On state securitization,artificial NGOs,and environmental journalism: An interview with Peter Schwartzstein,environmental security journalist,author,and researcher

Before we start with the actual interview, can you briefly introduce yourself and the work you are doing?

I am an environmental journalist with a background in water, food security, and particularly the climate-conflict nexus, which I have covered in a little over 30 countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East. I am a fellow at the Wilson Center and the Center for Climate and Security, and I just published my first book. ¹

You also recently did some work on environmental NGOs as tools of state security policy. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

Over my past decade and a bit of environmental reporting, I have frequently stumbled on environmental NGOs of dubious composition that conduct dubious work. Many of them have seemed to have a kind of sway or connection to authorities that appeared to be out of sync with the volume of work that they were actually doing on the ground and out of sync with the relative lack of importance attached to the environment in many of those countries.

As I and others have long suspected, there are a good number of essentially artificial actors within the environmental NGO space. In recent years, we have had more evidence to flesh out that suspicion. In Lebanon, there is an environmental NGO called Green Without Borders, which at this point has long since been established as essentially an extension of Hezbollah and some of its militant activities in the south of Lebanon. Equally, there are other examples where the nature of some of these environmental NGO activities has been so transparently out of whack with their declared duties and so obviously in the service of certain state security strategic goals that it has not required too much of a leap of imagination to determine what is going on here.

In that context, I am thinking of the situation in Armenia where you had a group of several dozen supposedly anti-mining campaigners from Azerbaijan who began the blockage of the lone road that extended from the state of Armenia through to the largely autonomous Nagorno Karabakh territory. After a little while, these so-called environmental activists were barely even pretending to be environmental activists. And so, by the time that various kinds of OSINT (open-source intelligence) types were able to well and truly establish that many of these folks were intimately connected with the Azerbaijani state, there was sort of total clarity.

Just one final point on that: We have more and more illustrations globally, but particularly in authoritarian states of course, of NGOs that are outright artificial in the way in which they have been put together and in the ways in which they conduct their work. Other NGOs do some legitimate work, but which have been geared in such a way as to dovetail with state security priorities.

What are the benefits for state or non-state groups such as Hezbollah in using these environmental NGOs, infiltrating them, or setting them up for their purposes?

It really varies across contexts, but sometimes, these environmental NGOs give security actors a certain deniability. It can enable them to work, at least for periods, in contexts where the overt deployment of state security personnel could be awkward, unwise, or strategically less useful.

Sometimes it is an extension of state greenwashing that we have seen in ever greater volumes over the years. Even a lot of authoritarian states with very little demonstrated interest in the environment increasingly feel the need to present themselves as being kind of green, and they hence switched on to the importance of environmental actors. By deploying what are essentially fake green organizations, they can glean what they deem to be some of the benefits of being perceived as environmentally friendly. But these benefits come without having to suffer through any of the awkwardness that might arise from having truly independent environmental civil society actors who are going about their business. These are just two reasons among many.

My question concerns expressions by scholars and activists who have long worried that the securitization of climate change could lead to repressive and counterproductive responses. However, this research has mostly been focused on countries from the global north. In your book, you identify a broad securitization and even weaponization of the climate space within the global south. Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that?

Absolutely. On the securitization front, developments occur in many different forms, and as is so often the case, there is no systematic approach; it varies according to the priorities and the capacities of these respective countries.

Perhaps the first thought that leaped to mind was the increased targeting of environmental defenders. Many of them, particularly in the wildlife space but also in various other parts of the wider environmental field, were previously seen in some instances as harmless tree huggers. But, as climate change has intensified and as its impacts and those of non-climate environmental troubles have become more politically salient, many of these environmental defenders have been kind of re-evaluated in the eyes of the state. They are increasingly considered as potential security threats rather than as supposed types whose existence was deemed to be both manageable and essentially totally unthreatening.

Can you tell us some examples?

In countries like Iran, water has long since become an issue of serious public concern and the state fears that water could be an issue that cuts across political cleavages, and which is, as a consequence, deemed extra threatening as a possible source of regime destabilization. Many of the long-time environmental actors are hence being targeted in ways that they never previously were.

Second, climate change is slowly eating its way up the priority list of authoritarian states. Many of those states increasingly understand that there are quite large sums of money, still insufficient amounts, but still large sums that are being made available for climate action. The environment portfolio within many of these governments is consequently also being fought over to a greater extent than it previously was.

In countries like Egypt or Iraq, the Ministry of Environment was previously considered something of a loser’s prize for various political actors. But so many of these environment portfolios theoretically have access to climate funding and how that could be spent. Various armed actors—in Baghdad, in Tripoli, in Benghazi, and elsewhere—hence increasingly see these environment portfolios as assets to be targeted from an early stage in the divvying up of government spoils rather than some kind of afterthought to be picked up toward the very end.

On the weaponization component of your question: Part of this is again an extension of the greenwashing phenomenon that just characterizes so much of the wider environmental space. Consider the UAE, Egypt, and, of course, Azerbaijan, the host of the next upcoming COP: Each of these states has at least in some ways seen the hosting of this big, prestigious event as a means of generating positive headlines at a time when they have been accused of perpetrating all sorts of abuses. It is absolutely no coincidence that Azerbaijan is particularly keen to host the COP not long after the end of its hostilities with Armenia in which Azerbaijan was mostly seen as the chief belligerent. This is a way in which states can begin to try to reinvent themselves and associate themselves with an issue that is cared about to a greater extent now than it previously was.

There may be two final points here and one is also not a newish theme.

First, governments like that of Assad in Syria and like that of Buhari, until recently the president in Nigeria, have quite often seen climate change as a kind of useful foil for their failures, and as a useful means of explaining away violence that is often at least partly of their creation. To my mind, this is one of the many reasons why there has been a very belated reluctance to accept the depth of climate change’s connection with violence. This is because of the wariness that more and more governments will seize upon it as a very useful tool and deflect from their role in initiating violence. But I certainly anticipate seeing much more of that in the years to come.

In 2015, I remember sitting down with a police general in Baghdad, and he quite literally, I’m not exaggerating, laughed me out of the room when I asked him about how environmental and climate issues might be contributing to varying degrees of instability in rural Iraq. And now you have officials across the political spectrum and many in positions that have nothing to do with the environment who are, in a completely unsolicited manner, raising the climate component, whether it is real or not.

Second, there is an argument that I’m hearing with a greater frequency and which I lend a little bit of credence to. The argument is that as climate change intensifies, many militaries are tooling up their forces and are adding to their military and security capacity in part as a way of beginning to face the more complicated world that a series of warming temperatures is likely to bring. We can observe this, particularly, in states in which militaries hold a disproportionate degree of power.

This is the idea that Iraq, Russia, and others of the world are actually performing varieties of climate action or are preparing for climate change up to a point. They are just doing so in the form of preparing for any of the security challenges that they anticipate arising out of this more complicated space. Again, there is a limit to how much of a motivating factor I think actually is behind the intensifying militarization of governments in many authoritarian states, but I think there is potentially something to that point.

With the environmental challenges of our time growing and more actors becoming interested in their intersections with insecurity and conflict, do you have any suggestions or advice for the next generations of journalists interested in climate and environmental security?

It is a classic trope within journalism that the older generation of journalists are forever encouraging the younger generation to not even consider getting involved in the media space. But many of us, myself included, ignored that very good advice.

But within a kind of specific environmental security and climate security context, the single biggest advice I would give is the absolute importance of conducting as much groundwork as possible. I, and I think many others, argue that it is only by seeing, up close and over extended periods, how climate stresses are mingling and interrelating with other drivers of instability and all of the other things that are going on in people’s and communities’ lives that you can really understand how big or not of a destabilizer climate change is. I am certainly one of these people who thinks that climate security risks are at least partly impervious to quantitative analysis. I think it is something that really cries out for a lot of this long, slow, and often quite dangerous research on the ground because it is only then that you can understand how climate change fits into the wider mosaic of complications that people have in their lives.

This is sort of really a profoundly unhelpful point in some ways: One of the reasons why I have been slowly segueing from environmental journalism into think tank and research organization work is because I argue that climate security is a field that also is not particularly well suited to media as we know it. That is because, even if you are writing in an extremely concise way, you often need a greater word count than media outlets are necessarily willing to grant you to lay out the nature of the climate security risk, precisely because of the importance of the previous point, of looking at how climate change fits into everything else that is going on in that individual or that community’s life.

Equally, a lot of the time, we do not have smoking guns when fishing for evidence in the climate security space. Sometimes, there are not even statistics that are particularly useful in illustrating that a certain kind of climate-related stress is generalizable. At least to some extent, people who are intent on looking at environmental security and climate security are in some instances better placed to conduct that work in other, non-media formats.

Learning the languages is the other kind of classic necessary bit of advice that is frequently doled out to journalists. It is only by understanding people and by really seeing the full series of issues in their particular lives that one can even begin to understand where climate change fits into their wider troubles. And to do that, much of the time you need to be able to communicate at length in terms where there is less of a possibility of any serious misunderstandings.

From your perspective, what is the single biggest trend to watch in the environmental security field?

We could talk about this till the end of time, of course. To me, the single most important phenomenon that we are seeing at the moment and that we will see to an even greater extent in the future is declining state legitimacy in large part because of intensifying climate stresses. We are talking about a state’s ability to provide effective infrastructure, sufficient and accessible clean water, adequate wastewater disposal, etc. If those capacities struggle and, in many instances, drop off as a consequence of climate drivers or for reasons related to climate drivers, I think many of these governments that are already struggling with limited legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens will struggle considerably more. I foresee an increase in partly or wholly ungoverned geographic spaces as a consequence of that. To me, that is the single biggest global security problem arising out of climate change.