[Commlist] 100 Sec to Midnight CFP

  Title: 100 Seconds to Midnight: Media, Conflict and the Climate Crisis


    Deadline Extended to 31 May, 2023

In January 2020, the Doomsday Clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight - a 
stark warning that the world is closer than it has ever been to 
cataclysmic devastation.  The accompanying statement in the Bulletin of 
Atomic Scientists identifies nuclear weapons, misuse of information 
technologies and climate change as the three most critical threats to 
the planet. As the Bulletin implies, conflict, media and climate change 
are at the epicentre of the current crisis, highlighted by events in 
Ukraine, yet the entanglements between these three elements have never 
been fully explored.  This is an urgent call to address that gap.

There have, of course, been investigations into aspects of various 
combinations of relationships between these three elements.News media 
around the globe have been addressing climate change in various ways 
since the middle of the last century and how news media address, or fail 
to address, the climate crisis has been the focus of much academic 
attention (Boykoff 2008, 2009; Lester and Cottle 2009).There has been 
interest in how the climate crisis is playing out in documentary films 
(Hughes 2012; Aaltonen 2014; Huggan 2015; Bieniek-Tobasco et al 2019), 
and the role played by fiction film in representing climate issues has 
also received some attention (von Burg 2011; Skallari 2015;Manzo 
2017).However, investigations into how the relationship between violence 
and climate change has been represented in film are thin on the ground 
(Hobbs-Morgan 2017), and more research is needed into how videogames are 
responding to the intersections between conflict and climate change, and 
into how televisual narratives are engaging with these issues.

Meanwhile Defence Departments around the world – in the U.S., the U.K., 
India, France, New Zealand and China, to name a few – have all 
identified climate change as a non-traditional security challenge and 
are in the process of developing strategies and measures to address 
it.Much of the discourse around climate change and armed conflict, 
however, in academia and in the military, is concerned with attempting 
to prove, or disprove, causal links between the two (Hsiang et al 2013; 
Selby et al 2017; Adams et al 2018; Nordqvist and Krampe 2018) or with 
identifying climate change as a threat multiplier (Brown, Hammill, 
MCleman 2007 Huntjens and Nachbar 2015).How conflict itself has 
contributed to climate change, not only through the damage caused by 
armed engagements past and present, but also through the carbon 
bootprint of military activities, has received less attention in the 
media and in academia.Other forms of conflict emerging from climate 
change - such as that between human and non-human for resources, for 
example – and their relationship to media, have also not been fully 
investigated.

This special issue addresses the urgent need to investigate the 
intersections between media, conflict and climate change, and the 
challenges and/or opportunities that emerge from their 
entanglements.Potential topics include, but are not restricted to, the 
following:

  * What are the implications and extent of the use of martial terms in
    the discourse in relation to climate – eg. “war on the planet”,
    #waronourfuture, “climate wars”
  * How are different forms of conflict related to climate change
    reported and represented in both traditional forms of media and
    other media forms around the world?
  * In what ways do the media of different countries address
    climate-related migrations and their relationship to conflict?
  * In what ways do non-fictional media forms (film, television, digital
    games) inflect the understanding of the relationship between
    conflict and climate change?
  * How has the coverage of war (such as the recent war in Ukraine)
    represented/obscured the environmental cost of warfare?
  * What media strategies are militaries around the world adopting in
    relation to their role in responding to the climate crisis?
  * How is the impact of the climate crisis on the international
    security landscape playing out in media?
  * How have the long-term environmental legacies of conflict been
    addressed or ignored in media?
  * Are some countries able to negotiate climate change without
    conflict?  What role does media play in such countries?   What can
    be learned from them?
  * How are environmental wars mis/understood and represented in media?
  * Why has Hollywood ignored climate change?
  * In what ways are video games, especially those with war-themed
    settings, addressing the relationship between conflict and climate?
  * How are other forms of conflict and their relationship to climate
    change – between human and non-human, for example – being ignored or
    addressed in media?
We particularly welcome papers that cover previously under-represented 
countries and regions in debates about these issues – Pakistan, Myanmar 
and Afghanistan, South Asia, South East Asia, for example – as well as 
papers addressing the recent war in the Ukraine.

*Please send abstracts of 200-300 words for articles of 8,000 words, 
intended for a special issue of the/Media, War and Conflict/journal 
<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mwc>to: *

Dr. Debra Ramsay : (d.ramsay /at/ exeter.ac.uk)

Dr. Martin Robson: (m.robson /at/ exeter.ac.uk)

*Please use the subject line: 100 Sec to Midnight Abstract *

*Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 April 2023 – extended to 31 
May 2023. *


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