Jan Selby

If international relations can be theorised as 'inter-textual', then why not also-or indeed betteras 'inter-carbonic'? For, not only is the modern history of carbon to a large degree international; in addition, many of the key historical junctures and defining features of modern international politics are grounded in carbon or, more precisely, in the various socio-ecological practices and processes through which carbon has been exploited and deposited, mobilised and represented, recycled and transformed. In what follows I seek to make this case, arguing that carbon and international relations have been mutually constitutive ever since the dawn of modernity in 1492, and that they will inevitably remain so well into the future, as the global economy's dependence on fossil carbon continues unabated and the planet inexorably warms. Will climate change generate widespread conflict, or even civilisational collapse? How are contemporary power dynamics limiting responses to climate change? And how, conversely, might 21st-century world order be transformed by processes of decarbonisation? Building on research in political ecology, I argue that a dialectical sensitivity to 'inter-carbonic relations' is required to properly answer these questions. Scholars and students of International Relations (IR), I suggest, need to approach climate change by positioning the element C at the very centre of their analyses.

Policy discourse on the conflict and security implications of climate change has repeatedly found it to be overstated, misleading, and out of line with the balance of scientific evidence. However, the reasons for this recurring science-policy divide have not yet been systematically investigated. To explore this issue, we examine the case of Lake Chad, which over the last decade has become a poster child for climate conflict. We seek to understand and explain how this climate security narrative has gained such traction. Drawing on interviews and documentary analysis we examine the key practices, interests and hierarchies underpinning the narrative's rise and reproduction, and show that it is essentially a political construct, reflecting a combination of questionable epistemic manoeuvres and geopolitical, economic and climate mitigation agendas. Our findings suggest the need for change, and increased caution, in how the climate security community engages with scientific evidence.

Organisations and institutions of many kinds play important roles in maintaining and transforming energy systems, not least through their direct contributions to energy demand. Major service-providing institutions such as universities and hospitals have especially large and complex demands. Facing pressures to reduce environmental impacts and costs, many of these organisations are trying to reduce their energy consumption—with varying degrees of success. The responsibility for pursuing this goal in practice often lies with practitioners here referred to as Energy Management Professionals (EMPs). However, there has been little systematic investigation of EMPs' practices and their energy implications. Using qualitative evidence from English universities and hospitals, we argue that three types of work are marginalised in EMPs' practices, namely: (a) change-focused work, and within that; (b) work engag- ing with people and what they do, and within that; (c) work engaging with institu- tional policy-making. We argue that these marginalisations limit the scale and scope of demand reduction efforts, and also show how they arise from interacting dynamics of national policies and priorities, institutional structures and professional practices, and the influence of neoliberal governance, among other things. Finally, we discuss how rethinking institutional energy governance could help reduce energy demand and reflect on wider lessons for research and policy on organisational sustainability.

... The author exposes how the peace accords between Israel and the PLO allowed Israel to maintain control over regional water resources, preventing ... 4 WATER, POWER AND POLITICS IN THEMIDDLE EAST 1999 for over three months.-' And in most rural areas the situation ...

Because of existing policy silos, energy policy tends to be addressed from a narrowly energy-centric basis; yet energy systems are clearly also affected by a wide range of policies emanating from other sectors. This article explores the impacts of policies associated with various 'non-energy sectors' on energy supply and demand, using a systematic and wide-ranging review of academic, policy and grey literatures. We discuss six policy sectors where these impacts are, in our assessment, not sufficiently recognised by policymakers or researchers but have significant energy implications. Overall, we find that there is little acknowledgement or analysis of this issue, especially of the full causal chain from 'non-energy policies' through to energy system impacts; for whatever reason, consideration of the reverse links (e.g. of the health impacts of energy policies) is far more common. The upshot is that non-energy policy impacts on energy systems are not sufficiently visible within either research or policy. We argue that this serves as a barrier to change, and that increasing the visibility of these complex and multi-faceted connections is thus a vital task for researchers and policymakers alike.

This article reflects on the implications of the Trump presidency for global anthropogenic climate change and efforts to address it. Existing commentary, predicated on liberal institutionalist reasoning, has argued that neither Trump's promised rollback of domestic climate-related funding and regulations, nor withdrawal from the Paris framework, will be as impactful as often feared. While broadly concurring, I nonetheless also in this article take a wider view, to argue that the Trump administration is likely to exacerbate several existing patterns and trends. I discuss four in particular: the general inadequacy of global greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and implementation efforts; the inadequacy of contemporary climate financing; the embrace between populist conservatism and opposition to action on climate change; and not least, the current global oil and gas boom which, crucially, is being led by the US. I submit that these patterns and trends, and the Trump administration's likely contributions to them, do not augur well for climate change mitigation, let alone for an orderly transition to a low-carbon global economy. Given current directions of travel, I suggest, this coming transition is likely to be deeply conflict-laden-probably violently so-and to have consequences that will reverberate right across mid-twentieth-century international order.

Among the various sustainability goals of higher education institutions (HEIs), reducing energy use and carbon emissions are particularly important. However, not much is known about energy demand from the higher education sector-especially since there is a lack of robust models of energy demand in this sector. This paper, the first to utilize a panel dataset and advanced panel econometric techniques in order to model energy use in higher education, investigates variations in energy use between HEIs (cross-sectional analysis), and also changes in energy use over time (temporal analysis), using the UK as a case study. We argue that panel dataset and methods are more useful for understanding growth (and reduction) in energy use within the HE sector than the methods used within previous cross-sectional studies. Results show that, over time and also across the sector, energy consumption in the HEIs increases with increases in income and floor space, but at a slower rate. As HEIs grow overall (in terms of income, floor space, student and staff number) over time, they become more 'energy efficient' (using less energy per unit of area, population or income), indicating economies of scale in the temporal dimension. Results also show that after controlling for income and size, research intensive HEIs consume more energy. We also find a small but statistically significant effect of energy prices on energy consumption, as might be expected. Simulation using the model parameters for an example scenario suggests that energy consumption will continue to increase unless there is a significant change in the policies driving income growth and spatial expansion in the HE sector in the UK.

This article makes the case for a new and ambitious research and governance agenda for energy demand reduction. It argues that existing 'demand-side' approaches focused on promoting technological efficiency and informed individual consumption are unlikely to be adequate to achieving future carbon emissions reduction goals; it points out that very little attention has so far been paid to the impacts of non-energy policies on energy demand; and it submits that a much fuller integration of energy demand questions into policy is required. It advances a general framework, supported by illustrative examples, for understanding the impacts of 'non-energy' policies on energy demand. It reflects on why these connections have been so little explored and addressed within energy research and policy. And it argues that, for all their current 'invisibility', there is nonetheless scope for increasing the visibility of, and in effect 'mainstreaming', energy demand reduction objectives within other policy areas. Researchers and policymakers, we contend, need to develop better understandings of how energy demand might be made governable, and how non-energy policies might be revised, alone and in combination, to help steer long-term changes in energy demand.

How should critical international relations (IR) scholars approach the 'impact agenda'? While most have been quite resistant to it, I argue in this essay that critical IR should instead embrace the challenge of impact-and that both IR as a field and the impact agenda more broadly would gain greatly from it doing so. I make this case through three steps. I show, firstly, that critical IR has until now been very much at the impact agenda's margins, and that this situation contrasts strikingly with its well-established importance within IR teaching and research. I argue, secondly, that critical IR scholars both could and should do more impact work-that the current political conjuncture demands it, that many of the standard objections to doing so are misplaced and indeed that 'critical' modes of research are in some regards better suited than 'problem-solving' ones to generating meaningful change-and offer a series of recommended principles for undertaking critically oriented impact and engagement work. But I also argue, thirdly, that critical social science holds important lessons for the impact agenda, and that future impact assessments need to take these lessons on board-especially if critical IR scholarship is to embrace impact more fully. Critical IR, I submit, should embrace impact; but at the same time, research councils and assessments could do with modifying their approach to it, including by embracing a more critical and political understanding of what impact is and how it is achieved.

This article is the second in a series on the alleged links between climate change, drought and the onset of Syria's civil war. In a previous article it was argued that there is little merit to the Syria-climate conflict thesis, including no clear evidence that drought-related migration contributed to civil war onset. Building on this earlier work, the present article investigates an issue which was not fully analysed in the previous one: the nature and causes of the pre-civil war agrarian crisis in Syria's northeast Jazira region, and especially in the governorate of Hasakah. This crisis is usually represented as rooted essentially in a severe multi-year drought which, it is claimed, led to multiple crop failures and in turn large-scale migration. Here it is argued, by contrast, that the central causes of Hasakah's agrarian crisis were long-term and structural, involving three main factors: extreme water resource degradation; deepening rural poverty; and underpinning these, specific features of Syria's and Hasakah's politics and political economy. The article contends, most notably, that the exceptional severity of Hasakah's crisis was a function of the nationwide collapse of Syria's agrarian and rentier model of state-building and development, combined with Hasakah's distinctive political geography as an ethnically contested borderland and frontier zone. I thus conclude that rather than supporting narratives of environmental scarcity-induced conflict, the Syrian case actually confirms the opposite: namely, political ecologists' insistence on the centrality of the political , and of conflict, in causing environmental scarcities and insecurities.

In this introductory article we identify eight myths of conflict and development related to the Middle East region. Some of these myths, which cut across academia, foreign policy and development interventions, are specific to the Middle East; others are ‘global’ myths that regional developments contradict. We do not claim to be the first to identify all these myths; many of our arguments are indebted to a long history of critical scholarship. The articles in this IDS Bulletin all speak to the disconnects, disjunctures and misconceptions highlighted here.

This article advances a critique of the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia's (ESCWA's) representation of the Jordan River Basin, as contained in its recently published Inventory of Shared Water Resources in Western Asia. We argue that ESCWA's representation of the Jordan Basin is marked by serious technical errors and a systematic bias in favour of one riparian, Israel, and against the Jordan River's four Arab riparians. We demonstrate this in relation to ESCWA's account of the political geography of the Jordan River Basin, which foregrounds Israel and its perspectives and narratives; in relation to hydrology, where Israel's contribution to the basin is overstated, whilst that of Arab riparians is understated; and in relation to development and abstraction, where Israel's transformation and use of the basin are underplayed, while Arab impacts are exaggerated. Taken together, this bundle of misrepresentations conveys the impression that it is Israel which is the main contributor to the Jordan River Basin, Arab riparians its chief exploiters. This impression is, we argue, not just false but also surprising, given that the Inventory is in the name of an organisation of Arab states. The evidence discussed here provides a striking illustration of how hegemonic hydro-political narratives are reproduced, including by actors other than basin hegemons themselves.

In recent years a large body of work has emerged that uses a positivist epistemology and quantitative methods to assess the likely conflict impacts of global climate change. This article advances a critique of this positivist climate conflict research programme, identifying within it three serial shortcomings. It contends, first, that the correlations identified by this research are specious, since they always rest upon coding and causal assumptions which range from the arbitrary to the untenable. It argues, second, that even if the correlations identified within this research were significant and meaningful, they would still not constitute a sound basis for making predictions about the conflict impacts of climate change. And it submits, third, that this research programme reflects and reproduces an ensemble of Northern stereotypes, ideologies and policy agendas. A departure from positivist method is required, the article contends, if we are to get close to thinking through the wide-ranging political and conflict implications of the human transformation of the global climate.

This special issue of Geopolitics presents a series of critical interventions on the links between global anthropogenic climate change, conflict and security. In this introduction, we situate the special issue by providing an assessment of the state of debate on climate security, and then by summarising the eight articles that follow. We observe, to start with, that contemporary climate secu- rity discourse is dominated by a problematic ensemble of policy-led framings and assumptions. And we submit that the contributions to this issue help rethink this dominant discourse in two distinct ways, offering both a series of powerful critiques, plus new interpreta- tions of climate-conflict linkages which extend beyond Malthusian orthodoxy.

This article develops a new framework for understanding environment-conflict relations, on both theoretical grounds and through a qualitative historical analysis of the links between water and conflict in the states of Sudan and South Sudan. Theoretically, the article critiques the dominant emphases on ‘scarcity’, ‘state failure’ and ‘under-development’ within discussions of environmental security, and proposes an alternative model of environment-conflict relations centring on resource abundance and globally-embedded processes of state-building and development. Empirically, it examines three claimed (or possible) linkages between water and conflict in the Sudans: over trans-boundary waters of the Nile; over the links between internal resource scarcities and civil conflict; and over the internal conflict impacts of water abundance and development. We find that there exists only limited evidence in support of the first two of these linkages, but plentiful evidence that water abundance, and state-directed processes of economic development and internal colonisation relating to water, have had violent consequences. We conclude that analysts and policymakers should pay more attention to the impacts of resource abundance, militarised state power and global political economic forces in their assessments of the potential conflict impacts of environmental and especially climate change.

Do there exist instances of international (water) policy coordination which are so unequal that they should not even be considered 'cooperation'? This article argues, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that this is indeed so. Theoretically, it posits that 'cooperation' should be distinguished from 'policy coordination', and that situations of policy coordination without mutual adjustments or joint gains should instead be considered instances of 'domination'. And empirically, it illustrates the existence of such relations of domination through an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC), using new evidence from JWC negotiation files, plus interviews with leading Israeli and Palestinian participants. Most startlingly, the article finds that under the constraints of JWC 'cooperation', the Palestinian Authority has been compelled to lend its formal approval to the large-scale expansion of Israeli settlement water infrastructures, activity which is both illegal under international law and one of the major impediments to Palestinian statehood. The article suggests the need for both the complete restructuring of Israeli-Palestinian water 'cooperation', and for further research on relations of domination, and the ideology of cooperation, within international (water) politics.

‘Liberal peacebuilding’ is a subject of intense debate within contemporary IR. This article contends, however, that for all the merits of much of the work on the subject, the overall terms of the debate are rooted in a series of questionable assumptions. Proponents and critics alike hold that peacebuilding is an essentially liberal project, over which there is a global (or Western) consensus, and which is pursued by a decentralised plurality of institutions irrespective of the particularly of war-endings. This article shows that this is misleading. Focusing on the relations between peace agreements and peacebuilding, it shows that peace agreements are contextually specific political arrangements, driven above all by strategic considerations of power and legitimacy, in relation to which liberal peacebuilding doctrines and practices are unevenly applied, instrumentalised, or plain ignored – including by international actors. It argues in turn that liberal peacebuilding discourse overstates both the liberalism of contemporary peace interventions, and the degree of global consensus thereover, and fails to capture the enduring centrality of states, strategy and geopolitics in the making of peace. These arguments are developed with reference to a wide range of cases of post-Cold War peace interventions, though with especial focus on UN peacebuilding in Cambodia in the early 1990s.

How should we characterise the relations between environmental scarcity, con ict, and migration? Most academic and policy analyses conclude that scarcities of environmental resources can have signi cant impacts upon con ict and migration, and claim or imply that within the context of accelerating global environmental changes these impacts are likely to become more signi cant still. Many analyses admittedly recognise that these impacts are often indirect rather than direct and that there exist multiple 'drivers' of con ict and migration, of which environmental stresses are but one. We argue that even these quali cations do not go far enough, however: they still overstate the current and likely future signi cance of environmental changes and stresses in contributing to con ict and migration and underemphasise a far more important causal pathway—from con ict and migration to environmental vulnerabilities. These arguments are advanced via a comparative analysis of water–migration–con ict linkages in Cyprus and Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.

This article provides a critical survey of the appropriation of the work of Michel Foucault within poststructuralist IR. Foucault has thus far been employed within poststructuralist IR in three ways: to support deconstructions of realist international theory; to analyse modern discourses and practices of international politics; and to develop novel accounts of the contemporary global liberal order. I argue that the first and the third of these usages are especially problematic. Utilised for the critique of realism, Foucault’s main emphases have consistently been overlooked or misrepresented. By contrast, when ‘scaled up’ to inform analyses of world order, Foucault’s work has ended up supporting essentially liberal accounts of international politics. There are, I argue, clear limits to the use of Foucault in theorising international and world politics, and given this I conclude that if Foucault is to be used more effectively within IR, his work needs to be situated within a framework – I suggest a Marxist one – which is cognisant both of the structural dimensions of power, and of the specificity and irreducibility of the international.

Within post-colonial debates, Edward Said has tended to be viewed by critics and admirers alike through a predominantly postmodern lens: as an (albeit inconsistent) Foucauldian genealogist of the relations between western truths and oriental subjugation, and as an opponent of cultural homogeneity and advocate of hybridity and exile. This paper argues, by contrast, that Said was above all a critical modernist committed to truth and justice; that despite his opposition to pure identities he was not anti-nationalist; and that he was remarkably consistent, both philosophically and politically, across a lengthy period of at least twenty-five years. In his desire to ‘speak truth to power’ and in his ethical universalism, Said had much deeper affinities, the paper argues, with Noam Chomsky than with Michel Foucault. It was this critical modernism, I argue, that underlay Said’s belief that nationalist movements could be of progressive and liberatory potential, and that also underlay his critiques of mainstream propaganda on the question of Palestine, as well as his ambivalent positions on the utility of the two-state solution.

Most expert and public discourse on Middle Eastern water politics holds that water scarcities are of great, if often under-recognised, geopolitical importance. Pessimists and optimists alike tend to assume that water has, or soon will have, profound geopolitical implications. In this paper I argue to the contrary. Specifically, I contend that water problems should neither be understood in naturalistic nor in liberal – technical terms, but instead as questions of political economy; that water is structurally insignificant within the political economy of the modern Middle East; that in consequence water is generally unimportant as a source of interstate conflict and cooperation ; and that, notwithstanding this, water supplies are a crucial site and cause of local conflicts in many parts of the region. I submit also that given the worsening state of economic development within the Middle East, these local conflict dynamics are likely to further deteriorate.

‘I’M RUNNING OUT OF DEMONS. I’M RUNNING OUT OF VILLAINS’, said Colin Powell in 1991, nicely articulating one of the key difficulties facing the developed capitalist world, and the US state in particular, in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union. Since
then a whole panoply of demons have been discovered, created or otherwise ‘securitized’: rogue states and collapsed states; ...

During the late 1980s and early 1990s Israeli social science went through something of a transformation. Previously, its sociology had been dominated by a conservative neofunctionalism that attributed a high degree of value consensus to Israeli society, but had little to say about internal social conflicts or inequalities, while its history had been strongly informed by nationalist myths about the formation of the Israeli state, its relations with neighbouring Arab states and ...

This article analyses the extent to which Israeli-Palestinian water relations were affected and transformed by the Oslo process. Focusing in turn on the management of water systems and supplies, the monitoring of water resources and the development of new supplies, the article suggests that many of the seeming and much-lauded achievements of the Oslo process were more cosmetic than real. Comparing Israeli-Palestinian water relations before and since the onset of the Oslo process, the article contends that the Oslo agreements did little more in this particular sphere than to dress up and discursively repackage Israel's domination of the West Bank water sector in a new vocabulary of Israeli-Palestinian 'cooperation'.