Julianne Liebenguth is an Assistant Professor of International Security at the University of Arkansas. Her research primarily focuses on the intersections of environmental politics, political theory, and insecurity. You can find her publications here. Her current book project is about reimagining security amid planetary crisis through an abolitionist perspective.

Julianne earned her B.A. in Environmental Geoscience and International Relations from West Virginia University. She completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at Colorado State University, where she was also a trainee in the interdisciplinary, NSF-funded InTERFEWS program. Julianne was previously an Assistant Professor at Elon University, where she taught courses on environmental security, international relations, political communication, research methods, and the connection between art and politics.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

My work is broadly situated within the realm of global environmental politics. I think the most pressing areas of research happening in this field right now concern the convergence of political theory and practice. As we teach and write during a dire inflection point — characterized by disasters, war, and unfettered extraction — scholars are increasingly turning toward the role of social movements for insight into the politics of change and transformation. Notable examples include land defense struggles like the movement against the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline led by the Standing Rock Sioux, the Mapuche-led defense against forestry companies in Chile, and Appalachian resistance against the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Looking toward such spaces can foster a better understanding of the layered processes of coalition building and expand the scope of worldviews and theories through which we make sense of the origins and stakes of environmental harm. Feminist and decolonial perspectives on how to engage in this type of research are instructive, as this work requires subverting traditional notions of what counts as and how to generate “knowledge” in IR.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The 2020 uprisings after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis changed my orientation toward global politics dramatically. I became much more aware of the relationship between militarization abroad and domestic criminalization. My specific areas of emphasis are within critical security studies, so questions about how something becomes a security issue, and with what effect, are crucially important to my understanding of the world. In crime and war, both police and state militaries operate under broader, legitimating logics of “security” that rely on pervasive narratives about a “threatening” other to justify the use of violent tactics. Such security logics are shaped by neocolonial conceptions of race that function both within and across borders. The war on drugs and the war on terror exemplify this. There are also intertwined, material aspects of criminalization and militarization — like the overlap in technologies, equipment, training, and corporate backing. My current book project, therefore, draws on abolitionist scholarship to better understand how mechanisms of securitization function across carceral geographies. I’m also interested in ideas about alternative notions of safety and security rooted in mutual aid and care. 

In addition, my professors at Colorado State University, especially Michele Betsill, drastically shifted my perspective of the world by giving me the tools to think with more precision, care, and empathy.

As an academic, much of your work has focused on the intersection between environmental security and international relations. What inspired you to delve into this topic?

I originally became interested in “environmental security” because of the recurrent tendency for states and intergovernmental organizations to frame environmental problems as security issues. The classic debate about this is whether responding to an issue like climate change under the rubric of security ushers in an elite-driven, non-democratic, militarization of climate solutions or whether the urgency of a concept like security can galvanize action toward safeguarding not only states but livelihoods and ecosystems within and across borders. Underlying this debate, again, are questions about what the logic of security “does” to our political processes and imaginations. Now,........

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