This project is part of a broader research agenda aiming to better understand the relationships between the development of contemporary security concerns and the evolution of forms of security cooperation and crisis governance.

The researchers working on Re-Scaling Security explore the historical consolidation of different security concerns, paying particular attention to their local origins and transnational developments. In so doing, they aim to overcome epistemological differences and offer a novel rendering of the complexity of the formation and institutionalization of security issues across different scales, times, and actors.

The questions at the center of Re-Scaling Security are crucial to critically analyzing the origins of some of the most urgent ecological challenges of our era, including toxic pollution and the uneven distribution of ecological risk. Moreover, the project helps to uncover how different local communities experienced the anthropogenic alteration of their surroundings and the rising challenges of climate change, and how their reactions contributed to the establishment of new global security paradigms and international governance. 

Re-Scaling Security aims to provide an innovative analysis of the origins of some of the most urgent socio-ecological challenges of our era by connecting the establishment of common existential environmental threats to the rise of local demands and concerns. Whereas transnational social and cultural networks and their role in fostering wider ecological anxiety and in envisioning shared solutions to common problems in an increasingly interconnected world have been amply investigated, local distress and activism have been often simplistically dismissed as ineffective NIMBYism. This project proposes to overcome such an interpretive limitation by looking at the contacts and integration among local forms of socio-ecological activism and at the coalescence of security concerns across the Atlantic, to see how these interactions have affected national and international environmental governance. Trans-local lenses are therefore used to unearth those currents and processes – mostly defined by environmental security demands – that have contributed to further shrinking the world in the last few decades. Crossing transatlantic geographies helps to explore different scales of cooperation and further test the comprehensive historical relevance of varied local requests.

In order to give further prominence to multi-scale perspectives, Re-Scaling Security analyzes a) to what extent the creation of trans-local networks of solidarity across the Atlantic from the 1970s onward contributed to the establishment of a western idea of environmental security; b) the role of trans-local activism in the codification and implementation of domestic and international environmental regulation; and c) the strategies that local actors employed to gather consensus around environmental security.

The starting point of this research project is that the contemporary shared feeling of extraordinary crisis and insecurity is chiefly a product of local perceptions. The way in which local communities have experienced both the anthropogenic transformation of their surroundings and the manifold challenges of climate change and global interdependence has played a crucial role in the definition of security paradigms and international governance. Issues like water rights and water security, for instance, have proven to be main catalyzers for the coalescence of local environmental concerns that have eventually resulted in the adoption of domestic and international regulation. For these reasons, this project mostly focuses on local actors and on their interactions across different scales. Local agency, in other words, needs to be factored in while providing historical narratives about institutions and practices of environmental security cooperation. Such local agency is analyzed in the context of the creation of baseline consensus on the nature and causes of security threats. Thus, local sources and those documents reflecting the interactions among local groups across national borders are at the center of the research. These sources are operationalized through the tools of historical inquiry, including close reading, text mining, oral interviews, and cultural approaches.