemed as though humans (or at least a segment of humans) had finally mastered and possessed nature. Yet the contemporary crises of the Anthropocene now present us with apocalyptic scenarios of a vengeful Gaia ‘fighting back’ against her human masters. This view of nature thus returns us to the primordial world of security, where existential threats emanate not just from competing human communities but from the world around us. The overriding emotion in this context is fear—generally considered the heart of security. Fear, particularly the fear for one’s survival or the fear of death, is a fundamental physiological trait of Homo Sapiens. It is also the foundation for the modern state system. It is unsurprising then that it has been used by almost all security theories including realism, liberalism, feminism, constructivism, and poststructuralism. Thucydides

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(Thucydides/Crawley 2012) lists fear as the principle motive driving the expansion of the Athenian empire, more important than honour and profit.6 Machiavelli (Machiavelli/Bondanella 2005) is fixated on fear, believing it (along with ambition) to be a foundational motive in the “state of licence,” a precursor to Hobbes’ (Hobbes/Gaskin 1998) state of nature. The fear motivating for preservation is responsible for violence, both at the individual and the interstate level. Without a central protective authority, humans must remain fearful of each other because one can never be certain that the other will not harm one’s life or property, despite any professed good intentions. In such a scenario it is entirely rational to eradicate or incapacitate others so as to neutralize the ever-present threat they pose simply by existing. Because others too are rational beings, and thus risk averse, one can expect a spiral of fear to emerge that leads to the use of force. Only through the creation of a political order, itself won through the prudent use of force, fraud, and eventually cooperation, can the fear spiral be managed (Machiavelli/Bondanella 2005; Fischer 1995). Hobbes repeats much of this, insisting that the desire for security, equated with the fear of death and desire for self-preservation, is a reliable and rational component of our nature. This awareness and foresight is what separates us from other animals. The important thing to remember, though, is that the state of nature can be overcome precisely because men are aware of their own mortality. It also produces a state of constant anxiety, which means that man is constantly aggrieved by the prospect of impending doom. In other words, man lives in the future. He is famished by future hunger and tormented by future sufferings, thus he seeks to “secure himself against the evil he feares” (Hobbes/Gaskin 1998: 72; Ahrensdorf 2000: 580). This fuels the need for a feeling of security—to be free from the fear of death, to be free from care. Fear then, is a natural component of the concept of security. This ubiquitous fascination with fear has been transposed onto modern security politics, generally through various iterations of realist theory, which assert that states live in fear and thus must assume the worst of 6 | Non-western ancient sources that also focus on fear as a motivating factor in international relations include Shang Yang (390-339 BCE), an influential Chinese advisor to King Hui of the Kingdom of Qin, and Kautilya (4 BCE) in ancient India (Tang 2008).

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each other’s intentions, or work to mitigate uncertainty about each other’s intentions and thus reduce fear (Tang 2008). Despite their differences, realist scholars like Morgenthau, Waltz, and Mearsheimer each focus on how either the fear of death or the fear of enemies undergirds the entire world system (Pashakhanlou 2017). Given both the psychological explanations for the feeling of fear and the ubiquity of realist analysis, it is not surprising that fear of the world has been a consistent trend in modern environmental security analyses. This plays out most acutely through the apocalyptic discourses that accompany environmental security discussions. Images of climate disasters, both real and imagined abound. The melting of major ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will flood coastal areas and drown major cities; increases in major storm and wildfire activity will devastate entire regions; melting permafrost will make many northern communities uninhabitable and will awaken once-dormant stores of methane; drought and desertification, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, will eradicate ancient civilizations; shifting land-use changes and climate change will accelerate already high rates of extinction (think of polar bears clinging to floating ice patches). All of this catastrophism, while politically ineffective, has remained a potent trope (Biro 2015; Feinberg/Willer 2011; Swyngedouw 2013). Fear of the world manifests itself in contemporary security terms in many ways, perhaps none more acutely then through the continued obsession with resource conflict. For many security scholars the environment is interesting only insofar as it compels violent conflict between groups. Most government discourse on security and climate change follows this framing (Selby/Hoffmann 2014). This weds a fear of nature, specifically changes in nature, to a fear of competing human communities. The primary example here is Robert Kaplan’s enormously influential work, The Coming Anarchy (2000), which predicted wars over dwindling resources and social breakdowns caused by environmental decay. Kaplan’s thesis ran alongside other post-Cold War scholars who made up the early generation of environmental security. These analysts argued that environmental issues were security issues to the extent that they triggered violent conflict. Their logic followed traditional accounts of the meaning of security, which is concerned with organized violence and the preservation of the state. A wide range of contemporary conflicts and hypothetical

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

scenarios were used to argue that environmental pressures would ‘trigger’ violence and social unrest: transboundary resource competition (eg, ‘water wars’), drought and other environmental degradation leading to economic vulnerability and subsequent urban migration, further exacerbating existing tensions, and an increasing groundswell of dangerous ‘climate refugees’ (McDonald 2012). The environmental conflict literature has grown more complex and has been begrudgingly accepted within mainstream security (particularly international relations), mostly because it coincided with a rising public awareness of environmental problems, and it cohered with the traditional agenda of the subject, focusing on war, conflict, and on the state as the referent object. The dystopian framing of so much environmental security discourse combines fear of the future, fear of the people (usually poor climate migrants), and fear of the world. For many, talking about ‘security in the Anthropocene’ is a matter of identifying and preparing for a new world of increased, diverse threats, some of which are described above. This is problematic because it suggests that security is a universal and unchanging category.7 In particular it reflects a vision of security based upon negative association— of differentiating and fearing others, outsiders, and enemies, including the natural environment. In certain contexts this may be useful. Ioannis Evrigenis (2008: xviii) contends: In times of crisis, when the identities of these groups are challenged and the individual interests of their members interfere with their ability to act in unison, appeals to this bottom line may be the only means of forestalling their dissolution. Among motives for negative association, fear provides the strongest link because it speaks to another bottom line, the fundamental concern with self-preservation.

It may solidify group identities, but more generally fear of the world also places nature in opposition to humanity and helps to define humanness. It offers a vision of an all-powerful otherness vastly superior in strength that can quickly overwhelm institutions and, taken to extreme ends, place human civilization into an abyssal decline. Fear is, according to the philosopher Brian Massumi (1993: 12), “the direct perception of the contemporary condition of possibility of being-human.” Reconciling this 7 | The following chapter will expand on this point.

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to the global environment means seeing dwindling resources or rising seas (or other such catastrophes) as a premonition of humans’ always lurking vulnerability. In many ways, to fear a future Anthropocene world is to acknowledge “our future-past-the eternal return of the disaster” (Massumi 1993: 12), a vision of humanity that is locked in conflict, not simply against each other but forever in opposition to this naturally uninhabitable planet. In this view, space is rendered but a refuge—a hiding place.

N iche construction and postnatur al securit y The above classifications illustrate the varying ideas of nature as creator, protector, and destroyer. The perceived role of humans in relation to nature is also similarly diverse. Depending on the philosophical orientation or the specific historical context, humans are protector-saviours, destroyervillains, refugees, or conquerors. The human-nature divide manifests itself differently across space and time. Yet in almost all cases, (in) security is premised upon the use/misuse of an external nature—one that exists ‘out there’ and holds innate, definitive qualities that are objective, autonomous, and independent of humans. The Anthropocene tells us of a radically different world that exists not merely as a stage for the human drama or as an ideal of purity to which humans should return. The Anthropocene is in effect, a “geological translation of the idea that nature has ended” (Arias-Maldonado 2015b: 84).8 Where can we go then without the safe haven of nature? How can we perceive threats absent the organizing fear of the terrible forces of 8 | We would do well to acknowledge the long history of western thought (to say nothing of non-western philosophy) that has contemplated the deep connections between humanity and the rest of the world. Alexander von Humboldt—the 19th century explorer, naturalist and Darwin’s inspiration—wrote extensively about “the harmonious cooperation of forces” that comprise nature. Revolutionary for his time, Humboldt declared that “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” (Wulf 2015: 32). He found that nothing—not even the tiniest organism—could be isolated from the larger whole of the world. This marks the beginning synthesis of the now-widespread concept of the ‘web of life’. Humboldt’s teachings have greatly influenced the modern environmental movement by emphasizing how nature is not subservient to man and requires careful stewardship and protection.

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nature? These questions need to be actively considered across the security disciplines if we are to live well in the Anthropocene. This is because the end of nature does not mean that humans have transcended or conquered the planet but instead have been dragged further into it. We have more influence, but less control. We are what Jedediah Purdy (2016) calls, “destructive apprentices without a master sorcerer.” One way to better understand the end of nature comes from evolutionary biology. The Anthropocene idea tells us that human society and nature are co-constituted; that is, they construct one another. This assertion coheres with rising scientific interest of the evolutionary idea of “niche construction.” Niche construction theory (NCT) is a branch of evolutionary biology that emphasizes how organisms actively modify their environments and thereby influence their own and other species’ evolution. It also offers a philosophical shift in the way we understand how life develops. In the simplest terms, it tells us how organisms shape, and are shaped by, their environments over evolutionary time. It might be considered a second major component of evolutionary theory (paired with the far better understood theory of natural selection). It holds that organisms do not simply respond to static external environmental pressures but are active participants in constructing and modifying environmental conditions that may influence other sources of selection (Laland et al. 2016). This is an important development that deepens our understanding of the human-nature interrelationship. NCT explains how organisms interact with their environments. It turns out that these interactions have profound evolutionary impacts. Organisms “make micro- and macrohabitat choices with respect to environments, construct artifacts, emit detritus, and die in environments, and by doing all these things, modify at least some of the natural selection pressures present in their own, and in each other’s, local environment” (Odling-Smee et al. 2003: 1). Think of the building of nests, mounds and other artifacts by animals, which can alter local physical and chemical condition, influencing wind speed, and nutrient cycling by plants (Laland et al. 2016: 192). The interaction between organisms and their environments can create or eliminate equilibria, affect evolutionary rates, generate momentum, inertia, autocatalytic effects, catastrophic responses to selection, and cyclical dynamics that would otherwise be deleterious (Laland et al. 1996; Laland et al. 1999). All of this modifies evolutionary pressures and leaves ecological inheritances that reverberate through time

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and space, affecting organisms’ descendants and unrelated populations sharing the same niche. Odling-Smee et al. (2003: 2) write that, “rather than acting as an enforcer of natural selection through the standard physically static elements of, for example, temperature, humidity, or salinity, because of the actions of the organisms, the environment will be viewed here as changing and coevolving with the organisms on which it acts selectively.” The environment and the organisms work in feedback relationships—with both competitive and cooperative outcomes that affect the chances of coexistence. This view contrasts with other approaches to evolution that hold the environment solely as being a constraint on organisms or a filter for their actions, which causes organismal shifts over time. NCT confirms a view of evolution that is always transforming and entangling life. The ability of humans to modify their surroundings is a central feature of NCT. Central patterns have emerged in our expanding niche that have led to increasing successes across a diversity of landscapes. Along the way we have swept up countless other beings into our orbit, bringing them along for the ride and co-shaping our and their futures (Fuentes 2015). Our success in domesticating wild animals, constructing agricultural civilizations and mega-cities has evolved into a wholly unique and unprecedented global niche. We do not alter simply the lives of dogs and other companion species but create evolutionary pressures on their bodies and minds and transform them into new species that we “becomewith” (Haraway 2008). We have not simply used forests for millennia to provide shelter or raw materials that aid our survival and well-being—we influence the ecologies and structures of forests, species diversity, and how the plants and soils interact with humans and all of the creatures that share the landscape (Fuentes 2015). The forests that most view as expressions of wild nature are to an extent ‘cultural artefacts’ (Hunt/ Rabbett 2013). The transition to the Anthropocene has long roots. Human niche construction has existed for many millennia, extending back to the furthest reaches of our prehistory. And though the scale and effects are unique to humans, the process of niche construction is endemic to all organisms and the environments in which they reside. By transforming the environment, humans are doing what all living things do. Contemporary relationships with the world are in essence a continuation of all that has come before. Indeed, the uniquely human power of world-making is in

Chapter Three: Postnatural Security

effect entangled with culture. Human cultural practices—our sociality— is acted out on the world and thus drives the genetic evolution of pro-social emotions and moral cognition. It is now argued by some evolutionary scholars that gene-culture coevolution can help explain the internalization of norms, altruism, the capacity to empathize and the salience of morality and character virtues (Gintis 2011). Culture plays a significant part in worldly evolution but it is not immutable; it is not just a mechanistic reaction against the pressures of an immovable external environment. It is perhaps better seen as an ‘ecological inheritance.’ Kendal et al. (2011: 790) put it thusly: Over the last 100 000 years or so, humans have become increasingly reliant on physical and semantic resources that have been shaped by the cultural activities of preceding generations—from domesticated animals and tool-making to writing, the built environment and even religious cosmologies. Such inventions have in various ways both depended on and then subsequently shaped the evolution of genetic and other cultural traits. Niche construction provides a unique paradigm for studying these relationships that explicitly recognizes the reciprocal influences of cultural evolution, cultural evolvability and gene—cultural evolution on one another.

But yet, we must be careful here. Humanity is not a monolithic entity, certainly not from a cultural perspective, and our effects are not uniform. Our current predicament is not a ‘natural’ extension of evolutionary give-and-take. It is the result of our pursuit of security and, in particular two world-shaping forces, both driven by European males: capitalist development and imperial expansion.9 To occlude this fact is to perpetuate what William Connolly refers to as “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (2013: 147). Focusing on the naturalness of humans to 9 | The ubiquity among colonial powers to rely upon the Roman Law principle of terra nullius (no one’s land) offers a stark illustration of the ties between imperial power and the natural world. The land’s apparent openness (until formally surveyed) is used to justify its forced appropriation. Often, indigenous inhabitants were deemed inconsequential or a minor nuisance because they were considered less-than-human, as nomads who lived without a proper (permanently occupied and privately owned) land. Their own ecological agency was subsequently dismissed.

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modify environments empties the Anthropocene of moral responsibility or reflection. If all returns to nature, then the Anthropocene predicament easily becomes an alibi for technocratic solutions or macro-securitizations (absent democratic participation) or a fatalistic descent into human extinction. It becomes a return to all the forms of nature described earlier in this chapter. An appropriate response here would be to focus on how our activities are not encoded in our genome but are the result of our culture, or our collective ethos. If human niche construction is carried out through cultural practices (themselves created by niche construction) then it becomes possible to shift, alter, and override dominant cultural practices that have deleterious long-term effects on our security—easier said than done, of course. Unlike other species, “a human social group, by contrast, can acquire and transmit an ability over a single generation, since the ability is not the expression of particular genes but rather of the shared knowledge embedded in the group’s culture, typically conveyed linguistically” (Trachtenberg 2015: 48). What is needed then is a positive attachment to the vitality of the Earth, our fellow species, and the niches in which we all co-exist. There are various ways that this might be pursued. Zev Trachtenberg (2015: 55) advocates that the end of nature should lead us to “humanize” the Anthropocene—to recognize ourselves in it and it in ourselves. For him this “habitability” would produce a more intimate, embedded, systemic consciousness that would lead to greater awareness, reflexivity, and understanding to forestall a runaway Anthropocene. Other practical suggestions (some already being enacted) that might respond to the end of nature include the extension of protective rights to ‘nature’, or amending the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court10 to include ecocide and crimes against the planet. Others such as Vandana Shiva (2016) suggest creating a democracy of beings. We do not have the space or the inclination to fully engage with these suggestions, other than to point out that each carries with them creative, experimental principles that attempt to transform human culture to better incorporate the interdependence of the Anthropocene. In later chapters we take up the challenge by suggesting the construction of an ethos of security built on care, which understands that the world is not predesigned for us, nor

10 | U.N. Doc. A/CONF.183/9.

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necessarily susceptible to our control, but still requires human attention and acknowledgment.

C onclusion This chapter began with a complex question: in what ways do the various concepts of security interact with the natural environment? We argued that nature helps construct, and is itself constructed by, logics of security. The world is made up of niche constructions of security. Talking about environmental security now means acknowledging the collapse of human and natural history, “giving us a kind of hybrid Earth, of nature injected with human will, however responsibly or irresponsibly that will may have been exercised” (Hamilton/Grineveld 2015: 68). Whether or not nature exists makes a difference on how we understand and practice security. Surely, by erasing the binaries upon which most security studies have depended (human/nonhuman, natural/unnatural, inside/outside) the Anthropocene takes us to the edge of security studies. We are now forced to contemplate what happens when the others are brought inside. Entwining biological, social, and ecological modes of being is not an exercise in theoretical gymnastics; it has real implications. It reorients the practices of environmentalism and also the underlying foundations of western-based security logics. It means changes to the dominant security logic of threat/defense, while also questioning whether so-called environmental security logics, like resilience, are likewise insufficient. From a postcolonial perspective in particular it means undercutting the appeals to the ideal of ‘nature’, deployed for centuries as justification for conquest, dispossession, and exclusion. Empirically speaking, for most security scholars, things like a hurricane, or a prolonged drought, an oceanic garbage patch, or a lithium mine pit, offer limited and unremarkable appeal. On occasion these may be sites of conflict or negotiation, and thus worthy of study, but there has been little desire to identify and incorporate them as complex assemblages of social and ecological life—as representatives of Anthropocene security (Harrington 2016). Building upon all of this is a central challenge in the 21st century—a challenge of contesting securities. It is to these contests that we now turn.

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Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security Ollis salus populi suprema lex esto— “Let the safety of the people be the highest law.” (Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Legibus III iii [viii]).

On the surface, the Anthropocene does not tell us anything about the perilous condition of the environment that we did not already know. When Paul Crutzen popularized the term “Anthropocene,” in the early 2000s he was not the first to reveal that climate change is happening, that extinction rates are monumentally high, that resource extraction is outstripping supply and material throughput is overwhelming waste sinks, etc. These problems have been discussed for decades, and the environmental security literature has been active in response since at least the 1990s. Some may question whether the Anthropocene discourse simply repackages existing research into a single signifier with refreshed rhetorical power (Autin/Holebrook 2012). This skepticism does have some merit, but it also elides some central points uncovered by the burgeoning field of Earth system science: namely that our Earth is only one of many Earths. It is fracturing, changing as it always has, yet in perceptibly new ways and at unprecedented speeds. “An Earth, in other words, that is not at one with itself,” as Nigel Clark (2016: 138) puts it. This forces us to confront the very real possibility that the innate protection afforded our species from the Earth may in fact have been an illusory, providential period of climatic stability. As the previous chapter was careful to point out, nature is not a benign, unresponsive vassal that humans frequently harm. The Anthropocene has violently disturbed the comforting idea of a nurturing Mother Earth and combined it with what the paleoclimatologist Wally Broecker (2015: 213) refers to as “an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.” It would be a tragic mistake to leave our core ideas about

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security and safety behind in the Holocene. There is, unfortunately, no going back. No return to normal. This chapter explores what happens when the concept of security meets the Anthropocene. There are, of course, many different ways that this can be achieved. The prevailing wisdom across security disciplines is that climate change and other forms of environmental harm comprise influential trends that will have effects on the functioning of global institutions, states, and on individual well-being. These analyses tend to emphasize environmental change as an “accelerant of instability” (The White House 2015a) showing how they might lead to conflicts like civil war.1 There is also a more direct tendency to focus on how environmental threats such as resource shortages, increases in the number and severity of droughts and storms, sea level rise, etc, already pose direct effects on vulnerable populations and national infrastructure. Almost every significant security actor—from the UN Security Council to the US military and intelligence communities—has made climate change a priority issue in preparing for the future. While it is true that ideas related to environmental security remain relatively marginalized in terms of overall influence in security studies, there now seems to be a general acceptance that the environment (so long as it is ‘changing’) is a legitimate, important security concern. Our approach is slightly different. We leave it to others to examine the suite of conflict potentialities or the geostrategic implications of climate change. We are interested in examining how the Anthropocene troubles prevailing security logics of exclusion and enmity developed in a different age and which we refer to as ‘Holocene security’. Our notion of Holocene security derives from the belief that security is not simply a symbol, but has a ‘content’—“an ensemble of rules that is immanent to security practice and that defines the practice in its specificity.” (Huysmans 1998a: 232) Though security theories differ over their understanding of the content of security, they all exhibit an allegiance to security as constituted by Holocene environmental and social conditions that ignored the nonhuman world. As the previous chapters have analyzed, particular conceptions of nature, the environment, and human beings are deeply embedded in the logics of security, though they remain undisturbed and unacknowledged. 1 | See the 2012 special issue of the Journal of Peace Research (49/1) on the subject of “Climate Change and Conflict” for articles that offer some empirical support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict.

Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security

When these are upset, as the Anthropocene necessitates, we are forced to consider whether certain aspects of security theory itself might adapt, or wither away. The incommensurability of certain security logics and the Anthropocene is also a partial explanation for why the security disciplines have lagged so far behind in confronting the subject. Many of our core security ideas are the product of an age that we are careening out of and cannot be so easily translated to the new epoch. This chapter builds from this assertion and focuses on the encounter between the Anthropocene and one of the most influential security theories developed in the last half-century: securitization. The choice to use securitization as an exemplar of Holocene security might appear overly colloquial, given it is a relatively recent development. But we have chosen it, not because we feel it is the only theory that can make sense of security, but because seemingly all security practices result from processes of securitization. Balzacq (2015: 2) writes: “For practices to be acknowledged as ‘security’ practices, there needs to be an intersubjective assent on the fact that they bear on ‘security’; that is, they call for a form of securitization.” It tells us that security is not dependent upon an objective threat, but to the construction of something an audience agrees is a threat. The acceptance of a perceived threat means that a relevant audience has granted legitimacy to the threat articulation and consented to obey the authorities and abide by the exceptional rules. Looking at securitization through the prism of the Anthropocene underscores the radical cognitive shifts required by contemporary security theorizing. Securitization, dependent upon logics inspired by the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, places security largely in terms of the spaces of normalcy and exception,2 the distinction between friend/enemy, the effects of emergency politics, and decisionist forms of sovereignty. All of this is problematic in a new geologic age that is weird ecologically and upsets the expectations of normal life built upon a unified vision of humanness. As we have explored in previous chapters, nonhumans, in the form of animals, ecosystems, materials, technology, help make up and transform the world (Cudworth/Hobden 2011; Mitchell 2016). Ecological changes, driven both by humans and nonhumans, cross temporal scales that simultaneously imbue daily life and future generations with 2 | An exceptional space is one where accepted rules are broken (Buzan et al. 1998: 24).

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monumental forms of risk, including potentially catastrophic impacts that are not adequately known. Scholars also need to question whether the friend/enemy distinction is relevant in an age where the constituency of relevant security actors is radically expanded to include nonhuman entities. Finally, notions of rational, sovereign decision-making in response to perceived threats also need to be reconsidered when those threats (when they are even perceived) are complex in nature, and cut across conventional, controllable, space and time spectrums. This chapter and the one that follows question how security theories might cope with the emergence of commonplace but dispersed extreme environmental events, or a politics of upheaval seemingly built into anthropocentric changes in the Earth system. If, as Schmitt (2005: 5) famously claimed, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception,” how can we view security when the Earth itself (an entanglement of human and nonhuman entities) dictates the passage to the limit and the resultant spaces of emergency?

C onfronting the ne w H uman A ge : securitiz ation and the horizon of H olocene S ecurit y Over the past two decades since Ole Wæver, together with colleagues Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde3 first applied securitization in a systematic way, it has grown into a highly influential approach within security studies.4 It was initially formulated as a way to open up the subject of security beyond the state and military affairs, while still distinguishing it from other types of politics (Gad/Petersen 2011). Since its genesis in the 1990s thousands of scholarly books and articles across international relations and criminology have applied, critiqued, and transformed the theory. Over the years it has been used to better understand a wide-ranging number of perceived security problems, including migration, refugees, cyber threats, terrorism, organized crime, and the environment. Securitization can be simply defined as the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a salience that is judged to have substantial political effects (Buzan 3 | Together, these scholars and their approach is referred to as the ‘Copenhagen School’ because the first writings were developed in the 1990s at the Conflict and Peace Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. 4 | For a review, see Zedner (2009).

Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security

et al. 1998: 25). To securitize an issue takes the politics of it beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics. When an issue is securitized it is “presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure.” (Buzan et al. 1998: 23-4) The move to securitize is meant to address the identified threats by eliminating the chance that such threats would successfully overthrow the state and its apparatuses. It legitimizes the use of force and opens the way for the state to mobilize or take special power—eg, using conscription, secrecy, and other means only legitimate when dealing with ‘security matters’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). The theory devised by the Copenhagen School is meant to trace the process of who can securitize, what issues, under what conditions—and with what effects (Floyd 2007). The process of securitization, or bringing an issue into the security framework, requires an actor to possess the means (or ‘capabilities’) to push an audience to accept the new parameters. Otherwise it would only amount to a ‘securitization move’, which is the simple expression of existential fear, with no adoption from the audience and no consequent security practice (Floyd 2007). Because individuals are in no position to fully provide for their own security it must be provided by larger entities such as society, the state or international organizations. Thus a level of state mobilization that would otherwise not be called upon is required to push the issue. Consequently, the state plays a central role in the theory because most securitizations are performed by state actors. It should be clear to readers by now that understanding Anthropocene security via the state level is normatively and practically problematic. Securitization scholars look to discourse to understand how certain issues become security issues. In essence, securitization is a speech act.5 By exploring the discursive nature of the object in relation to conflict through analyses of particularly employed rhetorical and semiotic structures, one may determine what allows intended audiences to tolerate violations of rules that would otherwise have been obeyed (Buzan et al. 1998: 25). It must be noted that this echoes a broader tradition within the social sciences that has long emphasized ‘speech acts’ as constitutive of, as 5 | Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde rely heavily upon John Austin’s insights, who wrote that speech acts are performative utterances, whereby in saying something, something is done (eg, betting, marriage, etc). See Austin (1975).

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constructing, worlds (White 1984). This baseline assumption relies upon a performative understanding of discourse, instead of a representational view. By saying the word of security, something is done. It is clear that a sentence like, “Water is a major security problem in our country” does not have the same effect as a sentence like, “An apple falls from the tree”. The former sentence has a performative force (Huysmans 2002). Uttering security is an act itself, though the power of the securitizing actor plays an enormous role in determining its success or failure. Securitization does not point to an object that is real. It articulates a threat that is not yet actualized, something usually not as clear as “a bullet in the head” (Stritzel 2011: 2499). In other words, “security is what states make of it.” (Buzan/Wæver 2003: 48) The task is “not to assess some objective threats that really endanger some object, rather it is to understand the process of constructing and designating a shared understanding of what is to be considered and collectively responded to as a threat.” (Wæver 2004: 9) What is most telling for securitization theorists is how some things are (or are not) designated as a ‘threat’, which generally comes down to powerladen socio-linguistic and socio-political processes—both in the naming of the threat and its acceptance by a relevant audience (Stritzel 2011). This is a clear, constructivist reading of security, one that consciously avoids saying whether security threats are ‘real’. As Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (1997: 246) write: “security can never be based on the objective reference that something is in and of itself a security problem. That quality is always given to it in human communication.” For the Copenhagen School, security is dependent on its successful construction in discourse (Buzan/Hansen 2009: 213). Within sociology, this type of thinking has flourished under a number of banners—one of the most descriptive perhaps is ‘symbolic interactionism’ (Blumer 1969). Within criminology it has led to the development of ‘labelling theory’ and has led to policy initiatives under signs such as ‘benign neglect’, ‘radical non-intervention’, ‘decriminalization’ and, recently, ‘justice reinvestment’. The Anthropocene combines discursive power with a radically material presence. It is much more than a speech act; it is the geological representation of modern industrial society. Its materiality is represented both in terms of the physical markers that stratigraphers use to identify an epochal shift, and the by-products left behind by human action. Discursively, the encapsulation of diverse environmental shifts into a single signifier helps overcome the vague and apolitical terminology of

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‘global environmental change’. It explicitly bridges the technical language of Earth system science with human-driven, complex processes of capital accumulation, population growth, industrialization, energy security, and overall increases in levels of human development. Perhaps most importantly it inserts humans and nonhuman actions into processes that have long been considered irrelevant to the anthropocentric fixations of the social sciences and humanities. It takes disparate human activities occurring within and across borders (space) and generations (time) and entangles them in planetary processes that have been largely absent in security. Finally, by identifying human actions as a geological force, the Anthropocene washes away the deep-rooted assumptions of an external, natural world upon which modernity depends. For all these reasons, the Anthropocene pushes the limits of contemporary security thinking, of which securitization is an exemplar. Within the framing of the Copenhagen School the most common securitizing actors are identified as “political leaders, bureaucracies, governments, lobbyists, and pressure groups.” (Buzan et al. 1998: 40) Securitization is limited to the construction of the threat and thus the holders of security are those who are placed in a privileged position of construction: the securitizing actors are the ones with the power and capacity to declare a referent object as existentially threatened. This maps well onto what Carl Schmitt claimed was the logic of ‘executive unilateralism’, which focuses on the actions of leaders placing themselves and their actions above the law, as part of the exception necessary for emergency politics (Schmitt/Schwab 2005). The objects in question, determined by the securitizing actor, are unsurprisingly middle-range (state-based), or macro (structural), that affect the international system (Buzan/Wæver 2009). Once accepted by relevant audiences, emergency measures are enabled in response to that threat. This designation of the threat by important actors determines how we think. And, as Simon Dalby (2002: xxx) has argued, how we think, “leads not only to how we act politically, but also to our understandings of who we are, what we value, and what we are prepared to countenance to protect our self-preferred identity.” For scholars of securitization, the articulation of the threat and the conjuring of security-speak structures the social practices that follow (Stritzel 2007). This is an important point to consider because of the normative tendency of the Copenhagen School to advocate for the long-range option of

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desecuritization—the separation of an issue away from security practices. This is particularly true with respect to environmental issues, which are better handled in appropriate political venues, absent the existential logic of security emergencies. While it is often believed that attaching security may bring sufficient attention to environmental problems, it also militarizes them and places them squarely within a threat/defense sequence. Within this logic, invoking ‘security’ as a meaning—a label— necessarily entails exclusionary and illiberal practices that are justified by the exceptional nature of security (Buzan et al. 1998; McDonald 2008). Desecuritizing environmental issues, it is argued, would move them out of the threat-defense sequence, away from purely state-centered solutions and into the public sphere (Wæver 1995). On the surface all this appears quite reasonable. Few people would associate the protection of rainforests or coral reefs with an increase in militarization. Perhaps the military is equipped to deal with preparedness and responses to increasing natural disasters, but the melting of Arctic ice will not be stopped by military patrols. Yet, according to the Copenhagen School logic, the desire for security reflects timeless practices of survival that are premised upon fear (something we discussed at some length in the previous chapter). We can easily identify securitization moves because it tracks with particular notions of what security is and can do. For most mainstream accounts of security (both objectivist and constructivist), security is at its core a practice of postponing death (surviving) by countering enemies (Huysmans 1998a). The survival imperative entails two central fears: the fear of the power of others to kill and the fear of the unknown (the fact that one does not know whom to fear and whom not to fear) (Huysmans 1998a). This requires humans to divide/unite into political communities, to trust or fear certain others and to forgo some individual liberties. The Hobbesian world lives on in perpetuity. Despite the Copenhagen School’s commitment to a broadened, nonobjectivist view of security through speech acts it still reaffirms the status quo of what we term “Holocene security.” Holocene security exhibits many traits but is fundamentally built on the assumption that the world (and the human social world that interacts with it) exists in an ecologically stable state that can, with prudent use, provide security and survival. From this come reasonable and knowable ideas of ‘normal’ politics and security in the first place. This stability helps alleviate the ‘double fear’ that underpins security. By organizing into communities of trust, humans can in theory

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diminish their vulnerability by increasing the numbers of friends. It also combats the fear of the unknown. This it does by concretizing death (the failure of security) and identifying it as a specific object to be feared (eg, another state, God, nature). Holocene security logics divide the world into friends and enemies, all jockeying for position within the rigid laws of a bounded nature. The Copenhagen School coheres with this vision of security. Analytically, it operates using a dualistic formula. An issue is only a security issue when it follows a specific structure—when it impacts survival and when it requires priority of action. Its distinction between normal and exceptional is premised upon conditions of normalcy that map particularly onto procedures of liberal-democratic societies. Claudia Aradau (2004: 392) explains: Securitization is a topological move from the realm of normal politics to extraordinary politics…and to the element of urgency that securitization entails which corresponds to the slow process of decision-making and contestation, where decisions follow strict procedural rules, i.e. democratic politics.

The urgency of transitioning to a state of securitization means bypassing judicial review or other procedures common to everyday, ‘normal’ life in democracies. Given the speed and rate of environmental transformations in the Anthropocene, the complex entanglement of human-planetary processes, and the potential futility of halting or adapting to large-scale/long-term cascading extinctions, it may be more apt to view the modern age as one of constant exception (Barnosky et al. 2011; Steffen et al. 2015a). It seems insufficient then to limit security to the Copenhagen School’s framework, where non-state and nonhuman actors are given short shrift in terms of their material power to securitize, but more importantly, where states themselves are the moral arbiters of security, based upon their abilities to enact emergency politics to combat a defined existential threat. From a normative position, the Copenhagen School contributes to the perpetuation of a security logic built upon a static, objectivist understanding of security as survival, and as state-led and maintained. This cannot hold in an age where complex non-linearities are the rule not the exception (Steffen 2006).

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Having established the broad parameters of Holocene security, exemplified by the Copenhagen School’s securitization theory, we now delve deeper into the foundational ideas of Carl Schmitt and question whether they are translatable into the Anthropocene age.

R e ading S chmit t in the A nthropocene In recent years, a new wave of interest in the ideas of Carl Schmitt has emerged, particularly from political geography and critical international relations circles. Many of these studies have returned to his concept of the political, its connection to space (and land), and how it influences conventional notions of sovereignty, security and the state of exception (Huysmans 2014; Marder 2010; Shapiro 2010; Hooker 2009; Slomp 2009; Axtmann 2007; Chandler 2008; Williams 2003). For Schmitt, politics begins when the common ground between actors is lost and a state of exception emerges. The state of exception reveals the true nature of politics—the struggle between friends and enemies. Given the preeminent position that Schmittian logics occupy in securitization theory, we might ask how the Anthropocene impacts our understanding of exceptional politics and security. Schmitt argued that the moral judgments needed for war and peace were monopolized by states, which define each other as either friend or enemy. According to him, “[t]he phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friendand-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics.” (Schmitt/Schwab 2007: 35) In other words, the function and essence of the political is to decide between friend and enemy. This locks the concept of the political into binaries of distinction and the ever-present possibility of violent conflict. As Schmitt (ibid: 29) explains: The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

The political designation of friend and enemy is crucial for demarcating the limits of antagonism and avoiding the commonplace use of violence

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that could be enacted under the guise of protecting humanity from ‘outlaws’. Without the labeling of an enemy (an alien whose values are different and to be feared), then it becomes possible (and likely in liberal democracies) to designate any adversary as a “disturber of peace” and a threat to “humanity” (ibid: 79). Security cannot exist without war or its possibility. Or, “[a] world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.” (ibid: 35) The explicit connection between security and the Schmittian concept of the political identifies this distinction between friend and enemy, inside and outside, peace and war, as the fundamental principle that allows political authority to integrate otherwise free individuals into a political community (Huysmans 1998b). Ole Wæver (2011: 478) claims that securitization adheres to the Schmittian concept of security “because it defines security in terms of exception, emergency, and decision (although not by a singular will, but among people in a political situation).” The moment of decision is crucial; it is when sovereignty is asserted by the power to decide upon and label something as ‘security’, or in Schmittian terms, to classify something, some group, or someone as the ‘enemy’. Security for Schmitt and the Copenhagen School exists in the decision, in the declaration, and (in democracies) its acceptance by an audience. That moment of decision, for both Schmitt and securitization theory, is important not only for raising the stakes of action to the highest degree, but also in determining the spaces of inclusion and exclusion. For, as Schmitt reiterates, it is only in the friend-enemy distinction that we can make sense of our own identity as a political community. Gabriella Slomp (2009: 13) writes: “[t]he enemy is, for Schmitt, the standard against whom we measure ourselves and come to know who we are. If we have no enemy or if our enemy is the absolute other, our identity remains unknown to us.” But this dichotomy is problematic. The political identification used in securitization maintains a clear and distinct dialectic between inside and outside, between friend and enemy. As Jef Huysmans (1998b: 577) writes: Securitisation here sets a dialectic of self and other at work, in which the other transforms into an enemy defining the self and grounding the dialectic in expectations of violence. In other words, the community of friends comes into existence precisely as a reaction to the representation of an enemy. This rationality

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of government subjugates the dynamics of association and disassociation among friends to the manufacturing and mediation of relations of enmity and distrust.

For Schmitt, “the political [is] the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.” (Schmitt/Schwab 2007: 29) In essence, individuals only become politicized once they are positioned within a friend-enemy dichotomy, with the survival of the newly identified group at stake. For him, the state of exception is defined as that (political) moment when people are grouped as either friends or enemies. Sovereign power is not simply the ability to override law, but the ability to create the legal order itself, demarcating lines of inside and outside. Order is necessary for the law to take root, and a “regular situation” must be created to demarcate political communities according to friend-enemy distinctions (Aradau/Van Munster 2011: 108). This focus on extraordinary politics and emergency measures, which enables the breaking of normal rules of liberal democracies, renders security negative and extreme. It emphasizes the production of intense antagonism required to push an issue beyond the boundaries of acceptable difference to friend and enemy. As a technique of government this “passage to the limit,” as Huysmans (1998b: 571) terms it, “is the essential ground of authentic political acts and of the authentic self-definition of a political community.” For him and many others, the “key ethico-political question becomes if one wants to and can justify the constitution of the political via this passage to the limit.” Huysmans (1998: 571) For Wæver, security is Schmittian “because it defines security in terms of exception, emergency and a decision (although not by a singular will, but among people in a political situation).” (2011: 478) In defense of his position, Wæver rejects claims that it is possible to see new forms of security today that are dispersed and that move away from exception and emergency. For Wæver and others the securitization form is what allows us to observe security. We cannot see new forms and know they are security without some preconceived idea of it as emergency (Wæver 2011: 473; Balzacq 2015: 2). Security can only be understood as ‘security’ if it is used to justify extreme measures in response to identified threats (eg, the suspension of the rule of law in favor of executive unilateralism). Many have already crafted important critiques of the Copenhagen School and other, more traditional approaches to security, for failing to

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deeply probe the underlying construction of security itself (Hansen. 2012; McDonald 2008; 2012; Williams 2011; Floyd 2011; Booth 2007; Huysmans 2006; Aradau 2004). The next section adds to these critiques by examining how the Anthropocene might affect the Copenhagen School’s conception of security. In particular, constantly evolving interactions between human and nonhuman worlds comprising feedbacks and changes do not return systems to a pre-crisis state and create new environmental realities that have no precedence. These changes exhibit a scale large enough to elicit extreme worry for the survivability of life on Earth—a truly existential threat. Ongoing extinction events fundamentally challenge the core problem security is meant to overcome: survival. The categorical boundaries that demarcate the possibility of peace and war, and between friend and enemy, assume new (or reduced) meaning in an age where it is more appropriate to speak of entanglement than separation. The friend/enemy distinction means little when brought over to the realm of the ‘inhuman’—the modes of being that do not depend on or admit any relations to humans or ‘the human’ (Mitchell 2017: 13). If, as many Earth scientists argue, the complexity and scale of changes defy prediction and, ironically, reveal the precarious nature of human beings within the Anthropocene, then the concept of security-as-promise needs further configuration (Aradau 2014).

The dawn of A nthropocene securit y This section identifies the implications of the Anthropocene for securitization. It suggests that core components of the theory need to be rethought in light of powerful planetary forces that are simultaneously of our making, and beyond our capacity to respond. Some defenders of Holocene security have argued there is no way to avoid a vision of security as the exception. This is because security is tethered to the idea of the political itself. The core business of politics is securing identities, boundaries, concepts, meanings, histories and truths, so as to protect a defined community (Dillon 1996). No matter how hard we try, “the Political, Sovereignty, and the Decision have a way of returning…There is simply no way out of the conundrums of our political thinking, and no security outside of security” (Behnke 2006: 64). We have argued that the assumptions implicit in this view and the idea of security as a passage

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to the limit are byproducts of a different age. The cognitive and material changes of the Anthropocene force us to consider new ways of viewing security and politics. The rest of this chapter describes how the new age of entanglement bypasses certain essential logics of security, including the distinction between normalcy/exception, sovereign decision-making, and friend/enemy. The chapter to follow will explore in greater detail with what we might begin replacing these logics if we wish to rescue some version of security for the age. In terms of the Earth system, the future will not look like the past, even if the specifics remain indeterminate. Schmittian security logics do not assume stasis or stability, but they do hold that security repeats itself because it is the horizon of all politics. No matter the context, security is premised as the sovereign decision to institute a community via the construction of the enemy, the process of identifying a perceived threat and emergency politics. Throughout human history it was generally possible to ignore or externalize the ecological impacts of human actions, particularly as a subject of international relations. The same could be said for the role of nonhuman entities in co-constituting the world in which the great games of international relations could be played. During the late Holocene era, it may have made sense to anchor security decisions to sovereign power over a bounded territory. Under such conditions ‘the sovereign’ determines friend and enemy and decides when the rule of law can be suspended in reaction to a perceived existential threat to the state. However, though the Anthropocene heralds immense security concerns for individuals, states, and the global system, it also questions the future utility of the Schmittianinspired real and the security logics that depend upon it. Questions abound whether contemporary security thinking, and the institutions that arise out of them, can comprehend the abnormality of climatic conditions. The concept of the ‘event’ (which can in reality be a number of events) that triggers the articulation of threat, which in turn allows for the suspension of normal politics in favor of security politics and subsequent emergency measures, is incommensurate in an age of complex entanglement -,where objects are nonlocal and cannot be fully discerned or experienced. Recall that securitization is not interested in the objective ‘securityness’ of a threat but in its handling by a community. Yet, what event of the Anthropocene could be responsible for a successful securitization speech act? The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 led to successful securitizations, and

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they may be examples of the Anthropocene condition (ie, human-nature entanglement), but they cannot be seen as ‘the Anthropocene’. Timothy Morton labels the Anthropocene as a “hyperobject” for this reason. A hyperobject is an n-dimensional, non-local entity, something massively distributed across space and time relative to humans. It is at once vague and real. One only sees pieces of a hyperobject at a given time. We cannot wake up and point to the Anthropocene. Morton (2013: 11) asks us to [c]onsider raindrops: you can feel them on your head—but you can’t perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn’t this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system? I can think and compute climate in this sense, but I can’t directly see or touch it.

The conditions of the Anthropocene indicate that the event—the ‘hap­ pening’—that ruptures normalcy and ushers in exceptional conditions becomes a line frequently crossed, often with little awareness or acknowledgment.6 Further, the spatio-temporal frame of the Anthropocene distributes insecurity and risk across the planet and along decadal and century scales. Today, rising seas currently pose an existential threat to a number of pacific island nations like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands (Nurse et al. 2014; Farbotko/Lazrus 2012). In the near future, as ocean circulation slows (particularly in the Atlantic), warmer water will pool below the surface. As warm water expands, sea level rise will threaten parts of the US East coast (Krasting et al. 2016). Longer-term, as climate change accelerates, it is possible that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will melt entirely, causing planetary sea-level rise in excess of 70 meters (National Snow and Ice Data Center 2015). This slow motion unfolding of catastrophe will take upwards of 2000 years before major coastal cities like New York and Kolkata will need to be abandoned (Clark et al. 2016). Two millennia may be a blip in geologic time, but there is no method for incorporating it into Schmittian security paradigms. Finally, to speak of the willful subject (in 6 | The concept of ecological ‘tipping points’ is a compelling corollary to the Copenhagen School’s commitment to security as a passage into the abnormal or, more specifically, the horizon of politics; see Russill (2015).

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this case ‘the sovereign’) that can make a decision to transition to a state of exception (and have a relevant audience accept that transition) in the midst of Anthropocene scales is almost nonsensical. This anthropocentric hubris is at odds with the diversity of existential threats that are enacted by newly formed agentic capacities of technologies, nonhuman beings (including microbes), changes in the Earth system, and even cosmic events, such as asteroid strikes Climate models demonstrate slow, entangled forms of emergency across time, space, and species. The Paris Climate Agreement, signed in 2016 and widely hailed as a diplomatic success, acknowledges the scale and scope of planetary threats from climate change, but lacks any robust enforcement mechanisms. Though the agreement expresses a desire for a safe operating space for global warming of 1-1.5 degrees there is no indication from country-level commitments that global warming will be slowed before at least a 2 degrees rise in temperatures.7 Even a 2 degrees rise, achieved gradually over the century, is likely to have enormous consequences for human and ecological health, increasing drought occurrences, and agricultural losses. If the world does warm by 2 or more degrees, then dangerous feedback effects might emerge, like the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which would send even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (Schuur et al. 2008). This degree of warming may also compel migration of up to 34 per cent of the world’s population, mostly in the tropical margins of Latin America, Africa, and South Asia (Hsiang/Sobel 2016). Other studies show that under businessas-usual scenarios, there is a greater than 90 per cent chance that summer temperatures between 2061 and 2081 in large parts of North and South America, Central Europe, Asia, and Africa would be warmer than any in recent modern history (Lehner et al. 2016). Much of the Middle East could become uninhabitable for human life (Pal/Eltahir 2016). Despite these calamitous warnings, slow-moving climactic feedback effects are dispersed across time and space in ways that are difficult to comprehend 7 | The consensus seems to be that, given the vast quantities of emissions currently in the atmosphere, the only way to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is through ‘negative emissions’. Negative emissions technologies could theoretically extract carbon dioxide from the air, concentrate it, and then store it. Doubts exist whether or not these technologies could actually accomplish the job, or if they may do more harm than good. See Fuss et al. 2014.

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and respond to. Further, as the ongoing Syrian civil war demonstrates, climate change is almost impossible to pinpoint as a catalytic variable for social unrest. While drought and environmental degradation may contribute to resource scarcities, migration and violence, the links are too complex to be grasped by simple and sensational analyses (Brzoska/ Frölich 2016; Kelley et al. 2015). For those working in areas of environmental security the tendency has been to stick to Schmittian security ontologies, highlighting Malthusian connections between resource scarcity and conflict. Though we may be traversing into uncharted planetary territory, it is often assumed that the ironclad laws of global politics will repeat themselves anew on a warmer planet. These connections have been made so consistently, forcefully, and authoritatively that an ongoing and increasing focus on security is readily apparent (see eg, Floyd 2010).8 For the Copenhagen School this is disheartening, as the overall goal is to avoid security in favor of deliberative politics. But as the resilience of the resource wars thesis demonstrates, the prospects for desecuritization appear dim. Concern about ensuring secure access to water, land, oil, etc, has generally been tied to a vision of security as exception, where natural resources are measured, managed, distributed, and controlled according to their ability to fulfill human (ie, state) functions and their instrumental value to deter or compel behavior from potential enemies or competitors. Moreover, securitization in this form has proven to be a useful ally in the fight for climate action. Thus, unsurprisingly, the US Pentagon has been at the forefront of predicting, preparing for and adapting to climate futures (US Department of Defense 2014a; Liptak/Davenport 2016). Within this context, securitization can tell us much about the construction of a specific form of environmental security. It can also focus necessary attention on the erosion of legal and political norms in the face of accepted security emergencies. Yet, part of its problem in accounting for, and shaping action in the Anthropocene is its reliance upon outmoded forms of security and the political. For Schmitt, the “division of space or

8 | The US defense, diplomacy, and security establishments, as well as the executive branch, have incorporated climate security into their planning documents and reiterated the connections in major speeches; see US Department of Defense (2014b), US State Department (2015) and The White House (2015a).

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territory is the fundamental act of constituting a stable order.” (Aradau/ Van Munster 2011: 110) Yet, as Stuart Elden (2010: 22) points out: [h]is understanding of territory is far too static, and seemingly ahistorical. Territory, for Schmitt, remains a bounded space under the control of a group; a quasi-Weberian definition that may provide the terms to be analysed, but is hardly a theory in itself.

This conception of territory—bounded, universal in logic, localizable in execution—comprises the bulk of planetary security thinking. As Latour (2016: 307) puts it, the Earth remains a natural globe: “[an] undisputed, authoritative, universal, external frame inside which all geopolitical entities—be they empires, nation-states, lobbies, networks, international organisations, corporations, diasporas—are situated in a recognisable place, a province side by side with all the other provinces.”9 One of the Anthropocene’s most important lessons is that the idea of the boundary is largely a principle from which to derive power rather than a law of nature. A boundary might be useful to describe a local effect of the Anthropocene (say a drought or a hurricane) but it does not represent Anthropocene entanglement. As the last chapter described, organisms are interdependent with their environment; in fact they help construct the environment (and vice versa). Humans produce nature and territory at every level through dynamics of interaction. To assume that a boundary exists before it enters into a relationship—to accept the view that entities like nation-states are impenetrable parts—is to accept the existence of pre-ordained identities or characteristics. The belief in a bounded, Westphalian state identity, able to exert sovereignty over its defined territory, is a key component of Holocene security. The planetary entanglements of the Anthropocene are deeper than the global ties of war or commerce could ever be; yet they do not follow the sharply drawn borders of international relations (Latour 2016: 320). Radionuclides bind to soil and marine sediments in the farthest reaches of the Earth; CO2 travels around the world; non-native invasive species cause biodiversity changes a world away from their origins. All this necessitates the reappraisal of traditional visions of bounded sovereignty upon which so much security thinking depends. These are vastly different forms of geopolitics. 9 | Also see Minca/Rowan (2015).

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Despite the expressed incommensurability, there are aspects of Holocene security logics that are translatable into the new age. The development of the environment-security nexus, beginning in the 1980s, has been driven by the desire to elevate environmental change onto the agendas of political leaders. This has generally succeeded, as almost all western leaders have labeled climate change as a preeminent concern and emphasized its implications for national security—indeed China has identified realizing an ‘ecological civilization’ as a guiding national objective (United Nations Environment Programme 2016b).10 That said, as the scale, speed, and volume of changes brought upon the Earth system (and the subsequent danger to humans) becomes appreciable, there are growing concerns that modern forms of democratic politics are not enough. Here, the turn to Schmitt is appreciable. Some authors detect the rise of environmental authoritarianism as the necessary response to the urgent existential crises wrought by environmental change. In this reading, “humanity will have to trade its liberty to live as it wishes in favour of a system where survival is paramount.” (Shearman/Smith 2007: 4) Democratic values of freedom, individual choice and personal advancement must be curtailed because they clash with the carrying capacity of the Earth. The planet, it is argued, cannot sustain 9 to 12 billion humans with consumption rates parallel to modern western societies (Gilley 2012; Ophuls 1997). Many argue that authoritarian countries, such as China, that are able to enact swift, comprehensive reforms are best positioned to respond to complex environmental and political pressures (Beeson 2010). Such a scenario suggests that Schmitt’s conception of politics and his decisionist forms of security are more, not less likely, to emerge in the Anthropocene. We might then ask ourselves whether it is at all possible to truly transcend Holocene security. It may be that the Anthropocene discourse becomes repurposed to fasten existing security dilemmas onto new contexts of environmental harms and risks. The resilience of the resource wars thesis is a good indicator that transcending Holocene understandings of security remains a challenge. Yet as Madeleine Fagan (2016) warns, we should also be wary of treating Anthropocene-bred ecological security as an escape from modern politics. She argues that a holistic vision of non10 | This is subject to change of course, as the recent election of noted climate change denier, Donald Trump, as US President illustrates.

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violent security, one that attempts to unify the human-nature binaries, is deeply problematic. For her, “to theorize an outside to this is to inscribe an oppositional system once again; to posit an interconnected whole as an alternative is itself a violent move.” (Fagan 2016: 17) This is a point worth considering as Anthropocene security debates grow. Instead of seeing the Anthropocene as a vessel to escape the boundaries of security, we should be prepared to see how those same boundaries are “multiplied, reinscribed, magnified, produced, obscured and, most importantly, mobile.” (Fagan 2016: 19) Viewing the human-in-relation emphasizes the inability of sovereign power to declare emergencies, to secure individual human life and communities from environmental harm, and to make the friend-enemy distinction. Who is the enemy or outlaw in the Anthropocene? While all of this is troubling for conventional security theory, it also allows for creative responses by allowing human ontology to shift, morph, and rearrange itself in relation to its new place(s) within the physical environment and its biochemical systems. As those working in the field of new materialism argue, ontologies of mind/body and self/world are challenged by hybridity between human and nonhuman things (Connolly 2013). Chapter two in this volume explained how security actors in the Anthropocene include at a minimum the plants, animals, humans, and microbes, along with the multiple layers of technologies enveloping us and them (Haraway 2016). To transpose binary logics that reduce environmental resources to ‘threat/defense’ or ‘secure/insecure’ significantly obscures alternative articulations of security based upon creative expressions of agency and kinships across species and Earth system processes, even in light of existential danger and dread. Processes of securitization in the Schmittian sense, and our under­ standing of it rely upon an unchanging view of security—one that at its heart “finds something to do with defence and the state.” (Wæver 1995: 47) Because the securitization thesis consistently focuses on the designation of threat, there is a tendency to avoid examining the construction of security itself, therefore privileging the content of security over its very meaning (McDonald 2008). Ultimately though, the Copenhagen school’s understanding of security is based upon a particular tradition that never escapes the logic of exclusion and its attachment to security as ‘panic politics’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 34). It thus binds itself to a particular interpretation of the meaning of security, seemingly to avoid rendering

Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security

the security concept incoherent. Jef Huysmans (1998c: 500) writes: “the rhetorical structure upon which the intelligibility of security depends is the fixed point—the threats, the units, the agents fluctuate but the signification of security remains.” For the Copenhagen School, to speak security is to make security. This approach fails to push deeper and excavate the security logic that is embedded in the rhetorical structure— how and why the speaker and audience understand a language as security language. In our new human age, to speak of a static security absent the strange permutations, intersections and assemblages of the Earth system seems like a radical thing indeed.

C onclusion What does it mean to talk about security in the Anthropocene? The answers to this question are varied, multifaceted, and undoubtedly unsatisfactory. The concept of the Anthropocene itself is perhaps too big, too complex, and too terrifying to confront in a systematic way. Beyond that, it disrupts at a fundamental level the unifying threads of international politics: power, territory, and sovereignty. Only recently have scholars begun to contemplate the myriad ways that this may affect our understandings and practices of security (Harrington 2016; Fagan 2016; Hamilton 2016). If the conditions of the Anthropocene are geologically exceptional compared to the vast history of the Holocene, then the spaces between normality and exception are themselves disrupted. Schmitt’s focus on the concept of the exception endorses a decisionist politics meant to overcome any procedural/legal shortcomings of process. For Schmitt, and the Holocene version of security espoused by the Copenhagen School, there is a deep need for “an actual, legally un-derived power that can decide on whether one is in a situation in which the formal and rational processes fail and on what needs to be done in response.” (Huysmans 2008: 168) Ongoing environmental harms may in fact increase invocations for the state of exception, which the ‘sovereign’ creates in response to crisis; where lives are rendered “bare”, or “ungrievable” (Agamben 1998; Butler 2004). However, if security is reduced to the emergency measures invoked by the ‘sovereign’ decision, then the Anthropocene and its potential for the existential state of catastrophe renders the concept rather useless. When placed against planetary forms of insecurity, the Schmittian zone of

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indistinction, where sovereign decisions are made to protect ‘humanity’ from ‘nonhumans’, loses its analytical power. Though immediate risk is dispersed unevenly, the Anthropocene brings with it forms of shared vulnerabilities and threats to human and nonhuman inhabitants of the Earth. Deep questions remain about the utility of Schmitt’s conception of the friend-enemy distinction given the nature of planetary-level threats caused by multiple and complex interactions of humans and nonhumans. Holding security in place as a purely anthropocentric response to rational decisions from an outside enemy elides the agentic power of nonhuman forces and our dependence upon them for our survival and our thriving. Finally, the ‘sovereign’ decision to move society to the limit (ie, the enactment of security) is itself incompatible with the tumultuous entangled forms of agency that exist in the Earth system. It is unclear how or if security decisions, traditionally understood, can ever be enacted given the complexity and unpredictability of the Earth system. Complicating factors include our continued inability or unwillingness to grasp the unique spatial and temporal scales of Anthropocene security. As we mention in earlier chapters, there is a tendency therefore to claim that we must abandon the concept of security, or wed it more closely with risk (Corry 2012; Oels, 2013). However, to replace security with risk or resilience perhaps reduces it to mere survival, renders its subjects devoid of agency, and equates governance with harm avoidance (Evans/Reid 2014). Such a viewpoint risks deeming life as catastrophicin-being, from beginning to end. This is a bleak view indeed. To deny the ethical-normative implications of Holocene security is to again cede the ontological vision of security as survival and exclusion. To do so, “retrieves the ordering force of the fear of violent death by a mythical replay of the variations of the Hobbesian state of nature.” (Huysmans 1998: 570) It is therefore right to ask whether it is possible to provide a response that can conceivably reorient the conception of security towards one that is relational between humans and the Earth, that binds nature and society together; that can be, following Audra Mitchell (2014a), truly “worldly”. This means that security might be seen in conceptual and practical terms as not a guarantee of safety, or as a sovereign decision to move society to the limit. Building an ontological framework of security premised upon exclusion may have made sense in an age where humans were divorced from nature. In contrast, security in the Anthropocene means exploring and appreciating immanent and transcendent security logics

Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security

and sensibilities like gratitude, or care, which can be built for a world that is simultaneously both nurturing and hostile (Clarke 2011). Just how this might take place remains an elusive quest rather than an emerging path. It is a quest that the other central security discipline, criminology, has to date offered little. Schmitt‘s ideas have received little questioning within criminology within criminology (see eg, Neocleous 2008; Zedner 2009). Perhaps this is because the discipline relies upon understandings at an interpersonal level grounded in Hobbesian conceptions of sovereign authority and capacity. While criminology has made significant moves to conceive of security without centering it on sovereign authority and capacity (see eg, Schuilenburg 2015 and Brodeur 2010), this, as yet, has led to remarkably little progress in conceiving of security within the Anthropocene.11 It is to a possible line of flight for conceiving of, and enacting, security in the new age that we now turn.

11 | This has been so even though Ulrich Beck’s (1992) seminal “risk society” idea, with its grounding in environmental concerns, has significantly shaped contemporary criminology. See also Beck’s (2016) posthumous Metamorphosis.

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Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene Usà puyew usu wapiw! “He goes backward, looks forward!” Maškēkowak (Swampy Cree) saying.1

The impossible past How are we to pursue security in the Anthropocene? It is clear that if we replicate previous security logics, shaped as they have been by a profound carelessness, we will be doomed. To use a phrase from Edmund Husserl (1931/2012), carelessness has been our “natural attitude”. This Holocene mindset is so engrained, so pervasive, so all-encompassing that, for most of us, existing otherwise seems impossible. We have developed many security institutions—the institutions studied both in criminology and international relations—that have sought to protect us from each other and disasters of various sorts. All these institutions—police, the military, insurance, and many others—have been imbued with a logic of separation of humans from all others. These logics have enabled many technologies of security—guns, bombs, surveillance, drones, patrolling, and so on. They also tell us that the spaces of security, safe havens, are founded by perimeters. Theories like deterrence, offshore balancing, or securitization 1 | Ursula Le Guin (1982) uses this in her talk, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Very Cold Place.” She references Howard Norman (1979) as the source of her inspiration. In Swampy Cree tradition the saying is used to describe the thinking of a porcupine that retreats to a rock crevice as a form of self-preservation. The opening formula of Cree stories is to begin with an invitation to listen, followed by the phrase, “I go backward, look forward, as the porcupine does.” (Le Guin 1982: 84).

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help us make sense of the different ways that our lives are protected or threatened by powerful actors. These institutions, technologies, spaces, and theories, in one way or another, have expressed logics of carelessness with respect to the Earth and its systems. All of these developments have been united by an assumed separation of humans, and their societies, from the Earth. The Anthropocene has not negated or rendered obsolete the established markers of modern-day security. In the Anthropocene, there will be a role to play for all of the above. The conflicts and insecurities of the Holocene will remain. And yet, much of what we take to be true and real and important about security is already being fundamentally troubled by the scale, speed, character, and scope of the Earth system changes that the Anthropocene references. Take for instance Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen’s (2009: 10) point that “security is about constituting something that needs to be secured.” Central to the debates dominating the post-Cold War security has been “who, or what should be secured?” Is it the nation? The state? The community? The individual? As we have seen, these referent objects of security are challenged by the breadth of ecologies of existence that the Anthropocene has brought into view. The systemic entanglements of the Anthropocene means that locating a space for intervention (say the individual human) independent of other spaces (the nonhuman or the landscape that animates the human subject into existence) becomes ever more untenable. Subjects and objects are entangled. There is no inherent distinction between the knowing and the knowable object in need of securing. Deciding whether to emphasize the security of the state instead of extoling the value of human security may have immediate consequences (eg, the dilemmas and trade-offs of humanitarian intervention) in certain circumstances, but it also perpetuates a certain tautology of action. It employs a linear view of cause and effect, problem and solution. That which is identified as a threat enables the kinds of responses made visible by the purported threat. Determining the referent object of security means deciding upon the type of appropriate intervention as it arises and not before. In the Anthropocene this means the danger lies in identifying the threat (human activity in search of security) and responding in kind with types of action (more human activity) that only exacerbates the threat (Chiew 2015; Luhmann 1995). Acting on this realization, responding to this challenge, is difficult. It requires positioning interactions as intra-actions, emphasizing con­

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

nectivity and entanglements within diverse wholes. As the feminist, and quantum physicist, Karen Barad (2007: 393) puts it: Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human.

Taking apart deeply rooted ontological assumptions that hold natural objects as “mute,” awaiting the inquiring gaze of self-aware human beings (Descartes’ “thinking things”) leads to very difficult ethical conundrums (Jackson 2010: 27). Seeking to locate a referent object of security—the quintessential point on which modern security debates have turned— fundamentally misreads how creative, “intra-acting” forces constitute our worlds. Holding any object or level to be the singular object of security misrepresents the layered folds of existence in the Anthropocene. As Barad (2007: 394-395) explains: With each intra-action, the manifold of entangled relations is reconfigured. And so consequentiality, responsibility, and accountability take on entirely new valences. There are no singular causes. And there are no individual agents of change. Responsibility is not ours alone. And yet our responsibility is greater than it would be if it were ours alone. Responsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then.

What, if anything, can be done? If everything changes in the Anthropocene—the objects of study, the variety of harms, the nature of responsibility—what is left? Is security, as we have come to understand it, obsolete in the face of Earth system changes? Is it better perhaps to embrace or reconfigure nihilism and despair for the new age as some authors like Eugene Thacker (2011) and Ray Brassier (2007) propose? Perhaps there’s something to this—nihilism, horror, and tragedy have always been quintessential themes of security. Perhaps there is value to be gleaned in questioning the philosophical orthodoxies that hold that everything exists for a reason, principally as an instrument to be used, or avoided, for human flourishing. Humans may be influential enough to be considered geological actors, but the worlds of which we are a part remain largely indifferent to us. As science continues to chip away at the

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idea that things are filled with an intrinsic purposefulness, it is becoming increasingly possible to abandon the mythologies of humanism that have permeated security. This enables us to begin to recognize the diverse worlds of being that have always been here. Yet, to fully embrace nihilism is unsatisfactory; a soothing oasis in an ocean of anxiety (Morton 2015: 186). It offers us an easy way out, so to speak. And it may in fact bring us back to traditional forms of security, infusing it with the types of reactionary and rejectionist politics of anti-humanism. We cannot offer a blueprint or a political plan of action for righting our ship. The Anthropocene does not allow it. New voyages of discovery are required as we enter a period of extreme upheaval and risk for most living things on Earth—a reality that is unlikely to change no matter what actions are taken today. The anthropogenic interference that defines the Anthropocene threatens the integrity and survivability of vulnerable systems, such as Arctic sea ice and coral-reef systems. It is increasing, and will, increase the number and severity of extreme weather events (eg, heat waves, droughts, hurricanes), and cause extensive biodiversity loss with an associated loss of ecosystem goods and services (Coumou/Rahmstorf 2012; IPCC 2014). With increased warming, some ecosystems are at risk of abrupt and irreversible changes. Traversing ‘tipping points’ may lead to the loss of human life and cultural heritage, but it may also lead to catastrophic changes and disasters on a larger scale, leading to ecosystem collapse. Up to 30 per cent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species may be threatened with extinction this century (Rockström et al. 2009).2 Security, famously defined by Wolfers (1952) as an “ambiguous symbol” because it holds so little intrinsic value, will mean something different in the Anthropocene. The various ways that we have thought about it and pursued it in the Holocene—whether as survival, as safety, as threat, as order, as emancipation, or as flourishing—are all largely inadequate given 2 | There are wide discrepancies in published research over extinction risk rates. Studies have shown anywhere between 0-54 per cent of species could become extinct from climate change. A 2015 meta-analysis of 131 published predictions concluded that the best estimate is that 7.9 per cent of all species will be extinct from climate change. Rates of extinction vary widely depending on region (South America, Australia, and New Zealand will experience the highest rates), and the overall level of climate change. As the climate changes, extinction rates increase and accelerate (Urban 2015).

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

the range of global environmental changes. We are now compelled to reconsider the logic of our established security problematique in a new age of upheaval and ongoing extinction. We are tasked with envisioning security in an age where we “are no longer monarchs of being, but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings” (Bryant 2011: 44). This requires both dissolving the image of humans as unbounded and outside nature, while simultaneously acknowledging the diverse, entangled nature of humans with the multiple subjects who are also threatened. Where might we turn? Some, like Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos, propose that we should abandon the concept of security and label it as “anti-politics” (Neocleous/Rigakos 2011). For them, security is an insidious mode of governing, “a political technology” (Neocleous 2008: 4). It treats people less as human beings than as objects to be administered and “suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told—never could be told—what might count as having achieved it.” This security fetishism grounds the state, and state power more specifically, as the terrain of modern politics and security (Neocleous 2008: 185-186). Others have suggested that we resist the hegemonic and overwhelmingly negative conceptions of security and focus instead on developing and supporting positive notions—moves intended to redeem the promise of security and explore the conditions of possibility for humans to be secure without being pacified or dominated (Schuilenberg et al. 2015; Wood/Shearing 2007). These perspectives derive from the belief that security holds both subjective and objective dimensions. Though the negative Hobbesian influence on security is strong, alternative conceptualizations recognize security as a public good, held communally. It cannot be experienced solely through a single unit, such as the state or the individual. Authors working from these perspectives contend that security also relates to notions such as trust, well-being, belonging, as much as it does to threat, power, coercion, and violence. In addition, there are research agendas that emphasize security as emancipation, or sustainable security, that offer fluid visions of security that do not depend upon logics of exclusion, criminality, and the restriction of liberty (Booth 2007; Bigo 2010; Crawford 2014; Harrington 2015). Whether negative or positive, purely Holocene approaches to security offer ultimately unsatisfactory answers to dealing with our new age. To

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be sure, the Anthropocene offers us ample opportunities and avenues for conjuring up negative visions of security. It does not take much imagination to conclude that rising seas, decreasing land productivity, collapsing ecosystems, uninhabitable zones and extinctions will stoke conflict, increase criminality, deplete government resources and contribute to ethnic, class and other social tensions. Most of these effects are felt most acutely in already vulnerable regions of the world like subSaharan Africa, and the Middle East. In an unforeseen twist, ideas of positive security and its attachment to human connections and local capacity-building overlap with the hopeful discourse of a Good Anthropocene, promoted by the Breakthrough Institute. In this reading the new age is not, or at least does not have to be, an age of crisis but constitutes “the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity” (Ellis 2011). We are now masters of the Earth. Instead of lamenting this ‘tragedy’ we should become better at it. This echoes some of the ideas from positive security we have just canvased—ideas that contrast dominant ideas of security such as crime, conflict, and disorder, with alternative discourses that promote security’s role in fostering human connections, local capacity-building and mutual relationships. The Anthropocene is indeed a crisis. It offers us little hope that life within it will be any better for humans and our nonhuman kin. Yet, to reduce the future to one of apocalyptic visions of flooded cities, charred farmlands and waves of migrants battling for access to ever-dwindling resources in the developed world is a mythical replay of Hobbesianinspired security forms that we hope to have dispelled earlier in this book. The Anthropocene should likewise not be reduced to some innate benevolence of a whole system. The feminized image of Gaia so prevalent in Anthropocene discourse is used to portray the Earth system as a bountiful goddess or a nurturing mother, able to provide for all life, including humans, so long as we protect and sustain her natural state. However, as Latour reminds us, the Earth system (Gaia) is both nurturing and destructive. She is not indifferent as she is so clearly affected by human behavior. But she is simultaneously “…too fragile to play the calming role of old nature, too unconcerned by our destiny to be a Mother, too unable to be propitiated by deals and sacrifices to be a Goddess” (Latour 2011b: 9). How then do we fashion security for our new age? If both traditional negative and positive form of security fall short, are there other avenues

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

left to pursue? We propose that the Anthropocene requires us to explore an abstract and transcendent ethos of security based on the notion of care. Not a new set of rules, but a way of being out of which action arises that fully recognizes what our careless failure to recognize our entanglements has wrought. It represents a promising, if also problematic, approach to security in the Anthropocene, this age of shared threat. It may not save us from the consequences of our past actions (perhaps we are unredeemable) but it can show us that there exist possibilities of worldly responses within seemingly apocalyptic times. A comment on the wording we have employed. We do not think that it is possible or desirable to outline blueprints for action that humans should enact in light of the emerging data on the Anthropocene. Of course the Anthropocene demands ethical thinking and the pursuit of normatively better ways of dealing with environmental change. Thus we welcome the growing discussion on ethics in the Anthropocene (Schmidt et al. 2016). Yet, the Anthropocene is indeed too vast, complex, multi-faceted and unknown to lend itself to some overarching program of action. Likewise the most potent critique of the Anthropocene idea is its propensity to reduce humanity to a single force of nature. To accept this critique, as we do, and then to seek to devise a schematic set of ideas for action that are applied to great swathes of the world is problematic, to say the least. Some thinkers, like Clive Hamilton (2015) believe that ethics are “feeble” in light of the earth-shattering transitions that we are now experiencing. There is much to applaud in Hamilton’s urging that we should avoid lapsing into familiar forms of thinking that normalize the exceptional predicament of the Anthropocene. As the previous chapter showed, we too are deeply wary of the desire to revert to emergency logics. Declaring the exceptionalism of the Anthropocene as justification to circumvent or dismiss legal, societal, and political norms is a dangerous maneuver and one that is unlikely to effectively guide us as we learn to live in the Anthropocene. Instead we take inspiration from two primary repositories. First, we draw on Heidegger who understands ‘ethos’ as a self-transformative contemplation of Dasein, being-in-the-world. For Heidegger, the idea of ethos is beyond the powers of representation. He contrasts it with ‘ethics’, which for him are calculative—prescribing rules for living and apportioning praise and blame based on subsequent behavior. In contrast the idea of an ethos, as a sensibility, recognizes the need for constant choice

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about how to live an authentic life (Heidegger/Farrell 1993). Ethos is a lively, poetic and contemplative way of being, one that is necessarily vague, contradictory, and flexible. Ethos opens up, rather than works within, ruledefined boundaries that neatly define categories of humanness, nature and society. Secondly, in our turn towards care we draw upon a long tradition of ‘virtue ethics’, which emphasizes character dispositions, such as humility and gratitude. These dispositions help expand the imagination and, in doing so, can contribute to new forms of security relationships for the Anthropocene. This idea responds to the deficiency of both deontological and consequentialist approaches to security ethics, which simply cannot cope with the multi-scalar complexity and unpredictability of Anthropocene relations. Thirdly, in our turn toward care we also recognize both feminist and indigenous philosophies that emphasize different, relational ontologies and cosmologies. These rich traditions, that are so often absent from security thinking, can help broaden our imagination in ways that recognize the character of the planet’s interlocking crises and how our actions should be guided and for what purpose. This may frustrate some readers, particularly given the fact that the ethics of security is a contentious topic, having been ignored or deemed irrelevant by security scholars until recently.3 This is so despite the fact our current predicaments derive, at least in part, from the development of strict ethical norms that have helped to lock in problematic routines of behavior at the expense of contemplation, deliberation and reflexivity. This resonates with feminist theorists who have pushed back against the idea that a codified set of moral principles can be applied to guide moral agents or should be used as a way to explain the justness of a fully-formed agent’s decision (Walker 2007: 8). A turn to ethos allows for the malleability required to fully transition security ideas out of the Holocene. Ethos is what motivates, enlivens and creates the practices by which we order our security cultures. Ethics can shift and change in line with the guiding ethos that underpins them. 3 | A recent collection edited by Anthony Burke and Jonna Nyman has attempted to fill in the gaps of ethical security studies; see Burke/Nyman (2016). Other works include Rita Floyd’s attempts to outline a morally just securitization theory (Floyd 2011), as well as Burke, Lee-Koo, and McDonald’s turn towards security cosmopolitanism (2014).

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

Emphasizing the ethos of care, and the alternative security logics it enables, can help push back against contemporary forms of planetary ethics, which offer rigid impositions of historically contingent, anthropocentric, and power-infused modes of being, and denies the multiplicity of the worlds in which we are embedded.4 Care allows us to emphasize local solutions to specific problems, whilst still attuning ourselves to the relations with distant places, others, and forces. If we are to focus on cultivating a new ethos of security, one that is posthuman, post-natural, post-environmentalist and that does not rely upon Schmittian-inspired logics, where might we turn? Can we end up avoiding all that and still speak of security? While we are aware of the difficulty of answering that question, we believe security is a necessary component of adjusting to the Anthropocene. Yet we are forced to reconsider the traditional obsession with tragedy (which is everywhere in Anthropocene discourse) and instead focus on an ultimate horizon of politics—the injunction to extend hospitality, gratitude and finally, care. We argue that the notion of care attunes us to the shifting contours of life and death in the Anthropocene. A security that is caring and careful preserves the concept’s historical coherence. Care also emphasizes the relational practices that underpin the survival and flourishing of life in addition to embracing, and accepting, the finality of earthly existence in the Anthropocene.

C an securit y be careful? In a fundamental sense security has always been about care. Before we began associating it with emergency and friend/enemy distinctions, it referred to care, specifically the absence of care. This is the constitutive tension at the heart of security. John T. Hamilton expertly explains in his book Security: Politics, Humanity and the Philology of Care (2013: 10) that our concern for security is ultimately a concern to be without concern. We 4 | Though we differ in some respects, Joanna Zylinska’s remarkable short book, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is well worth reading. Her minimal ethics, inspired by Adorno, is meant to find a discursive, affective and corporeal response to difference, to multiplicity, and our relations with the Anthropocene—this “something else”; see Zylinska (2014).

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have struggled to reconcile this from the earliest beginning of the security concept, which was formed via Roman mythology by the character Cura, the personification of care and concern. From Cura comes the etymological root of security, securitas, which translates into modern English as the state of being removed from care; the state of being care-free. Hamilton (2013: 5) explains: The word is transparent enough, featuring three distinct components: the prefix sē- (apart, aside, away from); the noun cura (care, concern, attention, worry); and the suffix-tas (denoting a condition or state of being). Securitas, therefore, denotes a condition of being separated from care, a state wherein concerns and worries have been put off to the side. Man will be literally secure when he is removed from Cura’s governance, when his unified being is split apart, back into its discrete elements.

This reading tells us that the desire for security—understood as certitude and trust—is seemingly universal and timeless. We all seek to reduce uncertainty and the risk of personal harm it brings. Securitas is an ideal state where there is no risk and care is no longer needed; where we can exist in serene tranquility, without worry and with the knowledge that no harm is coming. Yet, the flip side of the security-care relationship points to an inherent contradiction. […] Securitas can just as well refer to ‘indifference’ (the lack of interest) or ‘negligence’ (the lack of concern for a person or object). By removing cura as commitment or concentrated effort, by ignoring the loved one or neglecting one’s work, the elimination of care denotes ‘heedlessness’, implying that one is no longer driven by the concerns that are believed to define and guide human existence, moral behavior, or practical action. Free from these kinds of concern, we are secure in the sense of being inattentive or indifferent, foolhardy or delinquent. In this case, the privation of devoted attention threatens to leave us deprived. (Hamilton 2013: 11)

From its earliest beginnings care has played a central role in security and the desire to eradicate care continues to drive our security decisions. Yet Hamilton also makes clear that the contours of security have always been contested. He weaves in a variety of sources, from ancient Greek poetry to Roman stoicism, from Hobbes to Schmitt and Heidegger, to underline the

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

“vast network of mythical, linguistic, and cultural valences and traditions that have motivated the term’s usage across histories” (Hamilton 2013: 276). The ambiguity and mystery of security that has generated so many shifting depictions over the centuries “stems from the varying values of cura, the concern that security seems to eliminate (Hamilton 2013: 10). For a variety of reasons, not least our collective agential inability to transcend the Anthropocene and its physical and philosophical effects, we are driven to renegotiate security around a sensibility of care. Before constructing a robust image, and defense, of care in the Anthropocene it is necessary to acknowledge others who have, to use Foucault’s phrasing, explored “the art of living under the theme of the care” (Foucault 1986: 45).5 The feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, first published in 1982, has been widely credited as the most influential expression of a feminist ethics of care and is primarily responsible for the modern development of the care idea. Gilligan’s research found that the developmental psychology of men and women differed in significant ways and that this difference challenged the assumptions about moral “maturity”. She showed how men often thought about relationships in hierarchical terms and morality in terms of a justice imperative, with reciprocity being the guiding principle. According to the accepted “Kohlberg” model of objective, hierarchical moral growth, the highest form of moral reasoning is the ability to apply universal, impartial principles to make ethical judgments. Gilligan argued that Kohlberg’s model occluded distinctly feminine moral reasoning that did not appeal to general principles. She found that women were more likely to imagine relationships as webs, and morality therefore was deemed more complicated than finding ‘right and wrong’. In our terms they act out of a different sensibility or ethos, a different way of being, or in Dorothy Smith’s (1987) terms, a different “way of seeing”. Because relationships were cast in web-like terms rather than hierarchy, it meant that women privileged interconnections over inequality. Gilligan (1982 [1993]: 62). concludes: The experiences of inequality and interconnection, inherent in the relation of parent and child, then give rise to the ethics of justice and care, 5 | Foucault (1978) was using the term slightly differently, writing about ‘care for oneself’ as a way to ‘know thyself’, part of the spiritual activity of philosophy.

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the ideals of human relationships—the vision that self and other will be treated as of equal worth, that despite differences in power, things will be fair; the vision that everyone will be responded to and included, that no one will be left alone or hurt. These disparate visions in their tension reflect the paradoxical truths of human experience—that we know ourselves as separate only insofar as we live in connection with others, and that we experience relationship only insofar as we differentiate other from self. Gilligan distinguished between masculine, universal ideas of justice, duty, obligation and feminine, contextualized notions of care. In this way she countered deontological and consequentialist ethical paradigms with a care perspective that was particular and contextual. Out of this has sprung a well-developed, though still evolving tradition of care ethics. Nel Noddings (1984) drew from the feminist insight that “the personal is political” to argue that political institutions needed to be built from the experiences felt in individual personal lives. Because the makeup of society’s political institutions helps determine what is possible in our individual lives, to assume these institutions have an abstract, ordained character is woefully naïve. Noddings controversially concluded that care is untranslatable into a general political theory and can never be actualized in political institutions. She wrote: “[N]o institution or nation can be ethical. It cannot meet the other as one-caring or as one trying to care. It can only capture in general terms what particular ones-caring would like to have done in well-described situations” (Noddings, 1984: 103). The political scientist Joan Tronto’s 1993 book Moral Boundaries refined Gilligan’s thought and countered Noddings arguments. Tronto eschewed Glligan’s claims of a “women’s morality”, countering instead with a care ethic that emphasized the values typically associated with women (Tronto 1993). Tronto also dismissed Noddings’ rejection of institutional forms of care, saying they encouraged parochialism—a form of narcissistic retreat. She wrote that those forms of care ethics “could quickly become a way to argue that everyone should cultivate one’s own garden, and let others take care of themselves” (Tronto 1993: 171). Her solution was to build radically democratic forms of care that can be connected to ideas about global justice. The founding generation of care thinkers clearly differed in many respects but they were united in rejecting traditional forms of Kantian or utilitarian moral theory. For them morality was never impartial, justice

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

does not form the basis of morality, and humans are not autonomous individuals. They all reject what Walker (2007: 30) refers to as the, “theoretical-juridical model” of moral theory, meant to represent “morality as a compact, propositionally codifiable, impersonally action-guiding system, and linked to the idea of a pure core of moral knowledge separable from the particular features of local social lives and available to reflection without empirical inquiry”. While we recognize that there may be certain circumstances in which Kantian or utilitarian/consequentialist theories may be appropriate, the ideas and approaches of care emphasize concerns that are woefully underappreciated (Collins 2015: 6). This severely limits the possibilities of moving beyond the radical divisibility of humans and nature within the context of an entangled earth. Instead of diving further into decades-long, intra-paradigm debates, we believe we would be better served to outline the key concerns of care theory. At its core it is about concrete, particular, relationships. Humans should pursue moral action based upon their empathic consideration of the other they exist in relation to. This perspective de-emphasizes the traditional view that ethics should be derived from the rational invocation of universal duties, responsibilities, or principles expressed as rules for action. In place of that we should consider the unique value of personal relationships and ongoing patterns of interactions and responses. This means being cognizant of the needs, wants, and desires of the “world”, defined as one’s self, loved ones, near and distant others, society, and the planet (Engster 2004: 117; Rifkin 2009). Importantly though, “morality demands actions and attitudes of care, in addition to or even more importantly than those of respect, non-interference, and tit-for-tat reciprocity (which care ethicists generally see as over-emphasized in other ethical and political theories)” (Collins 2015: 5). Care then becomes an approach to life, a pervasive sensibility—in Foucault’s language, a “theme” under which we live—that recognizes the needs of others, attempts to respond to/provide for those needs, and establishes trusting relationships. It centers the social and the unequal power relationships that define it, moving beyond critique to advocate “new forms of relationships, institutions, and actions that enhance mutuality and well-being” (Lawson 2007: 9). It recognizes how different historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care. In the context of the Anthropocene this includes how human decisions over time have created the conditions for ‘unnatural’ disasters like Arctic ice melt, drought, famine, flooding, mass extinction etc.

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The ethics of care is perhaps the most significant ethical theory to emerge from feminist analyses. How it translates into the world of security—so often filled with danger, harm, and violence—is an evolving, still unsettled question. Feminist approaches to security have indeed grown into a well-institutionalized sub-field, but the idea of care remains relatively under developed as a security concept. When it has been examined, most notably over the past two decades by scholars like Sara Ruddick (1989), Fiona Robinson (1999; 2011), Virginia Held (2006), and Kimberly Hutchings (1999; 2000; Hutchings/Frazer 2014) care ethics and security have been bonded by emphasizing the connections between the universal and the particular. They argue against security logics that emphasize the ontological primacy of homo economicus: the concept of human as an independent, value-maximizing and self-reliant subject. Such thinking obscures the particular social reality around the world, especially the experiences felt by women, who are more likely to “define themselves in and through their relations with children and other family members— including those who are elderly or chronically ill—or with friends or members of their communities” (Robinson 2011: 90). More directly it helps maintain a deeply unjust and violent international society that views militarism as an inevitable byproduct of human nature rather than a masculinized ideology produced through social practice. These care authors explore the contours of contemporary security issues like the concept of ‘just war’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘peacekeeping’, and ‘human security’. Though each offers a unique position, a unifying thread has been a fixation on the practices rather than the principles that contribute to violence. Most crucially they emphasize the persistence of everyday material insecurities (Robinson 2015). They argue that instead of strictly focusing on the spectacular moments of violence and conflict that accompany the breakdowns in social order, a feminist ethics of security must also look to ‘marginalized sites’ (Stern 2006: 182-183). Rather than the Schmittian inspired version of securitization that is enacted via the transition to a state of exception, a care ethos can, and should, acknowledge the relentless insecurities of the unexceptional.6 This invocation of care provides an alternative to the atomistic theories of ethical virtue that

6 | For an alternative conception of securitization that does this, see Schuilenburg (2015).

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

emphasize righteous, masculine qualities of honor, courage, intelligence, and detachment.

C are and the A nthropocene Fiona Robinson’s pioneering work on care ethics and human security is an important conduit for us as we seek to interject a sensibility of care into the Anthropocene. Robinson describes how a relational, interpersonal ethics of care could be cultivated in state morality, as well as in burgeoning forms of global civil society emerging at the dawn of the 21st century. Including care into discussions of international ethics: […] it may be possible to replace the global ‘culture of neglect’ with a new culture of attentiveness responsibility; international relations, from this perspective would be characterized less exclusively by the liberal values of autonomy, rationality, and reciprocity and increasingly by the ‘caring’ virtues of responsibility, trust, and friendship. (Robinson 1997: 129)

This bypasses the pervasive tension between perceived obligations to fellow citizens and obligations to human beings around the world. By focusing on relationships it helps us notice the mutual dependence of peoples and the continued construction of difference that is embedded in our political, institutional, and cultural norms (Robinson 1997). Seeing the world differently allows us to conceive of ourselves as entangled beings-in-relation, placed in a world that is more alive and diverse than we have ever imagined. This translates directly into our practices of everyday security ethics—transcending the prism of impartiality that renders life impersonal, independent, and distant. Thus, we propose turning security on its head: from care-free to carefull and careful. Social life is dependent upon caring relationships.7 This means that it is not only the young, sick, elderly, or those that have suffered harm who require care, but all of us (and this ‘us’ is very much open). Our very first (and often our last) moments on earth are defined by care. 7 | This echoes Rifkin’s (2009) analysis of the possibility of an ever-wider embrace of empathy. See also Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2012) analysis of the history of, and possibilities for, widening spheres of institutionalized inclusion.

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Because our normative frameworks of security, both within criminology and international relations, have been, and are, obsessed with existential threats of violence and conflict and the breakdown of civil and political liberties, it becomes easy to dismiss, or more likely ignore, the everyday forms of care that are required for individual and collective human security. Our traditional approaches (for instance, Schmittian securitization theory, discussed earlier) emphasize the exceptional qualities of security, invoking it as a last resort, rather than a first image. From this perspective it is only when our security (narrowly understood) is obtained should we turn our attention to the provision of care for seemingly distant actors (human or otherwise) who are so often devoid of security. This is a highly misleading story of security, and deeply troubling for our prospects in the Anthropocene. It ignores how most security issues— from the traditional “high” security of militaries and interstate war to the “low” security of individual human needs (Brodeur 1983) like health, shelter, and education—are imbued with practices and sensibilities of care. The onset of violent conflict inevitably leads to a breakdown in care services, shutting off important pathways for social cohesion and wellbeing, and making it harder to cease hostilities. Likewise, inequalities of care exist. Those who experience or are threatened by violence, poverty, environmental degradation, and health pandemics are often those for whom caring relations and institutions are nonexistent. The erosion of, or the failure to build, state and local services that care for citizens is often exacerbated by a global political economy that is built upon the hidden labor and care of women (particularly of color). In these cases, care is either rendered peripheral to the needs of international capital or is seen as innately feminine and thus better provided in the private sphere of the home. The masked existence of care as a security logic blunts some of the anticipated criticism that would label care responses as naïve, idealistic, or foreign to the ‘real world’ of conflictual states and the overwhelming risk embedded in the Anthropocene idea. Indeed, care and security have always intermingled. It seems odd, if not entirely reckless then to proceed into the new age reusing the same ideas, of carelessness, that helped produce our planetary predicament. Re-engaging and repositioning our understanding of security as the state of being without care is a useful way of thinking and acting in the Anthropocene. As humanity crosses some identified planetary boundaries

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

and into uncharted territories, the ideal type of security becomes not simply a form of safety that allows us to do whatever we please without fear of harm. Instead the Anthropocene obliges us to see security as a way to act in relations to others in curious and creative ways—to act with care, to be care-full and to be careful. In this spirit we may then begin privileging alternative forms of security that are immanent, emergent, and speculative. Doing so allows us to account for the deep entanglement and non-reciprocity that characterizes the Anthropocene, whilst still activating the security concept so crucial to understanding our planetary predicament. Pursuing care allows us to construct new logics of security, engage with older, marginalized forms that focus on the care drive, and to theorize based upon a deeply relational ontology that goes further than simply acknowledging interconnections of harm and shared risks. There are some problematic elements in an ethos of care. Definitions of what constitutes ‘caring,’ generally employ rigid forms of anthropocentrism, seen particularly in Robinson’s reappraisal of human security. These offer a truncated view of earthly life. Most versions of care view it primarily as a mode of recognizing near and distant others as ‘real’ human beings. As our previous chapters have sought to break down the impermanent barriers between humans, nature, and security, we should be willing to expand and open up sensibilities of care to acknowledge and respond to the various, often strange, forms of human and nonhuman relationships. Security in the Anthropocene requires an open-ended process of deciding, in companionship with our fellow earthlings what we might become. In the midst of the tragedy of the Anthropocene, there is also “a unique opportunity for humanity to re-invent itself affirmatively, through creativity and empowering ethical relations, and not only negatively, through vulnerability and fear. It is a chance to identify opportunities for resistance and empowerment on a planetary scale” (Braidotti 2013: 195).8

8 | Some scholars (including care proponents) have argued that it cannot be translated into a comprehensive, universal political theory (Barry 1995). Noddings (1984: 103) claims that it is better left as a personal moral guide because “no institution nor nation can be ethical…It can only capture in general terms what particular one’s caring would like to have done in well-described situations”. There is a tension here between the universality of care as a human virtue, and

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The limits of care How can care, something so ephemeral and localized be considered an adequate response to Anthropocene threats that are planet-wide and occur along geological timescales? Can care, a logic buried deep in the recesses of security’s philology, truthfully be expected to transform human actions that are relentlessly critiqued as rapacious and self-interested? Will it stop the seemingly inevitable ‘climate wars’ (Dyer 2009; Parenti 2012)? What if it is used to legitimate neoliberal forms of ‘humanitarianism’ that are so often accompanied by sovereign and/or biopolitical violences on vulnerable populations (Piotukh 2015)? And just what can an ethos of care do to subvert or transform the power-laden carbon lock-ins found in technological, organizational, social and institutional systems (Unruh 2002)? If held to such standards, the answer is, of course, to concede that care is inadequate. It will not on its own prevent the earth from warming, hinder the damaging powers of market processes, or overcome the deep divisions that separate humans from each other and from the wider webs of life in which we are all enmeshed. Yet care, as a sensibility, helps repurpose our pursuit of security for the Anthropocene. Part of the issue with answering the above charges is that the questions themselves are remnants of a past age. Our Holocene-bred logics that champion reductive forms of safety and security are barriers to Anthropocene-era struggles which require a level of intellectual openness that expand and push the boundaries of comfort for most security scholars. Care already exists—our first moments on Earth are defined by diverse forms of care. By activating multiple traditions of care, found often in subaltern discourses/practices, we can recode and reclaim security away from its fatalistic determinism that dooms the world to apocalyptic conflicts over dwindling resources. It also allows us to cross the scalar and temporal zones that are impenetrable to conventional security studies, transcend the human-nature binaries that restrict who or what is worthy of ethical consideration, and make visible the immanent forms of relationality that bind us with our nonhuman companions. Given the character of Earth system changes, care is appropriate because it demands nothing in return—no search for justice the potential for general legal rules to enact harm and violence on the particular needs and vulnerabilities of individuals.

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

and reciprocity in a world that is indifferent to us. If we are to take the Anthropocene seriously we need to grow accustomed to, in fact embrace, loss and failure. Caring obliges us to act in a spirit of empathy; to engage in gift-giving and to feel gratitude in the midst of ongoing, seemingly perpetual, social and ecological crises. With this in mind, we now turn our attention to the ways that care intersects with Anthropocene security. Our appeal is open-ended and should not be considered definitive. All of these components depend upon the radical rethinking of subjectivity in security—from our ideas about the self-contained human as a security actor to the detached versions of nature that characterize so much security literature. Care forces us to: acknowledge the new forms of risk, uncertainty, and failure; focus on the micropolitics of the self and community in relation to a widened circle of others; and accept relational forms of security and non-reciprocity.

R isk and uncertaint y Connections between risk and security are long-established. It is now common to see suggestions that risk has become the dominant logic of security (Zedner 2009; O’Malley 2004a). As Olaf Corry explains, rather than defending against and deterring identifiable foes and criminals our security practices are designed around prevention, probabilities, possible future scenarios and managing diffuse risks (Corry 2012: 36). Indeed within both criminology and international relations a logic of risk prevention remains central across theories. The “geostory”—to use Latour’s (2015a) term—that the Anthropocene references, compels us to acknowledge and expect monumental changes, not just in terms of a warming climate, but also rising seas, a growing intensity of storm activities, increasing periods of extreme drought, and a mass extinction event not seen in 56 million years. These changes are so severe and unpredictable that they present entirely new questions of risk mitigation and present new challenges about how to assuage fears about both known and unknown impacts. Partially as a result there exists now a new primacy of risk as an operating principle as well as a suite of diverse characteristics we might call risk practices—something that Beck sought to capture with his term “risk society” (Beck 1992) and in his more recent use of “metamorphosis” (Beck 2016) as a metaphor in understanding our

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new age. Given the complexity and unpredictability of the Earth system, risk comprises a key avenue where the Anthropocene and security meet. A security of care allows us to embrace the diverse ways that risk and uncertainty intersect in the Anthropocene. To adopt a perspective of care would be to accept the fact that what the world will look like in 50 or 100 or 1000 years is largely unknown, yet these varying temporal scales are worthy of our attention. Though we cannot be certain in specific terms, we do know that our climatic future will not resemble our past, and thus accordingly our expectations of security must also change, away from preparing for immediate, identifiable, and predicted ‘foes’ and towards a broader security ecology that understands that Anthropocene risk is inevitable and inherently relational. The speed and scale of global change in the Anthropocene is almost imponderable and unimaginable. This demands care rather than fear or hope. It requires us to shift the sensibility out of which we act to one that will promote actions that—while all specific and context specific—are united by a style of response, a “family resemblance” to use Wittgenstein’s term (Wittgenstein/Hacker 2001), sharply distinguished from the style of human action that characterized the Holocene. As we cultivate a sensibility of care, we will move far away from the style of carelessness that our cosmologies of separation enabled, to a style, and an associated repertories of action, that are imbued with care and carefulness—a style that recognizes our entanglements and our worldliness, and the caution that this requires. From the perspective of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) it makes sense to construct a broad range of climate scenarios. But incorporating long-term scenario modeling into traditional security studies has been difficult, politically divisive, and incongruent to most approaches, which are built upon expediency and relevancy to what are seen as the pressing problems of the world at hand. The uncertainty embedded in Anthropocene discourse is a significant challenge for theorists of risk and governmentality. The everyday inscription of a calculative and anticipatory mindset, with its focus on the specification of risks, makes little sense in a complex Earth system—the interconnected atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and lithosphere— undergoing massive transformation. The world may now be slowly preparing for a planet that will be 2°C warmer by the end of the century. But, what happens if the world grows 4°C warmer by 2100, as some now fear (Sherwood et al. 2014)? Under such a scenario the Earth would be

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

hotter than it has been in 15 million years. The variability across models and simulations is not a matter of slight adjustment. A world four degrees warmer would mark a monumental escalation of impacts on human communities. Already we are witnesses to the first iterations of human climateinduced migration, with the government of Kiribati, a small pacific island nation, forced to plan wholesale evacuations, including the purchase of land in Fiji (Caramel 2014). The numerous contextual security relations at play—between states that are helping to negotiate new territory for the Kiribatians, transnational familial ties that may provide assistance, between citizens and non-citizens that now meet each other, and within the institutions of global governance that facilitate/validate such a move— indicate that risk and security is a matter for, and about care, and not simply a case study in the ‘threat multiplication’ of climate change. We would do well to remember Donna Haraway’s (2015: 160) words that “Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.” Security in the Anthropocene is proving to be as much about the extension and absorption of hospitality as it is about predicting the ‘hot spots’ of climate conflict. The risks involved in Anthropocene uncertainties, are immense. Nonetheless, we should not resign ourselves either solely to a fear of the unknown or alternatively derive great hope from its potential—although both, as we have seen, have proven to be tempting.9 Many security scholars have followed Beck’s (1997) lead in declaring that reorganizing around risk paralyzes action and “dims the horizon” of policy options. When the World Economic Forum (2016) lists the failure of climate change adaptation/ mitigation as the world’s largest risk in terms of impact, it is conveying a sense of long-term anxiety, of vulnerability to change. Pat O’Malley though highlights the “uncertain promise of risk” (O’Malley 2004b). He argues that security approaches (critical criminology in particular) […] assume the unity of risk, as if risk-centred government can be imagined as one thing, rather than a heterogeneous array of practices with diverse effects and 9 | The most damaging of all options would be to believe that the uncertainty inherent to Earth system science means that the science ‘isn’t settled’ and we should therefore deny the existence of man-made climate change and argue that the risks are overblown.

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implications. They assume that risk can only be imagined and operationalised as a zero-sum: a game between potential victims and potential offenders, in which the risks to one party are created by the other (Ibid 325-326).

The dynamism of the Anthropocene alerts us to new spatial, temporal, and conceptual ideas of risk. The Anthropocene is, and will be, felt unevenly. Developing countries (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia) are most vulnerable to overcrowding, resource constraints and climate disruption, yet Anthropocene risk is never entirely localized. Nor is it held to a single moment in time. The familiar environmentalist refrain, echoed by some politicians and activists, is to act now so as to leave a better world for our children and grandchildren. This is true and noble of course, but how could we extend risk through geological time, given recent predictions that man-made global warming over the past two centuries is significant enough to suppress the next ice age, which is not due for another 50.000 years (Archer 2009)? The precautionary principle is a foundational principle of ecological stewardship that tries to answer how to act in the face of risk and uncertainty. It has guided influential international environmental agreements like the Montreal Protocol of 1987 and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The principle states that “if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof falls on those who advocate taking the action, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue” (de Carvalho et al. 2010). This activates certain civic and legal responsibilities including public dialogue, reflexivity and deliberative democracy that can observe, debate, and redesign (if need be) policies and norms. The value of the precautionary principle is to alert us to our ethical obligations when acting in the face of ecological uncertainty. We should not postpone action that can address climate change or other environmental harms because we lack full scientific certainty. We should, however, act carefully. This contrasts with traditional discourses of security that forever searches for certainty and predictability. The precautionary principle recognizes the necessity of ethical action in the face of uncertainty (Fierke 2016). An ethos of care embraces shared anxieties and harms, whilst accepting and embracing the contextual relationality of risk, uncertainty and security. It tells us that acting ethically in the face of uncertainty is a

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

moral imperative. It avoids necessarily holding the experience of risk as corrosive or debilitating. According to Timothy Morton (2015: 185) […] the basic attunement of the Anthropocene is anxiety, which is precisely the feeling of the loss of world—the end of the world, but not as we thought, a great bang or a void, but a prolongation of things in synchrony with the disappearance of meaningful backdrop—and thus the disappearance of the foreground as such.

The spectacular uniqueness of the Anthropocene means that almost any imagined risk is deemed possible—this makes either defensive or more hopeful action exceedingly difficult. This is both a function of our entangled earthly relations and the time frames we now use to prepare for the future. The prolongation and dispersal of risk and harm, across space and time may prompt aggressive action in the name of security, but it might also allow us to harness the promise of care across populations (both human and nonhuman) and unite in solidarity of shared malaise, fear, and hope.

Towards a micro - politics of care On its own, the Anthropocene is a daunting challenge to the world. For some, to add a seemingly ephemeral notion of care to our security actions in the context of these epochal changes would be wishful thinking at best, and dangerously naïve at worst. We need action, not care. While much of this book has already answered these reservations at length by arguing that both carelessness and care constitute sensibilities out of which action arises, we wish to say a few more words on how care might be transformed from potential or sentiment into action. Extending care and promoting empathic relations into security requires, first and foremost, an awareness of entanglement and relationality. Widening the circle of security to encompass not just humans and states, but also the generations unborn, nonhumans, and ecosystems, is a necessary foundational step that allows us to advance multi-sited forms of care. We say multi-sited because it would be ineffectual and contrary to its spirit to restrict care to macro-based policies or to advocate for a retreat to inward-focused forms of self-care. Both of these have no chance, on their own, to secure the planet. In fact, the restriction of viable security

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actions to a single level would be unaligned with the distribution of the Anthropocene’s security effects. The Anthropocene incorporates intertwined drivers, each with dispersed and unequal effects that cannot be easily separated. Take for instance the growing use of nitrogen to fertilize food crops. The flows of biogechemicals like nitrogen and phosphorous are used by Will Steffen, Johan Rockström and colleagues as one of the Earth system processes that make up their planetary boundaries framework (Steffen et al. 2015a). These identified thresholds are used to show the capacity of the Earth system to persist in a Holocene-like state.10 Crossing the planet’s ‘safe operating spaces’ impacts the resilience of the system, leading eventually to global-level transitions. Nitrogen cycling has quite likely never been a topic that has interested security scholars. The growing availability of nitrogen, though, has been a major reason for the dramatic increase in food security for some countries. That said, the rise in the production and use of nitrogen has posed increasing threats to human and ecosystem health. Biermann et al. (2016: 343) explain: The growing availability of nitrogen allowed some countries to dramatically increase food production, often followed by socio-economic commercialization, the rise of major multinational corporations in the food sector, and the support of vast monocultures. But this unprecedented and unbounded use of nitrogen has critically disrupted its natural cycle, with numerous harmful effects such as pollution and eutrophication. At the same time, a significant share of the human population still lacks sufficient access to food. Policies to address this global food insecurity, often directed at increasing food production, may further exacerbate disruptions of the nitrogen cycle.

Paradoxically then, the Anthropocene alerts us to a world that is simultaneously too nitrogen-rich and too nitrogen-poor—a good example of contesting securities. The unequal distribution of nitrogen reinforces the structural inequalities leading to human insecurity by denying poor 10 | There are nine identified boundaries: climate change, change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and extinctions), stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, land system change, freshwater use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and introduction of novel entities (Steffen et al. 2015a).

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

local areas the safety from rising food production while distributing the harms of an overproduction of nitrogen globally. Alleviating the imbalance though cannot simply be a question of using better technology and agricultural management to increase the applied nitrogen uptake by crops. Maintaining a sustainable balance of elements in the environment contributes to biodiversity on land and in the sea. If nitrogen use continues to surpass the identified planetary boundary it will have devastating impacts. At the local and regional level it will lead to the widespread eutrophication of freshwater systems. Globally this could eventually lead to a large-scale ocean anoxic event, something that has not occurred for millions of years and which would slow ocean circulation, increase climate warming, and contribute to mass extinction (Steffen et al. 2015b). How then to respond? Embracing a caring sensibility in this instance would entail acknowledging nitrogen and other biogeochemical flows as Anthropocene security issues, not by virtue of their potential to undermine global peace or community safety, but because they enact what Audra Mitchell (2015) terms “worldly notions of harm,” distributed across time, space, and worlds of being. Certainly these flows affect the daily well-being of individuals (mostly in obtuse ways), but they also point to something more complex and ultimately unsettling; namely that security exists not as the liminal moment that divides safety from danger for a defined moral community,11 but as a series of banal planetary functions made up of complex human and nonhuman assemblages. As security scholars we should then promote what Anna Tsing refers to as the “arts of noticing”— which encourages us to watch for, listen to, and measure the multi-sited assemblages of human and nonhuman forces that lead to world-making “happenings” (Tsing 2015). We are tasked with responding in concert with others to give and receive care in the midst of these imbalances, even if responsibility cannot be firmly established (Clark 2011). It is not enough to simply bring nitrogen flows into the traditional security toolbox. These flows (and the Anthropocene that they help create) can fairly easily be situated within traditional geopolitical contexts, eg, the rise of industrial agriculture in the west and its impact on food supplies around the world (Gregory et al. 2005). These insights, while crucial to a broader understanding of food security, are insufficient for the range of harms, ethical attunement and moral responsibilities 11 | This moral community is almost always restricted to humans.

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enacted by the Anthropocene concept. Perhaps most importantly they do not adequately reflect on the range of possible responses. Our Holocene notions of security leave us in anthropocentric, Malthusian straitjackets. Biogeochemical flows are reduced to their impacts on global food supplies and become acute security threats when they are reduced to a level that will impact food supplies, human health and catalyze violent conflict between human communities, usually at the local level.12 They become comprehensible only in the context of human harm. It reflects in many ways Timothy Morton’s (2013) claim that we are blind to the viscous, nonlocal “hyperobjects”, which exist over scales impenetrable to humans. By virtue of humanity’s inability to comprehend the spatial and temporal scales of the Earth system, we can only experience nitrogen cycling as perceived events, eg, the local effects of pollution and eutrophication from fertilizer overuse. The force-fullness of biogeochemical flows is only partially felt; humans must inevitably withdraw from the hyperobject that can never truly be known. The same experience can be applied to other markers of the Anthropocene—including the functioning of the oceans, climate change, or biosphere integrity. These are increasingly accepted as legitimate security concerns yet they are experienced narrowly, in bite sizes that accord to dominant anthropocentric and instrumental abstractions. Even someone like Latour, despite his theoretical innovations, asks how we might represent the oceans or soils in the United Nations? Would we be better off adding these entities to our global parliaments? Using a sensibility of care, we might reverse this question and ask how can we bring the UN to the ocean? That is, in what ways can we relate to complex, strange, and entangled natural entities, which deserve recognition on the basis of care rather than any kind of reciprocal forms of justice?

12 | It should go without saying that global food security and its influence on human health as well as the potential for violent conflict should remain a significant area of concern. But, as Jon Foley and many other Earth system change scientists point out, land-use change, primarily in the service of preserving and expanding food systems has had enormous (largely negative) consequences for the planet. The food system, which includes crop and livestock production, contributes up to a third of total anthropogenic Green House Gas (GHG) emissions (Foley et al. 2005; Vermeulen et al. 2012).

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

This can be pursued in a number of different ways. Conventionally it means amplifying by whatever means available the injunction to care for the vibrant and diverse security of earthly life that exists in relation to our own daily choices. According to William Connolly (2013: 131), the idea is to fold amplified versions of care into “operational patterns of desire, faith, will, identity, and self-interest, rather than to rise to an entirely disinterested level entirely above the mundane worlds of desire, instrumentality, and politics.” These patterns, which are already so prevalent in security thinking could be amended through cultivating micro-political interventions that can occur across individual and local scales to, for example, reflect on how food practices affect the efficiency of food systems and intersect with diverse forms of harms across lifeworlds. This could emphasize building the resilience of local food production by accepting lower yields in areas with high nitrogen pollution, while simultaneously increasing nitrogen use in sustainable ways in areas that are deprived (Biermann et al. 2016). It is important to remember that the outcomes of caring in one part of the world may be completely different from another. Care highlights the important links between the ‘global’ and the ‘local.’ The ‘everyday’ realm of the household in terms of food security would be prioritized without negating those relations as integral parts of Earth system processes. Care works to connect a number of different scales—the body, the household, the nation-state, the ‘global’—recognizing them as “interconnected and mutually constitutive” (Robinson 2016: 127). Understanding how security operates along various scales of care would challenge us to be “attentive and responsive to our own location within circuits of power and privilege that connect our daily lives to those who are constructed as distant from us” (Lawson 2007: 7). While traditional interpretations of care can lead to better security outcomes, embracing a care ethos also pushes us to explore outside the limits of Western cosmologies that struggle to comprehend the Anthropocene’s unbounded visions of time, space, and movement that seep into one another. Audra Mitchell has explored this phenomenon in the context of marine plastic, arguing that its spatio-temporal, material, scalar and relational features challenge conventional Western ethics.13 She writes that the North Pacific Garbage Patch is a spectacle of environmental 13 | The prevalence and the long-term ‘life’ of plastics is often used as a potential indicator of the Anthropocene; see Zalasiewicz et al. (2016).

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threat and societal waste that has generated significant attention. Ethically though, it is hard to decode its impact. Marine plastic is comprised of complex, dynamic assemblages of materials, beings, flows, and processes that enact harms across species, space, and time (Mitchell 2015). The widely distributed existence of oceanic plastics is hard to even comprehend, let alone measure and respond to ethically. It is simultaneously too large and too small (a single 1L plastic bottle can degrade to small enough fragments that one piece could litter every mile of beach in the world). Mitchell (2015: 83) concludes that, in fact, […] marine plastic precludes the possibility of any such boundaries. The conditions of hyper-relationality (specifically, entanglement and toxicity) and force-fullness make it impossible to exclude and externalize the harms it might embody beyond the boundaries of a normatively-defined ‘humanity’.

Transcending Holocene logics of security requires us ironically to dig deeper into sensibilities that have always been present. Indigenous cosmologies in particular need to be acknowledged as having long emphasized the entangled needs of humans and nonhumans within interdependent communities. For millennia, indigenous thinkers have constructed and passed down through generations, interpretations of sentient environments that are enacted by the complex and lively relationships between people and nonhuman presences, including the climate, ancestors, water, and sprits.14 In fact, Métis scholar, Zoe Todd, points out that the current “ontological turn” in Western theorizing towards cosmopolitics, new materialism, and posthumanism simply repackages Indigenous ideas about legal theory, human-animal relations and the multiplicity of lifeworlds without proper attribution or engagement (Todd 2016). The philosophical turn is part of an ongoing colonial project that silences, rejects, and harms whole worlds of being. Engaging with indigenous ideas of care is crucial because they can help craft effective responses to the types of threats engendered by the Anthropocene. They 14 | It is important not to homogenize distinct indigenous voices and traditions. We acknowledge the diversity of thought present in indigenous literatures. Because indigenous philosophy emphasizes the importance of place in knowledge production, it is necessary to avoid essentialist conceptions of pan-indigenous philosophy (Sundberg 2014).

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

are also necessary because they help decenter Holocene security logics that are perceived as pre-ordained and everlasting. The dualism of mind-body, self-nature, human-animal, normalcy-exception, risk-safety is a universalist dogma that emerged out of a specific time and place (namely the Western Enlightenment). This dogma is so entrenched that to engage in ‘alternative’ theorizing, which reflects on how we co-produce knowledge and security in relation to a multiplicity of beings, is labeled as naïve, superstitious, or worse—‘pre-modern’ magic (Bennett 2010). We are left with the world as universe, as a singular reality or nature, about which different cultures are allowed to offer particular interpretations. But what if we take seriously Juanita Sundberg’s appeal to embrace the pluriverse, a world where multiple, distinct worlds bring themselves into being and sustain themselves as they interact, interfere, and mingle with each other, even under asymmetrical circumstances (Sundberg 2014)? Care for, and in, the Anthropocene means a reciprocal respect between multiple lifeworlds. This can be pursued through the active engagement with indigenous scholarship from around the world, noticing their epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies. For instance, southern African philosophy has distinct ontological categories based upon the idea that Motho ke motho ka batho (‘a person is a person through other persons’)—a way of being captured in the term Ubuntu (humanness). A person becomes themself in association with others; a self-in-community. Engaging with these traditions, on their own terms, can help build creative security logics that embrace plurality, kinship, and care (see also Ramose 2002; Coetzee/Roux 2003). In a similar vein, Kyle Powys Whyte and Chris Cuomo (2016) have written recently on the discourses and practices of care by indigenous and feminist environmental activists. Whyte and Cuomo see care ethics and attentive caring enacted on-the-ground by indigenous movements such as Mother Earth Water Walk and the Green Belt Movement. They note how indigenous environmental and political discourses often emphasize themes of responsibility, reciprocity, and interconnections as integral to the flourishing of life in all its forms. They quote the Tlatokan Atlahuak Declaration, from the Indigenous Peoples Parallel Forum of the Fourth World Water Forum in 2006, which claimed that, “[w]e have been placed upon this earth, each in our own traditional sacred land and territory to care for all of creation and water ... our traditional knowledge, laws and forms of life teach us to be responsible and caring for this sacred gift

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that connects all life” (Fourth World Water Forum, quoted in Whyte and Cuomo 2016). In these cases, responsibility is not solely the domain of humans, but felt by other worlds of being too. Water is not inert but holds a forcefulness that denotes its own role in justice and security. Deborah McGregor, an Anishinaabe scholar and activist describes this relationship: We must look at the life that water supports (plants/medicines, animals, people, birds, etc.) and the life that supports water (e.g., the earth, the rain, the fish). Water has a role and a responsibility to fulfill, just as people do. We do not have the right to interfere with water’s duties to the rest of Creation. Indigenous knowledge tells us that water is the blood of Mother Earth and that water itself is considered a living entity with just as much right to live as we have. (McGregor 2009: 37–38, quoted in Whyte/Cuomo 2016: 8)

If we are to take up the task of building a posthuman, post-natural understanding of security then we need to ‘walk’ with non-western scholars and thinkers from whom we can learn and co-produce new responses to the Anthropocene challenge.15 To escape our Holocene security, fused indelibly with ideas of emergencies, boundaries, fear, and the quest to become care-free, we need to build up relational ideas of the force-fullness of water and the flows of nitrogen and embrace creative experimentation rather than retreat from it.

15 | We also acknowledge the distinct and real danger that ‘engaging’ with nonWestern traditions appropriates or assimilates indigenous knowledge or uses it as a token gesture. Sarah Hunt (2014: x) points out: “The potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, a case study or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial power.” The idea is not to centre white empathy as a motivating logic or erase relations of inequality (eg, “we’re all in this together!”), but to engage in the co-production of knowledge through listening, witnessing, and caring about indigenous philosophies of security. A security of care does not ignore past/ongoing harms, but is informed by them, learns from them, and aims to redress them.

Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene

C onclusion The Anthropocene haunts us with insecurity. We are beset with images of apocalyptic storms, rising seas, prolonged droughts, unending waves of climate migration, collapsing ecosystems, and extinctions. These images impart upon us the familiar existential logics of security, but we are seemingly powerless to respond. The world may indeed be transitioning past dangerous ecological thresholds, but we cannot truly wage war against Earth system changes because we would in essence be fighting ourselves, entangled as our societies are. The Anthropocene brings us, in many ways, to the end of security. Yet, the science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer reminds us that, “the things that haunt us in this age are often the things we care about or have some connection to, no matter how slight” (2016). It is upon this that the chapter has rested. We have chosen not to abandon security, nor place our faith in the construction of an inherently hopeful version of it. We have instead returned to the roots of security and examined its relationship to care, which, at its core means, “becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (Haraway 2008: 36). The provocation to curiosity in many ways upends the basic formulations of securitas, which is the appeal to be care-free. This is, for us, appropriate given the type of world we are in the midst of creating. Most of this book has been spent critiquing how we humans came to act in the ways we have and how we might—now that we are beginning to recognize what we have done—act differently. We have over the past several decades come to recognize that we transformed ourselves from insignificant, care-free beings to significant beings, who must engage the logics of care. (​Re)learning to care must now be part of our security architecture. How this can be achieved in the context of the Anthropocene is still very much being formulated by us, and others. Care ethics is in fact a welldeveloped tradition, though still relatively marginal in both international relations and criminology. We have thus drawn from a large subset of care ethics authors who emphasize care as a fundamentally relational pursuit, steeped in everyday practice and undertaken without fear of retribution or hope of reciprocity. We have also expanded our notion of care, away from the programmatic application of set rules in favor of a wider notion of a

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care ethos as a deeply entrenched way of being, a sensibility that shapes all of our actions. This draws us closer to cosmological ways of being in the world that echo indigenous philosophical traditions. We concluded the chapter by articulating how care forces us to acknowledge the new forms of risk, uncertainty, and failure; focus on the micropolitics of the self and community in relation to a widened circle of others; and accept relational forms of security and non-reciprocity. Sensibilities, as a long list of theorists like Erving Goffman and Clifford Geertz have argued, have no existence separate from action. Sensibilities do not exist in some abstract realm that is then actualized through action. Actions and sensibilities are mutually constitutive. What this means for us humans, as we move from being unaware Holocene beings to aware Anthropocene beings, is that we will have to learn to be careful, and to care, through actions that express care. Thus we argued for a process of a discovery through action. This will take time as we learn to pull ourselves up by our Holocene bootstraps to explore contours of care appropriate to the Anthropocene—a care, and an associated empathy, that extends beyond intimate human relationships to our fellow Earthlings. The popular writer Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization notes this conundrum of contested securities when he writes: “The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?” (Rifkin 2009: 15) Translated into our terms the question is: will a security of care that acknowledges our entanglements emerge in time to ensure ecological security? If it can, there is hope, perhaps not for a good Anthropocene, but for ways of living and dying well, “at the end of time”. (Latour 2015b: 7) As we come increasingly to realize who we were as Holoceneans and what this created, we are coming to realize that if we are to be secure as Earthlings our geostory will have to be very different.

Chapter Six: Conclusions “More urgently than ever, we need ideas and theories that will allow us to conceive of the new which is rolling over us in a new way, and allow us to live and act within it.” (Beck 1992: 12)

The Anthropocene is a monumental security problem, yet we lack the conceptual resources to effectively deal with it. We cannot see it. We cannot think it. Even if we could, the conditions of the new human age are of such a magnitude that our interventions will never be able to fully meet its challenges. The Anthropocene is radically dispersed—flowing across time, space, and being. Its effects are complex, disparate, and extreme. It completely eradicates the distinction between humans and the external world, making humanity a simultaneous subject/object of security. It is not your typical security threat. This book has thought about what it means to live and die in the Anthropocene. It has examined its various conditions and how they impact, and are impacted by our pursuit of something called ‘security.’ In its most basic formulation, security means safety. But yet the world upon (and within) which we act can no longer absorb our pursuits of safety. Our carbon-based societies may have achieved unprecedented levels of health and development, but the unintended consequences are dire. Beyond simply the elusiveness of state security (and the human insecurity often accompanying it), we are now confronted with very real ongoing mass extinctions and the potential for global-scale political upheaval. To think security geologically, as the Anthropocene requires us to do, we must be willing to imagine worlds before us, outside of us, and after us. We have argued this should take three principal directions. We must confront the ontological frontiers of the human being; focus on the

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changing conception of nature; and rethink certain core axioms of the security problematique, particularly the Schmittian inspired logics (enormously influential within international relations and criminology) that separate friend/enemy and normalcy/exception. We then argued in favor of a reflexive care ethos that acknowledges and responds to an Earth system regime that has the capacity to eradicate not only all human achievement but also political beings themselves (Clark 2014). Our injunction to care is framed as a meaningful security response in the midst of entangled fragility.1 This concluding chapter recounts the long general threads that connect the book’s ideas. We then outline some of the key implications for security theorizing as well as some new directions.

C onstructing the W orld The geological record reveals that Earth has been, and continues to be, a place of significant change interspersed with periods of environmental stability. One of these periods of stability has been the Holocene period that began at the end of the last Ice Age some 12.000 years ago. The warming trend that has defined the Holocene created environments that have been favorable to the development of countless species, including humans. Across this ‘twelve-thousand year present’2 several shifts in human engagements with their local environments have been identified, beginning with the impacts of hunter-gatherer societies and eventually growing into our present electrical societies/civilizations that span the globe. Central to these developments has been a pervasive (though not universal) sensibility—a way of being—which has understood nature (and nonhumans) as separate from and unaffected by humans and their actions. Within this way of being, humans and nature are understood as

1 | It should be repeated that our reference to entangled fragility is not meant to erase the unequal levels of environmental risk experienced by different human communities. In the simplest terms, climate change and other environmental harms impact already vulnerable communities the most. 2 | Timothy Morton (2014) uses the more eloquent term “ten-thousand year present”.

Chapter Six: Conclusions

two entirely separate realms, and survival by any means is the ultimate axiom. This framing, this way of seeing, has been used to constitute the ‘worlds’ that humans create for themselves by processing the sense data they receive. These constituted realities, by creating the worlds within which humans exist, have fundamentally shaped human action. As we have seen in the previous chapters, this sensibility has enabled, indeed encouraged, humans to develop practices that are profoundly careless, and carefree, with respect to our engagements with the Earth, its systems, other lifeforms and nonlife. We have been carefree because we have been embedded in virtual realities that construct humans as entirely separate from the Earth. We are all that we have to care about. The idea that humans construct, or in Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) terms collectively “accomplish” their worlds has long been recognized by social thinkers as central to understanding human behavior. How worlds are constructed reflects crucial forms of power; what is thinkable, and what is unthinkable, shapes action. In D.E. Smith’s (1987) terms, ways of seeing are also ways of not-seeing. This idea has been expressed in various ways. For example, Hegel talks of an ethos (eg, an aristocratic ethos) as constituting ways of being or dwelling. For Marx we not only create worlds that constrain what is possible, but we are often alienated from our creations and our own lives, believing that they are not of our doing, so that they appear to be imposed upon us. In a similar vein, Garfinkel explores how people accomplish worlds, while simultaneously presenting these worlds to themselves as un-constituted, as a given, and thus constraining what is possible in response. J.B. White (1984) helps us understand crucial texts, such as the American Declaration of Independence, and how these texts constitute communities—what might be thought of in Adler’s (2008) terms as “communities of practice”. Particular contexts provide authors with language and culture that establish appropriate conversations and constitute ways of being. These can be remade through the use of language and the community of readers. Similar lines of thinking have been developed by dramaturgical theorists like Kenneth Burke (1969) who explore the ways in which people develop meanings through figurative tropes that shape action. For example, at a very concrete level the policing scholar Peter Manning (2003) has explored how figurative events, like police funerals, shape the worlds that in in turn shape police action. The idea of a way of being, enabling possibilities of action was central to Max

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Weber’s analysis of capitalism in the pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.3 For Weber, a protestant ethos enabled the emergence of the ways of thinking and acting that produced and maintain ways of being central to early capitalism. All of these analyses, albeit each in different ways, conceive of ways of seeing as constituting ways of being, an ethos that enables sensibilities out of which different styles of action arise These ways of seeing and being constitute institutional cultures that in turn shape action (Shearing/ Ericson 1991). We have argued that dominant ideas about security (amongst other things, including contemporary industrial economies) have been characterized by a sociological construction of reality, where humans have been conceived of existing in two intersecting but separate and “sui generis” worlds (Durkheim/Halls 1982)—a natural and a social world.4 The Holocene-bred ethos has set the ground rules for human engagements with Earth systems, rules that enabled humans to take, make and waste planetary resources in any way that their emerging technologies allowed, and their knowledge systems enabled. This allowed them to pay little, if any, attention to what impacts their actions might have upon diverse, intersecting beings and ecosystems. This ethos has provided humans with a view of security that, while deeply human dependent, rests on a deeply-grounded belief that the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants are well, or at least unremarkable. This certainty enabled humans to enjoy the security of the Earth’s ecosystem services while remaining carefree and careless. This sociologically grounded analysis places a sense of security, founded in an ethos of separation, at the center of the emergence of the Anthropocene and at the center of the ecological challenges that it presents. This argument places constructions of reality, and the ways of being that they enable, at the very center of the Anthropocene and its challenges. Reformed institutions will require much besides shifting toward an ethos of entanglement. An ethos of entanglement is most certainly not sufficient on its own for creating the new ways of taking, making and wasting that the Anthropocene requires. But it is necessary. Without the emergence of a very different ethos, which combines the 3 | Translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (2002). 4 | See Shearing’s notion of “constitutive regulation” (1993).

Chapter Six: Conclusions

human world and the natural world and becomes deeply embedded in the DNA of all our institutions and practices we will not be able to avoid the devastation of a four-degree-plus Earth. There can be no one path to ensuring this occurs, but we believe that care and carefulness are pivotal recognitions of the entanglements of all earthlings. With such a change, new worlds, and new possibilities for action, will emerge. There is already much evidence to suggest that this is already happening. As awareness shifts, so do motivations and as motivations shift new pathways for action become possible (Petersen et al. 2015). Whether these changes will be sufficient to curtail the worst effects of the sixth mass extinction remains an open question—too much water may well have passed under the bridge of the Earth system for this to happen. What is clear is that if humans continue to view themselves as part of the old world—the Holocene world—the future for humans and most of their earthly kin is bleak. We must not revert to enclaves of complete pessimism or optimism. Humans can constitute new worlds that enable new ways of being and doing which recognizes their status as significant animals. As we do this we will, as geological actors, continue to have a significant impact on the Earth system in ways that auger well for, if not a good Anthropocene, then a creative, caring one.

D efenses and ne w directions We will now attempt to tie up some loose ends. We will discuss some omissions in our arguments, answer some anticipated lingering questions, and deliberate on what directions future research on Anthropocene security might take.

O missions and critiques This book is not a definitive account of the concept, nor does it purport to ‘claim’ the Anthropocene for security. Our intentions have been more modest: to offer a critical appraisal of how Anthropocene impacts on the Earth system shifts the conditions of security (broadly conceived), and how we might begin to cope with a world that we believe is now fundamentally different. Along the way we have been forced to omit or avoid certain

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discussions in the interest of clarity and brevity. Let us turn now to briefly acknowledging certain omissions or anticipated critiques. First, by blending two distinct disciplines like international relations and criminology we have risked putting forth half-formed interpretations of each. The two disciplines are not the same. They offer unique approaches to different issues. So why then attempt to combine them using a subject as diffuse as ‘security’? The answer is partly practical, given our academic backgrounds. More important, however, is the fact that the Anthropocene lends itself to cross-disciplinary conversations. It first arose out of discussions between atmospheric chemists, biologists, and geologists and was quickly adopted by other environmental scientists. From there it has spread to popular culture, and has more recently become an intense area of interest for social scientists and humanities scholars. Given that one of the core propositions of the Anthropocene is that it is by necessity a complex, multi-scalar phenomenon, and that it portends diverse security challenges, it makes sense to combine at the outset particular understandings of security. In fact, international relations and criminology do share a vocabulary: “political violence, crime, security, deterrence, war on terror, risk, human rights and freedom” (Aradau/ van Munster 2009: 686). Subjects as diverse as surveillance, borders, security technologies, and practices of risk, have led to a relatively lively exchange between the two disciplines. The two also have shared a relative aversion to incorporating environmental issues into their purview. Environmental security within international relations has, for the most part, focused narrowly on armed conflict, while green criminology and its focus on environmental harms and crimes is a recent development that remains of marginal influence (Floyd/Matthew 2013; South/Brisman 2013). As this book has progressed, we have probably relied more heavily upon the international relations literature, particularly in Chapter four’s discussion of Holocene security. This is largely because that discipline has a more robust history of dealing with planetary-level threats and lends itself fully to our focus on international theory rather than examinations of specific networks of influence, such as key or ‘fulcrum’ institutions (Shearing 2015) and regulatory bodies (eg, the finance sector) (Ericson et al. 2003). There is ample space for future studies to continue to combine and contrast the practices of security and harms with the manoeuvers of states and other global entities. We hope that we have contributed some groundwork to this ongoing task.

Chapter Six: Conclusions

Second, some readers might be frustrated by the lack of ‘real world’ empirical examples to situate some of the theory or demonstrate proofs-ofconcept. This has been a conscious (if difficult) choice on our part, made in part because we have felt that doing so would diminish some of the larger points upon which we have been fixated. There is no shortage of examples of Anthropocene processes from which we might have selected. Every day a new stack of articles, books, and reports is released demonstrating how processes like ocean circulation, arctic ice levels, pollution, and biodiversity loss are transgressing their established boundaries and how global environmental change is impacting the daily existence of humans, animals, insects, etc. This easily lends itself to security discussions. We may have offered case studies on environmental migration (perhaps the most analyzed climate effect on humans), or how droughts, floods, wildfires, and biodiversity loss threaten water and food security. We could have spent more time diagnosing how climate change threatens the existence of specific indigenous tribes, or how it may make conflict more likely between states. Likewise an increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters marks a signal change in how states and organizations prepare and respond to emergency situations. There are other, more arcane threats and pathways produced by our transgression into the new age. Take, for instance, how melting ice from climate change is exposing former US nuclear bases in Greenland, threatening the release of any remaining biological, chemical, and radioactive waste into the environment and potentially disrupting nearby ecosystems and human health on a broader scale (Colgan et al. 2016). Other security interventions could look at seed banks (‘Doomsday Vaults’), which offer sites of preparation for a radically new future. These genetic ‘Noah’s Arks’ are meant to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds and their genetic makeup as insurance against regional or global upheavals. They are international interventions meant to protect and preserve—through agricultural memory—human and biological life in the face of catastrophe. As can be easily discerned, part of the problem in dealing with a subject as vast as the Anthropocene is deciding where you should head. The list of where security lies in the Anthropocene is long indeed. By sticking to the big questions of security, our contributions have hopefully laid some groundwork for future studies to explore new Anthropocene effects more directly. A third critique may point to our focus away from extended commentary on specific security theories. On the contrary, we feel that

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doing so has allowed us to develop ideas that can cope with the scope and scale of the Anthropocene. Notably we turned to a very old security idea: care, or cura. This has allowed us to write a book that did not focus on hope or despair and sidestepped hegemonic blueprints for action. Instead we explored possibilities. We argued that humans cannot be ‘unmade’, but we can be remade into something other than what we have been and currently are. On this basis we have constructed a vision for security based upon an ethos of care—an ethos with a long lineage. This decision may prompt cynics (of which there are many in security studies) to label us as naïve or as lacking sophistication about how ‘the real world works’. We feel this is a mistake, both in interpretation of our motives and in its general outlook. There is no greater cynicism than to believe the natural world remains forever unchanged or that the guiding anthropocentrism of security studies remains the best way to see and know the world. The conditions of the Anthropocene compel us to reflect on our received ideas, our habituated traditions and our claims to authority (Wark 2014). We should not expect the old ideas and the old tools to be able to see, understand, or cope with forms of technical and scientific knowledge that signal a radically different world. Finally, one may agree with us in the above assessment, but find ‘care’ to be troubling or ineffective. We need not rehash common complaints about the care tradition from which we borrow liberally;5 however we might defend it as a diverse tool that does not bind itself to either optimism or pessimism, and overcomes the ecological deficiencies of the justice imperative, particularly its focus on reciprocity. William Connolly (2013: 188) gets at something similar when he writes about the need for existential gratitude:

5 | For a particularly potent critique of the consequences of care see Miriam Ticktin (2011). Ticktin argues that certain actions justified by humanitarian or care pretexts, “..enable a form of ‘Armed Love’ in which the moral imperative to act is accompanied, explicitly or implicitly, by practices of violence and containment… Brutal measures may accompany actions in the name of care and rescue…As such these regimes of care end up reproducing inequalities and racial, gendered, and geopolitical hierarchies.” (2011: 5)

Chapter Six: Conclusions

Existential gratitude is not tied by necessity to either cosmic or historical optimism; it can go hand in hand with a tragic view of human possibility and a renewed sense of the fragility of things….

Nonetheless an ethos exuding existential gratitude, amid the vitality and vulnerabilities that mark life, can help to render us alert to the fragility of things as we also allow the sweetness of existence to sink into our pores. It can, for instance, help to mobilize surplus energies needed to work experimentally upon the institutional roles that now help to situate us culturally. In the late modern era we bear a responsibility to the future to cultivate existential gratitude to the extent our position in the world makes it possible to do so and to renegotiate the modes of political activism in play today. The ‘we’, here as elsewhere, is invitational. A security of care is able to bridge disciplinary divides that have restricted the possibilities of understanding security and opening it up to the radical possibilities immanent in the midst of existential risk. These types of experimental manoeuvers are needed in a world that is consistently defying expectation. More concretely, it corrects the traditional silence within security studies on how to live well in the world. Though security is inherently political and thus replete with ethical dilemmas, security work “rarely engages the language or reasoning process of ethics, mobilises normative positions, or reflexively considers its ethical commitments and contradictions” (Nyman/Burke 2016: 2). Focusing on the care imperative and the relations upon which it depends, counters logics of security built upon the distinctions between inclusion and exclusion, friend and enemy. Because care is also the foundation of moral life (and upon which other moral concepts like justice and rights are derived), it can be said to always exist—from the mundane moments of the everyday to the spectacular transition to the emergency. Caring is both a practice and a disposition, and holds qualities of attentiveness, reflexivity, responsiveness, and mutuality. Such a view may appear far from the confines of traditional security studies, which emphasizes fear, risk and protection as ordering principles of safety. There are some who may claim that care comes after security. In this interpretation the state’s first priority is to deal with immediate existential threats and to provide basic political and civil liberties. Only after that should the provision of care become a priority (Robinson 2011: 163). Care,

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though, is clearly not an either/or proposition, nor an optional addition to life. It is infused in the daily social life of being. All of the hegemonic masculinist practices that are emblematic of security (militarism, force, surveillance, etc) are dependent upon care work (almost always feminized and privatized). There can be no security in the Anthropocene without care. Our turn to an ethos of care in the Anthropocene provides a wider interpretation than what is found in most care ethics literature. Our vision takes into consideration the needs of an expanded other, including humans (eg, the climate refugee who lives halfway around the world), nonhuman life (eg, microbes), things (the West Antarctic ice sheet, the weather balloon), and the yet-to-be-human (the generations unborn). This in part elides some tendencies for care to be co-opted by liberal internationalist approaches, which reduce it to charity and often unintentionally reproduce existing patterns of domination that focus on populations deemed ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ (Robinson 2011: 165). Instead, we place care at all levels of analysis: from the local to the planetary and across time. We also use it to acknowledge that there may be things beyond our comprehension (including politics) that compel creative action (Cudworth/Hobden 2015b: 137). It is incorrect, however, to assume that we all must care for everything equally. Some may choose to care about the polar bear; some may not. Along the way there will be tradeoffs, compromises, and conflicts that are unavoidable. Often care is localized to one’s immediate physical, cultural, and economic surroundings. Even when one’s care is extended to a distant other, like say the polar bear, that care can become localized when it is filtered through appeals to the bear’s significance to the specific human and nonhuman communities for whom it has long, local, complex, and unique relationships (Whyte 2017). Thus local contexts often determine the value assigned to something threatened by the Anthropocene. This is partly why it is so hard to ‘see’ the Anthropocene for what it is: namely a planetary phenomenon operating simultaneously at grand and small, long and short scales. Though we have pushed back against some anticipated criticisms of the care logic, we also fully admit that care will not secure the world. It will not restore the Earth to its imagined original (and thus natural) state. It alone will not preserve threatened species, or stop the harmful burning of fossil fuels. We do believe, however, that it can attune us to

Chapter Six: Conclusions

our cosmological allies in our quest for survival. It can tell us a different story of security, one built upon multispecies entanglement; one which is not based solely upon survival, fear, and the exception, but on seeing, knowing, and acting in relation to others. It can prompt us to attend to the state of care in the world. Care may assist us, in this era of radical uncertainly, to establish a direction.

F uture directions We (and many others) have claimed repeatedly that the Anthropocene presents incredibly difficult challenges. It seeps out from its geological origins and finds its way into just about everything. As both a description and as a new way to make sense of the world, the Anthropocene can be fitted to almost any theoretical and empirical approach. This malleability is both virtue and curse. On the one hand it neatly summarizes the cumulative destructive impacts of humans upon the Earth and signals the urgent need to build significant responses that counteract modern civilizations’ worst impulses. On the other hand, it offers us a vision of ecological entanglement that is inconceivably complex. There is now no center or edge from which to stand; no ‘within’ or ‘outside’ beings. In the words of Timothy Morton, the new ecological thought “permits no distance.” Thinking interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between “over here” and “over there,” and more fundamentally, “the metaphysical illusion of rigid, narrow boundaries between inside and outside” (Morton 2010: 39). Figuring out where security studies heads from here is inherently difficult. We should be very careful not to close ranks behind a singularized form of Anthropocene thought. Clearly the Anthropocene is malleable enough to fit in many different boxes. To reduce it to yet another hegemonic discourse (even if that discourse is broadly ‘critical’) betrays its inherent diversity and complexity and is likely to further marginalize it at a time when we can least afford to. Most of the attention being paid to the Anthropocene and security comes from a new generation of scholarly work that pushes us in creative and useful directions. Though these new approaches differ widely in their assumptions, methods, and subject matter, they share some commonalities, including the intuition that security is far more complex

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and involves far more than securing human lives from other humans. They each represent what Karin Fierke labels an “orthogonal” rotation in thinking about security. Originating in Euclidean geometry, it “refers…to a rotation in consciousness by which conventional reality is situated in a much larger three-dimensional space.” (Fierke 2016: 217) The orthogonal rotation in Anthropocene security means giving less emphasis on securing and avoiding the uncertainty of insecurity in favor of the new potentials in an age when uncertainty is assumed. It means that some ideas, tactics, and discourses that were heretofore verboten are now permissible. What new ways of seeing, knowing, and performing security are possible in this new age? We have already devoted a significant amount of time to a few of these approaches, notably posthumanism, which begins from the premise that politics and security is “neither exclusively social nor exclusively human but bound up with non-human beings and things” (Cudworth/Hobden 2011: 141). By decentering the human, it is possible to see our actions (and thus our ideas of security and ethics) developing within of a range of nonhuman and technological systems including nonhuman animals, materials, ecosystems, networks, and complex assemblages thereof (Mitchell 2014b). Related approaches emphasize the liveliness of matter and take into account how nonhuman actants alter human possibility (Connolly 2013; Salter 2015a; 2016; Grove 2016b; Srincek et al. 2013 Coole/Frost 2010). Others have been unpacking the limits of political and moral purposes and how we might better cope with failures, apocalypses and extinctions (Hamilton et al. 2016; Grove 2015; Mitchell 2017). Given the enmeshment of the Anthropocene and colonial practice, a wide array of postcolonial, cosmological and indigenous approaches to security are required to disrupt traditionally exploitative and violent security practices and offer important perspectives on the relational connections between people and the Earth (Chakrabarty 2012; Caluya 2014; Beier 2005; Todd 2015). Others are offering useful connections between security and assemblage and complexity theory (Acuto/Curtis 2014; Dittmer 2014). Finally, an emerging program of study attempts to inject insights and technologies from quantum science into the social sciences and into security studies (Wendt 2015; Der Derian 2013). They argue that the social sciences are derived from classical Newtonian physics and thus emphasize materialism, atomism, determinism, mechanism, absolute space and time, and the subject-object distinction (Wendt 2015: 59). Developing quantum social

Chapter Six: Conclusions

science could mean seeing the human mind as a quantum machine and seeing matter as a function of waves, which are entangled all the way down to the sub-atomic level. All of these examples are indicative of the type of ‘outsider security’ that is needed for these exceptional times. But the Anthropocene also prompts deeper consideration from more familiar approaches. One path, which is already well-trod, is to continue advancing our knowledge of the relationships between environmental change (particularly climate change) and security and advocating for their integration into mainstream security discourse. This approach, which has a lineage that stretches back to at least the end of the Cold War, is often policy-focused and tries to make sense of how a warming planet will impact states, the international system, and domestic criminological concerns. Environmental security can thus take a number of different forms including: examining environmental victimhood; linking fossil fuel dependence to dangerous regimes; forecasting new waves of migration and humanitarian crises; or investigating the causal role that climate change plays in conflict (South 1998). No matter what issue is centered, the intention here is almost always the same: to diagnose how environmental changes risk the viability and stability of the international and domestic order, and to set specific goals for how to best incorporate/regulate the environment according to the national strategic calculus. This can be seen most readily via highly publicized reports from US think tanks and government agencies over the past decade that have characterized climate change as a “threat multiplier,” or an “accelerant of instability” (CNA Corporation 2007; The White House 2015a).6 Can the Anthropocene add much to these types of analysis? It may unify different environmental issues and center the role of humans (in particular capitalist economies) but all of this is already well established. It may signal to some the increasingly dire state of the planet and ratchet up the stakes of avoiding environmental issues. In this sense it could be a new way to securitize the environment, which is something we covered at length in Chapter four. 6 | While climate change continues to increase its visibility in national security discourses around the world, it seems likely that the new Trump administration in the US, in its desire to downplay or deny climate change, will work to delink climate and security and undo many environmental regulations already in place.

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We do believe the Anthropocene can find its way into traditional security analyses that are less interested in examining meta-theoretical questions in two principle ways. First the Anthropocene pushes open even further the security black box by signaling the diversity of social impacts that arise from a rapidly shifting planet (and in fact are implicated in the shifts themselves). It could mean the more forceful incorporation of ignored (or previously absent) threats, including biodiversity loss, population increases, air pollution, degraded infrastructure, and waste dumping. It might generate new explorations on planetary extinction events and their possible (once-fantastical) ‘solutions’, including geoengineering or planetary escape. Or, the Anthropocene could lead to the inclusion of so-called ‘new security actors’ as varied as the energy sector, wildlife poachers, urban planners, and the insurance industry. One might also envision a growing fascination with how environmental norms, regimes, and institutions seep into security discussions. Finally, the increasing role of sciences and technologies, both new and inherited,7 could be an important component of situating Anthropocene security. Second, the Anthropocene alerts scholars and policymakers to the necessity of building cooperative security relationships in advance of future changes that are now locked-in. While there may be little desire to question the ‘great game’ of international politics and the self-interest that makes it run, this does not make it impossible to pursue cooperative security relationships on the basis of shared (though unequal) ecological risk in the Anthropocene. As we argued in Chapter four, the Anthropocene troubles certain dominant security logics, like the threat/defense and friend/enemy distinctions. As exposure to environmental hazards grow and spread, it should become clear that shared goals and vulnerabilities might produce impactful cooperative and multilateral agreements. We are not naïve enough to suggest that other strategies endemic to the international system, including free-riding, buck-passing, or obfuscation/ 7 | This can include new supercomputers that run complex circulation models of the Earth systems, or the spread of early warning systems. It could also include the ancient technologies derived from indigenous knowledge. Take for example the Siberian Tofa or Yolgnu peoples (in NE Australia), who can teach others how to better adapt to extreme climates or better manage the land using traditional fire management practices (Green/Raygorodetsky 2010; North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA) 2012).

Chapter Six: Conclusions

deception will wither away once ecological awareness shifts. However, recent experiences in environmental diplomacy demonstrate that when protocols and agreements are signed (as insufficient and laborious as they have been) they emit important normative signals, even if they lack strict rules or enforcement measures. The 2014 China-US greenhouse gas agreement and the 2015 Paris Climate Accord show that states can be compelled to play constructive roles and join global coalitions, lest they be seen as obstructionist or acting in bad faith (Busby 2016).8 Readers may balk at much of what we have written and argued. Some of the more fantastical elements—of entangled beings, nature’s end, extinction, the care ethos—may appear incoherent, or unachievable. This is fine. We hope, however, to have stimulated new concerns about the state of the world and how our concepts of security create it. Our hope is that some assumptions have been, at least temporarily, unsettled. If nothing else, we hope to compel readers to turn their gaze more fully to the worlds around them. Because, “yeah this place is haunted/but only by a ghost.”9

8 | The Trump administration‘s retreat from the Paris Agreement underscores how fragile progress in climate diplomacy can be. 9 | Science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer references these song lyrics from the band Giant Sand in his article “Hauntings in the Anthropocene” (2016).

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A Agamben, Giorgio  105, 157 agency  39, 41, 46, 52, 57-9, 81, 106, 162 anarchy  44, 48, 64 Anthropocene and geology  26-29 defined 17,19 critiques of  28, 115 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)  27, 29, 30 Aristotle  71, 158 B Badiou, Alain  73, 166 Barad, Karen  54, 111, 158 Beck, Ulrich  25, 31, 107, 127, 129, 141, 159 Bennett, Jane  40, 52, 53, 137, 159 Bogost, Ian  57, 160 Bohr, Niels  13 Braidotti, Rosi  52, 60, 125, 160 Bryant, Levi  57, 113, 160 Buzan, Barry  87-9, 90-2, 104, 110, 161 C carbon dioxide  14, 27, 100, 102

care critiques of  126-127 Cura  118-9, 148 distribution of care  71 ethos of care  32, 117, 125-6, 130, 148, 150 justice and care  34, 119, 148 origins of  118 relationship to security  117119, 122-125 and risk  34, 127-131 See gratitude causality linear  34, 110 complex 59 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  13, 28, 152, 162 Clark, Andy  54, 162 Clark, Nigel  25, 85, 133, 142,162 Clausewitz, Carl von  16 Colebrook, Claire  15, 163 Colombian exchange  30 complexity  38, 50, 59, 65, 97, 106, 116, 128, 151, 152, 164 Connolly, William  81, 104, 135, 148, 152, 164 Copenhagen School  88-97, 99, 101, 104-5, 161

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cosmology   116, 135-136,140 cosmopolitanism  34, 116 Criminology Green Criminology  18, 37, 42, 59 And international relations  37-8, 43-44, 124, 127, 142, 146 Crutzen, Paul  19, 29, 85, 164 D Darwin, Charles  53, 66-7, 78 Dasein  115 See Heidegger, Martin deep ecology  69, 175 deforestation  69, 175 Descartes, René  111 Cartesian dualism  33 Dupré, John  55, 165 Durkheim, Emile  15, 20, 42, 144, 166 E Earth System Earth system science  26, 767, 83, 86, 100-2, 112, 121, 127, 139, 144, 170-1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  68, 165 entanglement  19, 21-23 togetherness 39 ethics ethics in the Anthropocene 115 ethics of care  119, 122-3, 178 ethics of security  116, 122 virtue ethics  116 utilitarian ethics  120-121 extinction

extinction events  97, 154 F Fishel, Stefanie  55, 166 G Gaia  17, 39, 74, 114, 172 Gamble, Clive  21-3, 167 Gilligan, Carol  119-20, 167 global warming  14, 100, 130, 166, 186 greenhouse gases  14, 27, 100, 187 See also carbon dioxide gratitude  107, 116-17, 127, 148, 149 Great Acceleration, The  28, 29, 180 Great Man theory of history  46 Greenhouse gases, See global warming H Hamilton, Clive  32, 115, 169 Hamilton, John T  3, 117-19,169 Harari, Yuvel  13, 24, 169 Haraway, Donna  28, 39, 52, 56, 80, 104, 129, 139, 169 Hardin, Garrett Tragedy of the Commons  712, 169 harm  33-4, 39, 41, 52, 60, 75, 8586, 100, 103-6, 111, 118, 122-23, 125-26, 130-36, 138, 142, 146 Harman, Graham  57 Heidegger, Martin See Dasein Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan  43-4, 71, 167, 170

Register

state of nature  16, 42, 44, 71, 75, 106 Hodder, Ian  21-2, 170 Holocene Holocene security  33, 48, 86-7, 92-4, 97, 102-03, 106, 137-38, 146 Homo Economicus  122 human human agency  46 human nature  41-4, 48, 56, 61, 122 human security  23, 45-7, 67, 72, 110, 122-25 self-interest  16, 45, 71-2, 126, 135, 154 Anthropocentrism  17, 26, 33, 47, 57, 65, 70, 74, 88, 91, 100, 106, 117, 134 Holocene conception of  24-25 And western philosophy  40, 43-45, 60 Humboldt, Alexander  66, 78, 187 Huysmans, Jef  86, 90, 92, 94-7, 105-06, 170 hyperobjects 134 See Timothy Morton I Indigenous philosophy  136 Industrial Revolution  14, 28, 74 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  112, 128, 171 International Commission on Stratigraphy  19, 27, 29 International Relations

And the environment  18, 31, 3738, 74-78, 98, 146, 153 Intra-action See Barad, Karen J Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman  51, 111, 171 K Kaplan, Robert Coming Anarchy, The  76, 171 Klein, Naomi  13, 172 Kolbert, Elizabeth  15 L Latour, Bruno  22, 32, 37, 38, 578, 60, 102, 114, 127, 134, 140, 172 Le Guin, Ursula  109, 173 Lewis, Simon  29-30, 173 Lovelock, James  17 See Gaia M Malthus, Thomas  66, 101, 134 Maslin, Mark  29-30, 173 Massumi, Brian  77-8, 173 materialism new materialism  50, 57, 104, 136, 160 Object Oriented Ontology (OOO)   57-58 And the Anthropocene  90 Mearsheimer, John  76 microbes microbiome 53-4 Influence on humanness  39-40, 53-4

191

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micropolitics  127, 140 migration  21, 77, 88, 100-01, 129, 139, 147, 153 Mitchell, Audra  18, 50, 59-60, 87, 97, 105, 133, 135-36, 160 Morgenthau, Hans  16, 76, 176 Morton, Timothy See hyperobjects N Næss, Arne  69-70 Deep vs shallow environmentalism 74 National Microbiome Initiative (NMI) 54 nature as conservation  69, 73 as instrumental value  1,70, 101 as purity  64, 67-9, 73-4, 78 as threat  74-77 Neocleous, Mark  107, 113, 175 Niche Construction Theory   63, 79-83, 172 vs natural selection  79-80 nihilism  34, 111-112 nitrogen cycling  132-134 Noddings, Nel  120, 125, 175 O Orbis hypothesis  30 Ostrom, Elinor  71-2, 176 P Paris Agreement, The, See United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

planetary boundaries  39, 124, 132 Pleistocene  20-2, 24, 26 population growth, human  91 posthumanism  49-52, 58, 136, 152, 164 And postcolonialism   51, 79, post-processual turn in archaeology 21 Purdy, Jedidiah  23, 79 Q quantum social science  152 Queer International Relations  48, 186 R realism  42-3, 44, 74 Rifkin, Jeremy  25, 32, 121-23, 140, 177 risk risk society  25, 107, 127, 159 See care and risk Robinson, Fiona  122-23, 125, 135, 149, 150, 178 Rockström, Johan  13, 27, 39, 112, 132, 178 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court  82 Rose, Nikolas  55-6, 178 S safe operating space for humanity See Rockström, Johan safety   13, 34, 39, 47, 56, 69, 85, 106, 125, 133, 141 Salter, Mark Making Things International Vols I and II  58, 166, 178

Register

Schmitt, Carl  33, 87, 94, 101 -7, 158 And sovereignty  87-8, 94-5, 102, 105 And the state of exception  878, 94, 117 And the friend/enemy distinction 94-6 And executive unilateralism 91 securitization See Copenhagen School security critique of, see Neocleous, Mark logics of security  32, 49, 70, 83, 86, 98, 125, 136, 139, 149 referent objects of security 110 as securitas  118, 139 security studies  18-20, 33, 3741, 44-5, 47, 50, 55-7, 61, 63, 65, 83, 86, 88, 116, 126, 128, 148-49, 151-52 technologies of security  40, 109, 146 theories of security  33-4, 38, 45, 48 traditional security  33, 47, 59, 128, 133, 149, 154 water security  37-8, 169 as emancipation   47, 74, 113 worldly approaches to,   106, 133 speech act  58, 89, 90, 92, 98 Stengers, Isabelle  65, 181 Stoermer, Eugene  19, 165 Sundberg, Juanita  51, 136-37, 182

T terra nullius  65, 81 threats  13, 24, 37, 49, 55, 73-4, 77-8, 86, 88-9, 96, 100, 105-6, 124, 132, 136, 146-7, 149, 154 Thucydides  16, 42, 43, 74, 75 History of the Peloponnesian War, The  42, 182 transcendentalism   68 Tronto, Joan  120, 183 Trump, Donald  14, 103, 153 Tsing, Anna  41, 54, 133, 183 U United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC)  14, 130, 183 See Paris Agreement United Nations Human Development Report  46, 183 V VanDerMeer, Jeff  139, 155, 184 vulnerability  77-8, 93, 125, 129 W Wæver, Ole  88-92, 95-6, 104, 162 Waldron, Jeremy  34, 185 Waltz, Kenneth  76, 176 water  14, 37-8, 64, 77, 90, 99, 137-138 Weber, Cynthia  48-9, 186 Weber, Max  102, 144, 186 Westphalian international system  40, 64, 102 Whyte, Kyle Powys  137-38, 150, 177

193

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Interregnum Beyond Liquid Modernity 2016, 136 p., pb. 19,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3515-7 E-Book PDF: 17,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3515-1 EPUB: 17,99E (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-3515-7

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Trouble on the Far Right Contemporary Right-Wing Strategies and Practices in Europe 2016, 208 p., pb. 19,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3720-5 E-Book PDF: 17,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3720-9 EPUB: 17,99E (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-3720-5

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Games | Game Design | Game Studies An Introduction (With Contributions by André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman) 2015, 296 p., pb. 19,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-2983-5 E-Book PDF: 17,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2983-9

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Target Markets — International Terrorism Meets Global Capitalism in the Mall 2016, 198 p., pb. 29,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3352-8 E-Book: available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3352-2

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Digital Culture & Society Vol. 1, Issue 1 — Digital Material/ism 2015, 242 p., pb. 29,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3153-1 E-Book PDF: 29,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3153-5

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Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol. 2, Issue 2/2016 — Politics of Big Data 2016, 154 p., pb. 29,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3211-8 E-Book PDF: 29,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3211-2

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!