The Story of Kelley et al: How Does Scientific Knowledge Circulate in Efforts to Securitise Climate Change?

Many policymakers consider climate change and conflicts as linked. Think tanks, international organizations, scientists, governments, and military institutions debate the nature of this link, and what to do about it. But the link remains elusive, and views of the actors vary. Clearly climate change is not a “traditional” security threat involving a conflict between groups of humans. Rather, it is a diffuse threat based on environmental factors that might somewhere, at some point, aggravate instabilities around the world. But there is no obvious “smoking gun” (although some present the Syrian conflict as such). This ambiguity forces actors to draw on various types evidence, giving science a special role. Many scientific papers have been published on the link, and they circulate in the policy debates among think tanks, policymakers, and international organizations. But what actually happens when science enters security policy debates? How “science-driven” are those debates? How are studies taken up, considered, or perhaps even influenced, in the debate? Security studies have not elaborated this in detail. While the securitization approach of Buzan et al (1998) acknowledges that science has some special role in environmental security debates, it stops there, and the link has not been documented empirically. To gain clarity, two things are needed: 1. the theoretical landscape of security studies needs to be expanded with considerations from science and technology studies; 2. An empirical analysis of the climate securitization debate is needed to clarify what is happening between the actors. This paper will attempt to do that by applying the actor-network theory to conduct a case study on the role of one of the key scientific studies in the climate security debates: In 2015, Kelley et al. published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It drew on statistical data to demonstrate a connection between climate impacts and the Syrian conflict. The study has been widely quoted by policymakers, other scientists and the media, and has become a standard reference point on the issue. In this paper, I will describe the network that enabled and emerged in reaction to Kelley et al.. I will document what actors and associations between those actors enabled Kelley et al. to be written and published, how it circulated within policymakers, how it contributed to the efforts to frame climate change as a security issue, and what controversies it generated. By doing this I will provide an empirically grounded case study of the “science-policy interface”, with the aim of shedding some light into that mysterious black box.