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Since the end of the Cold War, both scholars and policy-makers have contemplated the connections between security and environment. There are three different discourses that these groups use to discuss security and environment links - environmental conflict, environmental security, and ecological security. Discourses give clues about the way we understand particular concerns, as well as how we try to solve them. To date, none of these security and environment discourses includes gender in a meaningful way. This paper seeks to highlight the different ways that the concepts of security and the environment are linked both in theory and in practice, and the contributions that using a gender lens make to these debates. In order to do this, I use the case of agriculture in South Asia to better understand how environmental topics are debated. I begin by outlining and discussing the three discourses on security and the environment found in existing debates. I then explore how these discourses are seen in the case of agricultural practices in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna water basin by conducting discourses analysis of the policy debates on this case. I seek to understand what role, if any, gender concerns currently have in these debates, as well as to demonstrate the value added of incorporating gender. My goals are to understand how scholars and policy-makers are using security and the environment discourses to discuss a real-world environmental issue, and to highlight the importance of incorporating gender concerns into an important human security issue. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers in the United States and at the United Nations have begun to identify global climate change as a matter of national and international security. This paper will explore the implications of linking climate change and security in this way. We begin by elaborating three general discourses linking environment and security. The environmental conflict discourse views environmental concerns as a potential source for militarized conflict between and within countries as human populations compete for resources. The environmental security discourse takes a broader view on the meaning of security and considers the ways that human health and well-being arejeopardized by environmental degradation. Finally, the ecological security discourse places the security of environmental systems at its core and examines the ways that human activities threaten the environment. We will argue that it is not new to think about climate change as a security issue.Rather, current discussions reflect a shift in how decision makers define security, a shift from the environmental security discourse to the environmental conflict discourse. We will then discuss the implications of this shift by noting the different types of politics and decision-making processes embedded in each of these discourses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture is a powerful vehicle for the transmission of gender norms. Gender can be understood as socially constructed ideas about how men and women ought to be, and the medium of popular culture disseminates these ideas to the masses. Similarly, po ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the lack of a strong gender component in the academic literature on environmental security. The issue of environmental security has gained significant attention since the end of the Cold War from both scholars and policy makers as a way to link traditional concepts of security to the natural environment. To date, the academic literature on environmental security has given little consideration to gender. This lacunae is interesting in light of the fact that a substantial body of literature exists on the intersections between gender and security and gender and the environment. This paper seeks to fill this gap by developing a feminist environmental security perspective. I begin by outlining three approaches to environmental security found in the literature: environmental conflict, environmental/human security, and ecological security. I then examine feminist perspectives on international relations and security as well as the environment. I explore instances of overlap and omission between the environmental security approaches and selected feminist perspectives in order to comprehend how the two sets of literature are related. I conclude by outlining a feminist environmental security perspective crafted by building on elements from existing environmental security approaches and the addition of elements from feminist perspectives. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]