After reading the assignments for this week, I could have a better interpretation of political ecology that consists of different dynamics and adaptation of climate change as a new topic for international peace building to resolve both violent and non-violent conflicts. Along with Watts’ and Mass’ arguments, Parenti’s reading about a climate change that is currently occurring in the world and its reference to economic, political and social consequences enabled me to link it with the conceptual and theoretical analysis by other authors.
Watts presents two central arguments: the components and dynamics of the political ecology and new perspective of biopower in modern security issue. Watts addresses three different regimes—regime of accumulation, regime of truth, and regime of hegemony that might compose the political ecology. He believes that rather than just focusing on the Marxist analysis of social class and capita in production, there should be a more emphasis on a transformational adaptation in viewing the climate change and political ecology. In second part of his arguments, Watts relates the neoliberalism to the concept of biopolitics. The security is maintained when there are contingency and transformation.
Similar points have made in Parenti’s reading that mitigation and adaptations are the most important elements of transformation. Parenti discusses different types of adaptation—technical and political adaptations. Technical adaptation refers to a transformation that enables us to live following the nature while political adaptation is rather an internal change within our human society.
Mass also agrees that the transformation is essential in environmental security. His argument focuses more on the political adaptation where the environment takes role in peace building—resolving conflict through cooperation and active communication. Also, he states that even though the environmental peace building is neither a theoretical school nor a practice, it is still considered as political, not necessarily being neutral.
All these three authors agree that the environmental security in modern world cannot be apart from the transformation whether it is in political, technical or in other form. Before reading the analysis, it was not really clear to me in terms of roles of environment in security issue. Also, how the international institutions and local governments deal with the environmental security issue was another question I had before the reading. I now understand that the traditional concept of security is mostly limited to the military and terrorism and that the environmental security is considered not only as an ecological, political issue, but also as an economic and social issue that influences our globalized society in diverse ways, including conflicts and peace keeping cooperation.