Special Issue: Epistemologies of the Environment-Security Nexus: Practices, Temporalities, Implications.

This special issue assesses the significance of knowledge production in influencing contemporary policies and practices aimed at governing global environmental change-related (in)securities, examining how these developments (re)shape the local contexts within which they unfold and to what effect. Much work has gone into predicting and debating the “real” security implications of global environmental change, leading to contesting knowledge frames – especially “for and against” risk-based understandings of environmental change as a global “threat multiplier”. Yet, comparatively limited attention has been paid to the question of how such knowledge itself is part of producing global realities in the first place, by informing and strengthening certain practices and policies, while foreclosing others. In addressing this gap, the contributions introduce diverse theoretical, normative and empirical approaches—reflecting different disciplines (Anthropology, Criminology, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, Sociology)—to map and interrogate the implications of the knowledge production processes at stake in the global environment-security debate. They focus on the manifestations and significance of what this special issue refers to as the “environment-security nexus” in domains including the green economy, counterterrorism, migration, indigenous fire management, authoritarian environmentalism and sustainability leadership, uncovering different scales and sites of practice and policy implementation—from Bolivia over the Sahel, to Bougainville, Fiji, and Vietnam. In examining the epistemological underpinnings and resulting practical, policy as well as normative effects of the unfolding of the global environment-security nexus in different world regions, the special issue sets out the contours of a future research agenda toward assessing the role of knowledge in producing the global geographies of the environment-security nexus.