Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Climate change and conﬂict: Global insecurity and the road less traveled Courtney Work Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University, No. 64, Sec. 2 ZhiNan Rd, Wenshan District, Taipei City 11605, Taiwan ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Climate change Conﬂict Cooperation Development Security Justice ABSTRACT Fears of climate conﬂict expected to erupt in states with unstable political and economic systems contribute to the global land rush through emerging politics of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Scholarship reveals, however, that solutions to the problem of climate change, like biofuel production, carbon capture, and ‘climate- smart’ industrial agriculture, are exacerbating both conﬂict and environmental change. This contradiction is created in part by long-standing and unchanging policies regarding societal security, which legitimizes economic development’s extractive resource transformations to avert conﬂict, incorporates climate change mitigation and adaptation into a development framework, and exacerbates the environmental crises of over-development. On a positive note, the obvious failure of these policies gives rise to social and scientiﬁc collaborations that disrupt the conﬂict scenarios promoting continued economic growth as the path to peace. New cooperation from the ground up can create new possibilities for integrated, and thus actually sustainable futures. 1. Introduction Land and resource use during the past 200 years has ushered in unprecedented climate instability and ecological collapse. IPCC (2014) provides strong evidence and directly connects industrial development to climate change. Policymakers at this critical juncture are not, how- ever, focused on ﬁnding new or cultivating existing land-use practices that do not exacerbate climate change; rather, the focus is on alter- native energy sources and methods to continue industrialized economic growth and accumulation. Neither of these make perceptible alterations to existing practice. The most visible changes involve a spectacle of climate-sensitive interventions and sustainable development initiatives (Igoe, 2010; Corson et al., 2013); the regulation and sale of carbon, enhancements to industrial agriculture and industrial infrastructure, and the development of non-fossil energy sources, for example (Corbera and Schroeder, 2011; Hunsberger et al., 2014; Taylor, 2017; World Bank, 2013, 2016). The insuﬃciency of these initiatives to achieve results that are actually sustainable is now documented, even by sci- entists who promote development in its revised and sustainable form (Dittrich, 2012; UNEP, 2017). Climate stabilization requires dramatic changes to our current economic model, which are not forthcoming. It is therefore urgent at this juncture, to understand the mechanisms through which the possi- bility for change is foreclosed. This paper examines one element of the legitimizing forces that justify continued industrial development de- spite little change to its practices, environmental costs, or social in- justice. This well-traveled road is conﬂict, and in particular the framing of environmental degradation, and by extension climate change, as a state security threat (Devlin and Hendrix, 2014; Homer-Dixon, 2000; United Nations, 2004). In the current era, developed nations attempt to expand markets, secure world peace, and deter civil war through eco- nomic development (Rist, 2008). This process connects to a long history in which elite and civilized modes of land use are privileged over other existing possibilities (Moore, 2017); and is justiﬁed through the ‘fact’ that peace and prosperity can only be achieved by overcoming human competition over freely accessible resources. This ‘natural’ state of war requires centralized control of resources and the suppression or ac- commodation of groups that would use resources to support their own elite ambitions (Le Billon, 2001). It is in this context, where resource access determines elite status, that conﬂict becomes a deﬁning justiﬁcation for enhancing resource governance and increasing economic opportunities (World Bank, 2011). This is a narrow framing of conﬂict, however, focused only on armed and violent conﬂicts that threaten state stability (Selby, 2014), stability that is presumed necessary for peace and prosperity. Such a restricted lens obscures the other conﬂicts and violent acts against peasant and indigenous communities, and all other species using common resources, when water and land are transformed into eco- nomic opportunities (Peluso and Watts, 2001). These two conceptions of conﬂict explicitly speak past one another. One, concerned with state security and stability, follows a Hobbesian framework in which ‘nat- ural’ competition over scarce resources must be suppressed (Homer- Dixon, 2010). The other, focused on social and ecological justice and human security, deﬁnes conﬂict broadly through the multiple injustices https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.004 Received 1 July 2018; Received in revised form 30 October 2018; Accepted 5 November 2018 E-mail address: cwork@nccu.edu.tw. Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0016-7185/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Work, C., Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.004