Papers on climate and security presented at EISS conferences and workshops, newest first. 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z https://eiss-europa.com/feeds/themes/climate-and-security.xml European Initiative for Security Studies https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2026-fragile-control-how-de-facto-states-degrade-nuclear-security-in-the-donbas 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z Eliza Gheorghe Ms Isil Idrisoglu Mrs Yanina Shved-Dogrul

Nuclear security research treats states as the primary managers of nuclear and radiological risk, with non-state actors as key challengers. This overlooks de facto states - separatist polities that exercise territorial authority without broad recognition. We argue that de facto states create zones of authority without recognised responsibility, weakening regulatory control while remaining partially excluded from global nuclear-security governance. Consequently, they undermine nuclear security through regulatory rupture, expanded illicit opportunities, coercive threats and use of force, and governance exclusion. We test these claims using cross-national event data and a case study of Russian-backed separatist regions in Ukraine.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2026-living-with-the-nuclear-spatio-temporal-entanglements-nuclear-cultures-and-the-a 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z Elisabeth Saar

This paper examines how uranium mining in East Germany - embedded in the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War - produced specific nuclear cultures that continue to shape the present. Framing the management of nuclear legacies as a local and global security issue, the paper highlights how uranium extraction and its afterlives intersect with environmental, health, and societal security concerns across generations. Drawing on the spatio-temporal entanglements of extraction and post-extractive remediation, the article demonstrates that the ‘nuclear’ is not solely a technological phenomenon but is deeply rooted in everyday life-worlds, social relations, and cultural practices. Precisely because of this embeddedness in the everyday, nuclear legacies emerge as long-term security challenges in which risks may become normalized, rendered invisible, or politically depoliticized. By analysing ambivalences - between exceptionalism and banalisation, risk and privilege, destruction and infrastructure, secrecy and everyday life, as well as trauma and nostalgia - the paper shows how uranium mining has shaped identity, memory, and regional belonging. Particular attention is paid to the role of knowledge archives, nuclear cultural heritage, and global circulations of expertise, as well as to the challenges posed by long-term radioactive temporalities. In doing so, the paper contributes to a broader understanding of how the nuclear becomes effective in everyday life and how its material and immaterial afterlives can be remembered, communicated, and responsibly shaped across generations. It argues that the governance of nuclear legacies constitutes not only a technical or environmental concern, but a societal and security-relevant task central to safeguarding the well-being of present and future generations.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2026-water-in-security-and-climate-migration-in-iraq-analyzing-socio-economic-threats 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z 2026-06-11T12:00:00Z Saman Omar Ms Dunia Baban

The 2018 UN GEO-6 report classified Iraq 5th most climate vulnerable globally and the UN have further warned that by 2035, Iraq may meet only 15% of its total water demand if current severe water crises trends persist. Equally, as latest as September 2025, IOM recorded that 186.00 Iraqi people are displaced due to water scarcity. In 2025, the Iraqi parliament, admitted that massive rural water shortages drive farmers and villagers to cities, Environmental changes in Iraq trigger socio-economic issues. The study is qualitative and exploiting a socio-legal approach, the primary data is in the form of interviews which were conducted with selected respondents (7) of various backgrounds, and secondary data from journal articles, books, and credible online sources were analyzed thematically. This study aims to scrutinise water insecurity and climate migration in Iraq. Study, revealed that Iraq faces a water crisis from declining Tigris-Euphrates flows (down 30–40% since 1980s per FAO 2023), threatening agriculture, and ecosystems. Similarly, study indicates the Iraqi water in-security and environmental decline has had a direct effect on agriculture with wheat and barley production falling by 30–40% during recent drought years and climate-driven displacement is on the rise. The study recommended that there is a need to strengthen Iraq water security strategies to address such threats, Iraq requires urgent reforms, domestically, must establish a national water diplomacy body, Hence, regionally, should leverage its 2023 accession to the UNECE Water Convention by engaging international mediators (like the UN) to negotiate binding water agreements with Turkey and Iran. This study provides valuable insights for policymakers and academic community, contributing to a better understanding of regional security dynamics and strategies, while identifying areas for future examination in water insecurity and climate migration in broader Middle Eastern. Climate Change, Migration, Water Insecurity, Iraq, Socio-Economic.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2024-temporal-disparities-in-intergenerational-justice-a-comparative-analysis-of-nucl 2024-06-27T12:00:00Z 2024-06-27T12:00:00Z Franziska Stärk

Nuclear weapons and climate change put future generations in the wrong by externalizing potential long-term harm and constraining their freedom of choice through extended policy trajectories. Focused on nuclear weapons, this article conducts a comparative analysis of intergenerational justice concerns in both contexts. The principal argument emphasizes the distinct temporality of these challenges, revealing three crucial temporal disparities. First, the externalization of intergenerational harm follows different timelines. Climate-related risks intensify across successive generations, while the risk of future generations navigating the aftermath of nuclear war accumulates over the long term, becoming more likely over extended periods compared to shorter ones. Second, the sustainability of present generations' incentives to prioritize immediate benefits over future generations’ well-being varies. The appeal of fossil fuels is expected to wane over time in the climate context, whereas perceived benefits of nuclear deterrence are likely to endure. Third, while the visual salience of the intergenerational implications of nuclear weapons is diminishing, the gradual impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly evident. Comparing how intergenerational injustice unfolds through continued reliance on nuclear deterrence and climate change not only highlights the oversight of intergenerational justice in nuclear ethics debates, but also carves out the distinct nature of intergenerational justice concerns in the context of nuclear weapons. Derived from this comparative analysis, a more nuanced understanding of intergenerational injustice in nuclear weapons facilitates a critical examination of mitigation and rectification strategies.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2021-india-s-new-security-approach-to-the-european-union 2021-09-03T12:00:00Z 2021-09-03T12:00:00Z Constantino Xavier

For more than fifty years the European Union and India have steadily expanded their engagement, from trade to areas such as education, climate change and connectivity, but the last few years have added a surprising new dimension focused on defence and security cooperation that had hitherto been absent. Officials now discuss collaboration on maritime security, intelligence and counter-terrorism, and defence industries; new dialogues have been set up, including on cybersecurity; and the EU Naval Force and the Indian Navy conducted their first-ever joint manoeuvre in the Indian Ocean. What factors drive this new convergence, and why, given India's traditional reluctance to go beyond bilateral security cooperation with France or the United Kingdom, is Delhi warming to the idea of engaging the EU as a global security actor? Drawing on historical and official documents and interviews with Indian diplomatic, military and other officials, this paper shows that a changing Indian understanding of security — now more focused on cyber, technology, climate and other non-traditional domains — has paradoxically increased the EU's salience in Delhi's geostrategic perspective, with structural uncertainty marked by rising tensions with China, decreasing reliance on the United States, and the United Kingdom's Brexit further incentivising India to engage the EU as a global security actor.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2021-peacock-in-a-coal-mine-european-understanding-of-environmental-loss-in-india 2021-09-03T12:00:00Z 2021-09-03T12:00:00Z Damien Carrière

The environmental crisis is now rightly understood as a security and stability issue. A common approach in Europe tends to see environmental degradation as the source of resource-based violence, and a potential challenge for the state. Europe tends to look at environmental issues with an avowed fear of prospective climate refugees. Neo-Malthusian theories linking population growth with environmental degradation are still widely spread. This approach obscures the fact that the source of environmental loss and displacement can lay in an economic system that uses violence to implement the interests of ruling groups while disfranchising others. Appealing only to state and international negotiations to protect the environment is therefore problematic. India is a case in point: environmental degradation and the destabilization of local communities that cause their displacement often result from a resources mismanagement by the state, enforced with violence on local communities. The state here is not problem-solving but its development is at the source of conflicts. State decisions on building dams, sand mining, and coal extraction are taken without consultations and implemented by force against locals. The state often engages police/paramilitary forces against environmental movements. Unsurprisingly, then, despite the recognition of the urgency of the environmental crisis by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, no major policy has yet been implemented to mitigate the various environmental hazard that that India is facing, neither the smog nor climate change. Rather, efforts are put into fostering further disfranchisement that correspond to an ethnic and economic agenda. European plans of actions and understanding of the environmental crisis is sorely lacking an understanding of the systemic dynamics that are at the roots of the crisis. This paper contributes to this understanding by comparing Indian and European paths to environmental protection and points out at the limits of an international relations approach of the matter.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-climate-change-and-the-us-military-changes-and-continuities-under-the-trump-admi 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z Adrien Estève

Over the last decades, the United States Department of Defense has started to think about climate change and its implications for national and global politics. Following Donald Trump’s elections, many commentators predicted a substantial revising of both environmental and defense policies at the federal level, which would represent a radical change in comparison to the policies implemented under the Obama administration. Regarding environmental policies within the Department of Defense, we could argue that, if we can identify substantial changes, many programs, bureaus and policies initiated under the Obama administration are still in operation. It is possible to explain this apparent paradox through a brief history of how environmental and climate-related issues became relevant for the military. In the 90s and the 2000s, the military, under increasing normative pressure, began to adapt its equipment, procedures and doctrines to new sustainable norms (a “greening” of the military). These efforts began in the 80s and the 90s and peaked in the early 2000s with the creation of environmental bureaus charged with enforcing ecological norms and codes of conduct, on both material and operational levels. The most important element, however, is that the Department of Defense started to incorporate climate change into its strategic doctrine. This is partly the consequence of the work of military analysts, think tanks and research centers close to the military establishment. This translation of the issue into military terms stay relevant under the current administration. This paper will present the result of a fieldwork conducted in April 2019 in the United States.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-money-rather-than-muscles-china-s-approach-to-post-polar-arctic-security 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z Mikaa Mered

Presented at EISS 2019. No abstract on file yet.

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-norway-and-the-arctic-climate-policy-and-energy-paradigm 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z Florian Vidal

As the Polar region gathers a load of challenges (i.e. climate change, resources management, opening transport routes, etc.) affecting local communities, it engages public authorities and other stakeholders including civil society to meet them. Also, it has been for 25 years a space for backing climate policy and environment. Norway is exposed to major negative impacts due to climate change effects on its territory, specifically on its coastline. Public authorities published key assessments on costs and needed adaptation in the coming decades. Besides, the Nordic country stands as a specific player on the Arctic stage. On the one hand, Norway is committed to implement international agreements to fight global carbon emissions. The country is shifting toward a free-carbon model as transportation and infrastructures has to meet critical objectives to reduce CO2 emissions. On the other hand, the state is still relaying on fossil fuel resources for its economic development, despite the emergency of the climate crisis. For over 50 years, Norway has based its social model on the oil and gas industry. Its government holds several O\&G projects in the Barents Sea. This paper will discuss the current strategy in term of energy development. This strategy retains two aspects. The first one is dedicated to the energy model shifting promoted for internal policies. The second one is oriented to the international energy market as the state and key energy stakeholders maintain O\&G projects in the Arctic as the economic future of the country. What are the consequences of such a dichotomy? Is there any division among stakeholders? What are the implications in term of security?

https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-regionalization-of-environmental-security-and-the-role-of-the-military-south-asi 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z 2019-06-13T12:00:00Z Dhanasree Jayaram

Presented at EISS 2019. No abstract on file yet.