Conflicts around sustainability decisions are driven by at least eight forces. The distribution of risks and benefits is uneven, creating winners and losers. Facts and values, while logically distinct, are often confused. Facts are uncertain. The value implications of emerging issues are not clear. Decisions bring about permanent, concrete changes making compromise difficult. Those disadvantaged by a decision often have little say in it and did not generate the problem, raising concerns about harm to innocents. The boundaries between what is public and what is private are often confused and contested. Competence about some aspects of decision-making, such as assessing facts, can be confused with competence about other aspects of decision-making, such as assessing values. In addition, major long-standing controversies about transforming political economies and ecosystems are part of the background to most sustainability decisions.

For many practitioners and scholars of International Relations, security is the number one issue in global politics. The need to secure survival trumps all other imperatives where a ‘state of nature’ is said to prevail among nations. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin our enquiry into the contribution of Green politics to global politics with this central concern. Despite the absolute centrality given to the politics of survival in orthodox representations of IR noted above, ecological questions are largely neglected. This is inspite of a now vast literature on environmental security and environmental conflicts. Here I explore Green critiques of militarism targeting the sources of violence and conflict, as well as the ecological impacts of war, before articulating visions of a Green security and considering strategies for achieving it through ecologising security, multilateralism and democratc defence.