Introduction: a new old world?

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of contemporary societies and exposed the limitations and paradoxes of existing security provisions. Pandemics are not a new phenomenon and yet states and societies were highly unprepared to handle the latest one. The number of deaths, the pervasiveness of the impacts, and the deep consequences on people's ways of life are prompting a moment of reflection, making evident the links between the personal and the political, between everyday life and geopolitics, between humans and other species, and questioning the very “subject of security.”

The pandemic is only one of the many challenges humanity is facing: environmental problems, from climate change to biodiversity loss, can have equally devastating consequences. Even if their impacts have not manifested themselves on a global scale, regional impacts, from wildfires in Australia and America to severe flooding from Germany to China, are becoming more evident. The impacts can be even more dramatic in the Global South.

These challenges suggest that we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which human actions are shaping the planet and its destiny. Growing concerns for energy, food, and water security coexist with new, potentially catastrophic threats, like global extinction of species or abrupt climate change, while old problems like conflicts remain relevant. Paradoxes appear as efforts to secure existing ways of life contribute to creating more insecurity. As Simon Dalby noted, “security continues to be formulated in terms of the perpetuation of the existing political order, precisely the order that has generated such dramatic ecological disruption in the first place.” The Anthropocene, considering human action similar to a geological force, able to change and transform the planet, questions that order and the separation between humans and nature. Nature is no longer a secure, taken-for-granted background against which human actions and history unfold, nor is it the foundation of a positivist epistemology and the security perspectives that rely on it. The debate about environmental security, with different attempts to conceptualize the link between the environment and security, has anticipated much of this debate. As Daniel Deudney warned, back in 1990, environmental degradation is not a threat to national security, but environmentalism is a threat to a specific conceptualization of security focused on the state, on external threats, and on reactive measures, which still characterizes much of the contemporary discourse, and so is the Anthropocene.