This chapter reviews the argument in the book to understand the intersection between state capacity, political exclusion, and international assistance and how these conjoin to contribute to negative security outcomes. I discuss how to operationalize each of these parameters. I then diagram several causal pathways connecting these factors to negative security outcomes. I also develop predictions for likely outcomes when these factors have more favorable and mixed characteristics in terms of state capacity, exclusion, and assistance.

In this chapter, I introduce the question that animates the book and preview the argument. Under what conditions does climate change lead to negative security outcomes? I emphasize the combination of weak state capacity, exclusive political institutions, and absent or one-sided delivery of international assistance. I then summarize the contribution of the book and preview the chapters, including the case studies.

The chapter examines the legal and extra-legal difficulties in eliminating military objectives. It also attempts to verify the claim,often made in literature on the subject, that civilians account for the majority of victims of armed conflict. The review of legal complexities begins with the examination of the principle of proportionality, the requirement to take appropriate cautionary measures, and the prohibition of reprisals. Extra-legal difficulties include the following issues: the shift in the nature of contemporary armed conflict; the tendency to protect one’s own troops at the expense of other goals; the trend to deliberately attack populations perceived as vulnerable; using gender as a potential cause for targeting; insufficient precision of weapons used in action; and difficulty in obtaining reliable information on the status of a person or object.

The focus of this chapter is on non-human targets, i.e. objects/goods. It begins by reviewing the general definition of a military objective enshrined in Article 52(2) of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Next, to illustrate how the general definition of military objective translates into practice, it reviews the categories of objects typically classified as such, and examines whether their situation truly is the same in international and non-international armed conflict. In the final part of the chapter, the focus is on objects that are generally classified as civilian and thus protected. The key purpose in this part is to identify the exceptions from the prohibition of targeting these objects.

The penultimate chapter explores the future of academic inquiry on climate and security and how the field of international relations ought to change. I explore several areas where the climate security field will need to develop new approaches and insights, mostly related to the challenges of writing about the future. This includes: how academics can be useful to policy and the need to move beyond the simple phrase of “thread multiplier”; the significance of the end of “stationarity” and what that means for scholarship going forward; the question of what baselines we use for identifying normal climatic conditions and how far back we can go to identify deep structural drivers; that scholars need to explore more fully the links between human security and state security; and that runaway climate change would make all of these security challenges worse and, hence, mitigation needs to be considered a security concern in its own right. Finally, I suggest that the broader field of political science needs to elevate climate change to a systemic structural factor like anarchy and think about what this means for the discipline and for the world.

This chapter explores why, in the wake of similar exposure to drought in the mid-2000s, Syria experienced a civil war but Lebanon did not.

International humanitarian law (IHL) grants protection to certain persons and objects, but at the same time indicates which other categories of persons and objects can be lawfully attacked. Therefore, IHL is a battlefield of two principles: humanity and military necessity.

The overwhelming majority of publications on the subject focus on the protection afforded to persons and objects. This monograph takes a different approach. My intention is to examine the opposite question: who and what is not afforded protection, and ergo can be targeted and attacked in armed conflict?

I believe that the norms of IHL are currently interpreted to permit attacks against a wide array of targets, and I answer several research questions to prove it: What norms apply to the determination of lawful targets? What persons and objects may be lawfully targeted in armed conflict?

How then can we understand the links between climate change and security? I begin with my understanding of security before reviewing the virtues and limits of the research on environmental security to date.

This chapter contemplates the possibility of enforcing the responsibility of individuals with regard to violations of the principles of lawful targeting. It foregoes re-stating the general principles that govern the individual responsibility for war crimes, in favour of strictly addressing the responsibility for unlawful attacks during armed conflict. Two issues are discussed separately. The first one is the norms that criminalize attacks against persons not directly involved in hostilities and against civilian objects. It is verified whether each violation of IHL as regards targeting results in criminal responsibility. The second issue is responsibility strictly for the participation in hostilities, because in several states there have been attempts to criminalize this as a type of war crime. Moreover, punishability of such participation offers a good illustration of the differences in treatment of those on the state and the non-state side of armed conflict.

This chapter explores the emergent practice of climate security. I survey how the practice of climate and security has evolved over the last fifteen years, starting with a review of the variety of climate security challenges policymakers have identified, how policymakers have responded to climate security challenges thus far, and concluding with a section on what can and should be done to address climate security going forward.