Climate Change and Treats to Human Security

The Westphalian paradigm of state as a hard shelled political and territorial boundary to impregnate all those who have been walled in as citizens with an impenetrable security shield is no longer impervious and insensitive to the volley of threats hurled at them by the emerging nontraditional and nonstate sources. One of such sources of threats remaining menacing to the people is the climate change with its apocalyptic consequences not centuries ago foreseen or predictably crafted within the contours of state security and its associated military establishment. The utter inadequacy and increasing irrelevance of weapons however lethal and sophisticated may be, in the face of climate change has challenged the narrow, reductionist, linear and one directional state centric security but also has laid the building block for redefining security that moves beyond the state down to the level of every single individual that can be comprehensively christened as human security. Yet one could argue with equal plausibility that the wrong end of a smokestack can be as much of a security threat to humans as the barrel of a gun. This book compiled of a sheaf of articles written from various perspectives mostly focuses on the threats the climate change poses to human security.