Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Geography

First Advisor

Edward R. Carr

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the broad question: How do the discourses of climate change and conflict travel across time and space to become policy, programming, and ultimately a development initiative that exist on the ground? To answer this question, I broke the research into three separate papers. The first examines how the US policy community approaches, understands and seeks to address the discourses of climatesecurity. The second examines the ways in which climate change affects conflict outcomes in Karamoja, Uganda. And the third, using the efforts of Mercy Corps in Karamoja as a case study, examines the realities and opportunities in addressing climate-conflict from a development perspective. Clear across all components of this research, and linking the three manuscripts, is the salience of scale in climate-conflict, the paradox of how the ‘threat multiplier’ discourse both oversimplifies and blurs the legibility of the relationship between climate change and conflict, and the need to further deconstruct climate-conflict in the context of particular places. The central contribution of this dissertation as a whole is to elucidate the challenges facing institutions who have the mandate of addressing climateconflict and wider climate-security connections. While the lessons of this project have academic implications, the evident challenges facing practitioners in conceptualizing and addressing the link between climate change and conflict, should serve as an argument for the policy and implementation community to critically examine how their efforts are affected by the discourses and scales of climate-conflict and climate-security.

Rights

© 2018, Daniel Abrahams

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