The structuring and institutionalizing of discourses on climate change and security in the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand how the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) structured climate change and security discourses and institutionalized them in its practices between 2007-2021. In this regard, Maarten Hajer’s argumentative discourse analysis has been employed to assess how the UNSC structured and institutionalized these discourses. The study additionally formed a multilevel security framework to employ over both the processes of discourse structuring and institutionalizing in order to strengthen Hajer’s analysis and make the discourses on climate change and security more meaningful. Based on the analytical literature review, the multilevel security framework establishes causal chains among climate security, human security, national security, and international security. This research understands the UNSC’s process of structuring discourses on climate change and security to still be in the developmental phase. In the context of a multilevel security framework, the discourses on whether the discourses on climate change as an international security issue or not were observed to have not been structured yet. However, climate change was observed to have been structured as a security problem by establishing causal links between climate security, human security, and national security. The second part focuses on whether or not the UNSC has institutionalized climate change and security discourses in its practices. The findings show the UNSC to have partially institutionalized discourses on climate change and security. Despite the increase in the frequency of the relevant outputs and the number of members defending climate change and the UNSC’s relationship with it, the UNSC was found to have institutionalized the discourses on climate change and security in line with the discourses of the Russian Federation. In the context of the multilevel security framework, climate change was found to have been institutionalized as a security problem by establishing causal links between human security and national security. The answer to the question at the beginning of the thesis of whether the realist security-based nature of the UNSC as problematized has changed with regard to the level of global security is that it has not changed yet.