Handbook

The world is faced with unprecedented challenges and threats to our collective security and well-being. These are multi-dimensional, global in scope and impact, and increasingly intertwined. Climate change and environmental degradation threatens the lives and livelihoods of billions of people: through susceptibility to natural disasters and extreme weather to eroded livelihoods, political instability and disruption to critical food supply chains. Intensified competition over non-renewable resources and subsequent strains on social and political cohesion is increasingly linked to intra and infra state conflict, often leading to large scale displacement and refugeeism. Demographic trends such as rapid urbanization exposes vulnerable populations to violence, persistent poverty and increased risk from epidemic disease.

In this interdisciplinary major, students will learn how to critically analyse complex networks of interwoven social, environmental, economic and political factors and their role in the production of insecurity, vulnerability and harm. Human-orientated security addresses a fundamental question: how can people protect themselves from widespread challenges and threats to their survival, livelihood and dignity? In this major in Environment, Conflict and Security students will gain the tools to analyse, identify and develop innovative and practical interventions that contribute to human safety and well-being in a challenging and rapidly changing world, focusing in particular on interrelationships between environment, conflict and the production of security.