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This book profiles Simon Dalby's academic contributions in the fields of critical geopolitics, environmental security and the intersection of international relations and the Anthropocene. It includes reprints of key essays that highlight innovations in critical thought at the intersections between geopolitics, environment and security.
Starting with an analysis of American reconstructions of the Soviet threat in the 1970s, an early contribution to the emerging field of critical geopolitics, subsequent papers focus on the emergent formulations of environmental security in the aftermath of the Cold War and the environmental costs of globalization. Focusing on the implicit geographical framing in discourses of globalization offered a critique that extended the ambit of critical geopolitics to grapple with the issues of environmental security and the rising concern with climate change as well as the political identities invoked in that debate.
In the aftermath of 9/11, similar arguments about contextualization applied to the American global war on terror and the revival of discussions of empire and its geographies, both in arguments for invading Iraq, as well as the wider discussions in policy discourse and popular culture. Simultaneously, the emergence of earth system science and the concept of the Anthropocene offered another way to highlight the dangers of fossil fueled economic activities. The necessity of fundamentally rethinking the premises of security policy in light of this recontextualization is emphasized in more recent contributions on climate security and the current ecological crisis.
- Critical geopolitics
- Environmental security
- Global war on terror
- Firepower in the Anthropocene
List of contents
Part I. On Simon Dalby.- Chapter 1. Simon Dalby: An autobiography.- Chapter 2. Simon Dalby: A Bibliography.- Part II. Simon Dalby Key Texts.- Chapter 3. Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other (1988).- Chapter 4. Environmental Security: Geopolitics, Ecology, and the New World Order (1996).- Chapter 5. Globalizing Environment: Culture, Ontology and Critique (2000).- Chapter 6. Geopolitical Identities: Arctic Ecology and Global Consumption (2003).- Chapter 7. Geopolitics, the Bush Doctrine, and War on Iraq (2003).- Chapter 8. Ecology, Security, and Change in the Anthropocene (2007).- Chapter 9. Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and the Kingdom of Heaven (2008).- Chapter 10. Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene (2014).- Chapter 11. Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2018).- Chapter 12. Unsustainable Borders: Globalization In a Climate Disrupted World (2021).- Chapter 13. To Build a Better World: Securing Global Life After Fossil Fuels (2021).- Chapter 14. Peace, Violence and Inequality in a Climate Disrupted World (2022).
About the author
Simon Dalby is a Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University, a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. From 2012 to 2018, he held the CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He co-edited Reframing Climate Change (Routledge 2016) and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Routledge 2019), and authored Anthropocene Geopolitics (University of Ottawa Press 2020), Rethinking Environmental Security (Edward Elgar 2022) and Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate Disrupted World (Agenda 2024). Simon Dalby was educated at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Victoria and holds a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. Before joining Laurier and the Balsillie School he was Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Roger Boyd is a Fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and holds an MBA from New York University and a PhD from the Balsillie School. Spent twenty five years working in the financial industry. Authored Energy and the Financial System (Springer 2014).
