Constructing Blame: Overpopulation, Environmental Security and International Relations

Historically, issues of gender, race and the environment have received little attention in mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship. Great strides have been made, however, in interrogating the inadequacies of the field in these areas and, similarly, in demonstrating the necessity of expanded definitions of security and violence in IR. Despite these strides, mainstream environmental security discourse mimics traditional IR security discourse. In both, gender, class, nation and race are crucial to the political mobilization of identity and the enemy-creation process characteristic of IR; raced, classed and gendered “others” are represented as threats to national security. For mainstream environmental security discourse, “overpopulatioin” in non-Western countries captures a lion’s share of attention and, like traditional security discourse, the bodies of women act as an important site for its construction. With particular attention to population growth, I examine mainstream environmental security discourse as well as mainstream media discourse in the US to expose the manner by which race, class and gender are utilized in the construction of environmental security concerns.