Global Change, Peace & Security
Global Change, Peace & Security is a scholarly journal that addresses the difficult practical and theoretical questions posed by the sheer scale and complexity of contemporary change. More specifically, it analyses the sources and consequences of conflict, violence and insecurity, but also the conditions and prospects for conflict transformation, peace keeping and peace-building.
The Journal focuses on the international dimension of political, economic and cultural life, its perspective cuts across traditional boundaries not just those between states, economies and societies, but also those between disciplines and ideologies.
The journal is sustained through collaboration between the Centre for Dialogue and La Trobe University's School of Social Sciences. The Centre for Dialogue provides the core of the editorial input of the scholarly journal. Aran Martin is the Editor and Hamish Myers is the Editorial Assistant.
Correspondence
Editorial correspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should be sent to:
Aran Martin
Editor, Global Change, Peace and Security
Email: aran.martin@latrobe.edu.au
The International Relations of Crisis and the Crisis of International Relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, England
Winning essay: the 2010 Routledge–GCP&S Essay Competition (forthcoming in Global Change, Peace & Security 23, no. 3 (October 2011)
The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, interconnected global crises – climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity, and economic instability. While the structure of global economic activity is driving the unsustainable depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural resources, this is simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. Both global warming and energy shocks are impacting detrimentally on global industrial food production, as well as on global financial and economic instability. Conventional policy responses toward the intensification of these crises have been decidedly inadequate, because scholars and practitioners largely view them as separate processes. Yet increasing evidence shows they are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political economy that has breached the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it is embedded. In this context, orthodox IR’s flawed diagnoses of global crises lead inexorably to their ‘securitisation’, reifying the militarisation of policy responses, and naturalising the proliferation of violent conflicts. Global ecological, energy and economic crises are thus directly linked to the ‘Otherisation’ of social groups and problematisation of strategic regions considered pivotal for the global political economy. But this relationship between global crises and conflict is not necessary or essential, but a function of a wider epistemological failure to holistically interrogate their structural and systemic causes.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security analyst specialising in the historical sociology and political ecology of mass violence. He is Executive Director at the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and Associate Tutor at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, where he obtained his D.Phil in 2009. His latest book is A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (London, New York: Pluto/Macmillan, 2010).
