Crisis Forum Climate Change and Violence Workshop Series 



Workshop 4: Securing the State: Securing the Corporate Nexus

The Coming Militarization of Climate Change 



27 November 2009 

9:30am - 5:00pm 

The Rosebowl, 408

Leeds Metropolitan University 



£10 (waged), £6 (unwaged)  (Includes Tea/Coffee and Lunch)



As part of the Climate Change and Violence series, this workshop will explore military and corporate responses to climate change and mass migration, and brings together key researchers on new military crowd control, surveillance and space technologies. 



The world is holding its breath for a successful outcome to the International Panel of Climate Change to be held in Copenhagen December 2010. The meeting will bring together the world¹s leading scientific experts in climate change, and its consequences. 



The Copenhagen conference is rich in the number of technical issues covered including migration. However, what is less explored is how states will respond if told they could be facing over a billion people being forced to migrate if the world’s temperature rises by more than three degrees. 



This workshop will, therefore, examine how the current revolution in military affairs has financed a new generation of weapons and control technologies in the "war against terror," and how these will become rapidly reoriented toward area denial and for border exclusion purposes. 



Speakers include experts on sub-lethal and paralysing weapons, new techniques of urban control and destruction, and the development of militarized robotics. Also discussed will be state responses to human security as the climate crisis deepens, and how these could go beyond the limits of international and humanitarian law.    



 



To book your place for this workshop please visit the Leeds Met online Store 

https://onlinestore.leedsmet.ac.uk/catalogue/productdetails.asp?compid=1&prodid=123&deptid=4&catID=8&hasClicked=1





Map and directions

http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/study/Visit_Us_find_us.htm



 

Applied Global Ethics, Leeds Met.  

http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/international/age/index.htm



 

For further information on the Crisis Forum, Climate Change and Violence workshop series

http://www.crisis-forum.org.uk/events/index.php 



 

For further information about this event please contact Rachel July [log in to unmask]   



 



Background:



This workshop seeks to extend the discussion of workshop 3 by exploring more fully not only the thinking behind ‘securing the state’ and its interest but also how already existing technologies of control and surveillance may be utilised, or further developed as climate emergency spreads. In particular this workshop will be concerned with two aspects of this subject. Firstly, it seeks to plot by way of examples, precedents, and evidence of current military R&D, how relationships between big government and the corporate sector are likely to develop to safeguard and, or perpetuate state and/or corporate interests for ‘business as usual’, even as climate crisis gathers pace. Secondly, and more exactly, we will be seeking to pick up on the question posed in workshop 1 as to whether this crisis will lead to a new ‘security’ paradigm. Can we expect a new intensification of control and surveillance mechanisms in the face of likely mass environmental refugee flows at and beyond borde!

 rs? Is the emerging doctrine of MOUT (‘Military Operations in Urbanised Terrain’) likely to undergo a further metamorphosis? What will be the impact of climate change on R&D associated with WMD as well as on the strategic planning and deployment of a potential new generation of nuclear, including possibly space, weaponry? In turn will this sort of thinking be complicated, yet at the same time amplified by, the building of a new generation of nuclear power stations? We will finally in this session pose a more general question. Is a perpetuated and enhanced Military Industrial Complex (albeit in all its complexities) likely to be an aspect of a climate changed world which is beneficial to the sustenance and security of the common weal, or an added threat to it? Or posed another way, is it as likely to be as much, if not more part of the problem, as part of the solution?



 



Marianne McKiggan 

[log in to unmask] 

(Crisis Forum, Project co-ordinator)