Environment, security and natural disasters, contesting discourses of environmental security

by Arsenault, Denis

Recent debates regarding the rnerits and implications of framing demographic, resource and environmental problems as security issues have largely neglected matters of human vulnerability to naniral hazards. Although a small nurnber observers have proposed the integration of questions of hazard vulnerability within alternative formulations of security, the potential drawbacks of doing so have remained almost entirely unexamined. It is argued in the present thesis that defining issues of disaster . risk in security terms rnay oniy serve to further legitimate the security practices of States which dready play an important role in the social production of vulnerability. Drawing prirnarily upon strategies of discursive analysis, the present thesis elucidates this argument by exarnining the manner in which conventional formulations and understandings of security in global politics have connibuted to the social producrion of hazard vulnerability before, during and after the impact of naniral hazards.