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, I find such questions even more interesting because an increasingly divergent range of global actors are using security rhetoric to make sense of environmental problems, including the UN security council, governments, NGOs, transnational corporations, and even social movements like Extinction Rebellion. The notion that we are living through an “environmental emergency” is proliferating across seemingly disparate ideological spheres. I am continuously interested in how this state of emergency influences contemporary politics.
In your 2022 doctoral dissertation, you argue that non-state actors leverage environmental security as a source of legitimacy. Can you provide an example of this?
Veolia is a transnational corporation that specializes in water, waste, and energy services. The origins of this corporation extend back to the1850s when Napoleon III issued an imperial decree that allowed for a company called Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE) to take control over water services during the rapid industrialization of France’s economy. Today, Veolia’s leaders legitimize their reach across six continents and 56 countries by positioning their company as an agent of “ecological transformation” that is “fighting the climate emergency” by privately managing natural resources around the world, particularly water. They tout their ability to offer protection in the face of “threats” like natural disasters, migration, and resource conflicts by helping cities “tackle the consequences of the climate crisis by rolling out strategies for territorial resilience.” Essentially, Veolia executives are co-opting a traditional, state-inspired environmental security agenda grounded in territorial integrity to justify their expansion into new markets. Veolia’s revenue in 2024 was over 40 billion euros.
You have suggested that transnational corporations (TNCs) sometimes cloak their financial ambitions under the guise of “progress”, particularly in the developing world. In practice, what does this look like?
We can continue with the example of Veolia here. The company’s purpose is to “reconcile human progress and environmental protection.” Specifically, Veolia’s public-facing narrative suggests: “all over the world, attuned to local cultures, we strive to improve the health and quality of life of communities.” Of course, there is not a one-to-one, causal relationship between this narrative and Veolia’s success in convincing municipalities all over the world to privatize their water services. The World Bank, IMF, and governmental policies, for example, also orchestrate the avenues through which corporations expand. The point is, however, that this legitimating narrative fits neatly into a global order wherein “progress” serves as a value-laden veil under which privatization, profit, and extractivism govern the political and ecological landscape of uneven relations of exchange between the global North and South. Thus, despite resistance to their operations in cities all over the world from Flint to Lagos, the reach of Veolia’s corporate grasp on water is normalized under conditions of capitalism in which the Eurocentric myth of “progress” justifies a French company profiting from and controlling the flow of water in countries like Ghana, Morocco, and Côte d’Ivoire. Major concerns regarding municipalities relinquishing control of water to huge TNCs include lack of democratic oversight, poor infrastructure maintenance, job losses, water contamination, service shutdowns, and systemic infringements on the right to water. Organizers have successfully chased Veolia away with divestment campaigns across Pittsburgh, Lagos, Kuwait, Palestine, and beyond.
In The Nutritional Turn Towards Crisis: A Critical Perspective, you point out that little research has been done on the impact that “securitizing nutrition” has on food insecurity as a whole. Why is this important?
Gabriella Gricius and I were inspired to write this article while we were both venturing into cross-disciplinary work. We were essentially concerned about the relationship between science and securitization. In this respect, the securitization of nutrition is important to consider because it merges the legitimating forces of security and scientific objectivity, such that ideas about what is threatening are imbued with biometric categories and statistics related to obesity, malnutrition, and calorie intake. This, in turn, designates certain bodies, diets, food practices, and people as “normal” and others as abnormal or risky. In relation to your previous question, these securitized categories proliferate within global policy spaces — like the World Food Programme or the Global Alliance for Food Security (GAFS) — where the focus is primarily on “nutrition emergencies” in the global South. Thus, policy agendas concerning “undernourishment” in “developing countries” serve as a framework through which the private sector expands “innovative” interventions into food systems through industrial agri-business. All the while, neo-colonial relations of land use, labor, and dispossession underlying the devastation of food systems remain doubly obscured by scientific rationality and the urgency of crisis. On the other hand, we argue that confronting the structural (rather than biological or apolitical) origins of crisis provoked by industrial agriculture can elevate alternative responses to systemic food insecurity such as increasing wages, returning Indigenous land, or strengthening sovereignty over food ways.
Beyond environmental security, as a professor, you have worked to model civil and effective democratic engagement across the aisle for your students. What advice would you give to academics on setting a good example for the next generation?
Thank you for asking this question. I derive such inspiration from students who share a genuine concern for each other and the state of the world. In this regard, the classroom, for me, is already an invaluable space in which strengthening mutual trust across difference seems very achievable. Studying global politics, in particular, allows students to reflect on how their own political lives intersect with global systems, issues, and possibilities, and this can often result in insights about the relational character of social life, and the shared and inevitable vulnerabilities that shape our exposure to precarity. In short, an IR class is already fertile ground for generating democratic dialogue.
At the same time, I am sensitive to how the power dynamics that we study at the global scale —relating to class, nationalism, patriarchy, race, ability, and so on — also traverse and give form to academia more broadly and classroom dynamics specifically. The most effective way, I think, to confront this is to talk about it, together. I often find that students are also eager to figure out how to communicate about their divergent perspectives and experiences.
That said, I think that society presently gives us very few tools for having generative discussions about political difference. Of course, today’s media landscape is quite harmful. What’s more, the mainstream notion of “politics” only encompasses a very narrow set of (sometimes exclusive) spaces that don’t offer much in the way of community-building or place-making. In academia, even, it can be difficult to move away from the linear transference of knowledge from teacher to student toward more difficult, ambiguous, or uncomfortable conversations that can involve, perhaps, intense disagreement. Sometimes, I incorporate my concerns about this directly into the course content by assigning something like Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, for example, before teaching a course in which I want students to take on more of an active role in shaping the trajectory of knowledge creation.
In terms offering advice, I’m not sure I’m equipped to offer concrete suggestions because every time I teach, I learn something new about what works and what doesn’t, and I’m still relatively new to this! The extremely unfortunate situation, moreover, is that talking about politics openly carries different risks, for different people, in different contexts— whether it’s the risk of re-traumatizing someone or exposing yourself to state repression— so this should always be taken into consideration. Working with friends and colleagues on this topic, though, I have gathered a couple strategies that I regularly turn to in my attempts to foster respectful, generative discussions, which I can share here:
a. Disagreeing Better
Last year, I worked as a democratic dialogue facilitator on Elon’s campus with my former colleague Matt Young, during which we focused on the idea of “disagreeing better” in a democratic society. This is a really helpful concept because it forces people to think about the communicative practices and values they’re employing as they’re engaging in political conversations. One way I implement this is by asking students to co-create a shared philosophy of mutual respect at the beginning of every semester. This helps us set a strong foundation for trust while anticipating that, in the shared effort to learn in community with each other, we will inevitably disagree. Specifically, we negotiate principles of respect before tackling difficult topics, which, this semester, included commitments to think through assumptions, take breaks to avoid defensiveness, encourage creative thought, and practice active listening. This allows us to better confront, rather than avoid, political tensions both academically and personally.
b. Art and Politics
Academic language can fail to capture the gravity or lived experience of global politics for many students, which can make cultivating authentic, generative dialogue difficult. In collaboration with friend and poet Robin Walter, I have integrated art into my coursework to overcome this barrier. Specifically, we co-designed a class that emphasizes the connections between politics and poetry to help students access creative avenues through which they might more deeply relate to each other and their political worlds. We use poetry, for example, to encourage students to think about their sense of place and also learn beyond the boundaries of their own positionalities. In this class, students challenge self/other or political/apolitical binaries as they identify how power, oppression, and collective liberation shape art, politics, and society more broadly. Readings include Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine and Whereas by Layli Long Soldier. Overall, incorporating art into intentional, democratic spaces can help open channels of communication and empathy that may otherwise remain elusive.
What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?
Think creatively about what constitutes “politics.” As scholars of International Relations, we can explore so many different questions about the way people relate to one another and the planet. Critically analyzing foreign policies and state behavior is absolutely crucial. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that global politics is everywhere; it’s in our clothes, our food, our water, our friendships, and our worldviews. If we expand our notion of politics, we can more effectively situate ourselves in the world as both agents and scholars of International Relations.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
