Increasingly, natural resources have come to be considered in dual dimension as objects that both increase the risk of violence and pose an opportunity to build peace. This linking of natural resources to question of conflict, peace, and security denotes the ‘securitisation’ of natural resources, taken to mean the “discursive construction of an existing threat to a referent object legitimizing extraordinary means.” This begs the question, what might these ‘extraordinary means’ entail? This thesis investigates this question by analysing the United Nations Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding’s 2016 report, a body tasked with researching the resource/conflict nexus and producing policy to address it. Utilising a post-structural policy analysis method, I denaturalise the claims made by the policy, applying governmentality, environmentality, and critical security theories to explain the logics and rationales underpinning resource securitisation, and the effects those rationales have. The analysis suggests that the policies security framing serves to represent resource conflict as manageable only through liberal governmental reforms associated with mainstream development practice, the UNEPs monopoly of technical peacebuilding expertise, and surveillance measures placed on unsuitable countries. By emphasising these as the primary solutions, the policy removes natural resource management from public control, downplaying populations agency, and maintaining existing power relations and inequalities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-46111 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Etchells, Oli |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Institutionen för globala politiska studier (GPS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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