Media Framing of Climate Security

How security issues emerge and dissolve have been a central question in the securitization literature. Studies on securitization dynamics in a growing number of sectors have been conducted, including securitization of climate change. However, the literature notes the lack of comparative analyses across countries as well as audiences in securitization. One category of audience that has been understudied so far in the literature is the public that gives moral support to security policies. Likewise a relatively understudied agent of securitization is media. In the proposed analysis we study Turkey’s media framing of climate change and whether and how it relates to the framings of security in general to acquire in-depth understanding of whether and if national media plays a role in securitization of climate change. Turkey is an interesting case as despite a lack of political discourse on climate security, public opinion survey results show a relatively high level of perceived threat of climate change. Possible newspapers to be analysed are Sabah, Hurriyet, Sozcu to be able to account for newspapers with different ideological orientation. Data will be collected and coded for the period between 1 January- 25 March 2015, which is the period before the Pew survey began. Second, we collect data for the period between 1 October-4 November 2015, which is the period before the UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change was signed.