The award was given at the ESIL 16th Anniversary Conference in Stockholm, 9-11 September. The jury members for this year’s Prize were Professor Seline Trevisanut (Utrecht University), Judge Ganna Yudkivska (European Court of Human Rights) and Professor Adriana Di Stefano (University of Catania). The jury unanimously decided that Dr Cusato’s paper should win the Prize out of a wide range of papers submitted.

Abstract from 'Problematising climate security: international lawmaking, conflict and violence in the Anthropocene'

Over the past couple of decades, climate change has been increasingly described as a peace and security issue. Although empirical evidence of the correlation between climate change and amplified rates of violence remains scarce and disagreements exist within the relevant literature, the argument that climate change may increase risks and vulnerabilities paving the way for instability has gained traction in policy and academic circles. In 2007 the UN Security Council held its first open debate on the topic, while a 2009 Report of the UN Secretary-General famously characterised climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ that may exacerbate threats caused by poverty, weak institutions, resource mismanagement, and ethnic clashes. Despite the growing popularity of the language of peace and security in the context of the unfolding climate ‘crisis’, the debate on how to define ‘climate security’ and how the latter should be implemented has only just begun. While international legal norms play an important role in the the construction of the ‘nexus’ between climate change and security, there is still little understanding of how international law operates in this venue of global governance, the actors it enrols, the forms of authority it fosters, and the theories it employs. This paper aims to fill this gap by unpacking the emerging concept of climate security. Linking climate change and security entails a set of assumptions about who is to be secured and from what. What’s the nature of the security ‘threat’ posed by climate change? Whose security are we trying to protect? Against which risks? Emanating from where? These are foundational questions to think in new ways about what ‘peace’ and ‘security’ means in the current geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Yet, as this paper will show, these are also controversial questions that carry immense political stakes. The paper will draw upon critical security studies to illuminate the stakes involved in the ‘securitisation’ of climate change and in legal efforts to assert the authority of the Security Council over it. Further, it will build upon critical readings of the law and patterns of climate injustices to reflect on the opportunities and risks that come with framing climate change as a security issue. Recognising that the international law of peace and security is a vocabulary of governance with the capacity to distribute power and authority, the question of what climate security discourse will prevail in the international legal order could not be more pressing.

Eliana Cusato

Eliana Cusato is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (UvA). She holds a Ph.D. in international law from the National University of Singapore. She serves as a member of the editorial board of the Asian Journal of International Law. Prior to joining UvA, Eliana was a lecturer at Essex Law School (UK). She is the author of the The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law, forthcoming in September 2021 with Cambridge University Press.