The slow violence of climate security

Abstract

This paper considers how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) engages in world-making around risk that sets up a harmful basis for thinking about climate security. This inquiry offers a reading of a recent IPCC report chapter as a form of world-making and epistemic violence through its limited portrayal of risk. A core argument made in this paper is that the selective representation of risk sets up the potential for slow violence outcomes and practices can perpetuate unjust harm. It matters how the IPCC portrays risk, because the organization is in a unique position to influence how security practitioners understand connections between climate change and security. This paper draws on concepts of world-making, epistemic violence, and slow violence, and it builds on previous critiques of the IPCC’s selective representation of climate change. It suggests alternative opportunities for understanding human contributions to the current state of our planetary environment through an example of another well-known, world-making representation of the water cycle. Overhauling the way that the water cycle is presented as influenced by human activity offers insights to possibilities to create transformative, less harmful pathways for understanding and engaging with the changing climate.