IDI’s Dr. Coline Covington Presents at Oxford Climate Change Conference

IDI member Dr. Coline Covington recently presented a paper at the OxPeace 11th Annual Conference on Climate Change, held at Oxford on 17-18 May 2019.  The conference, which included presenters such as former UN Peacekeeper and current NYU Visiting Research Fellow Franz Baumann, laid plain the link between political conflict and climate change and the growing worry about wars over water, migration and basic survival.

An excerpt from Dr. Covington’s paper — entitled “Taking Back Control: Existential Threat and Large Group Anxiety” — is below.

When immediate economic and political survival is threatened, the issue of climate change needs to be understood through the lens of large group behaviour and the particular anxieties that affect group identity and cohesion and how identity has been shaped historically. A case in point is the US Tea Party position against climate change that followed in the wake of the 2001 twin towers attack and economic recession. The US was militarily invaded for the first time since its independence and this effectively marked a turning point in the American view of itself as an invincible world power. The recession, starting in 2007 that led to the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers the following year, only underscored the vulnerability of the US in relation to the rest of the world. The Tea Party response was to revert to the frontier myth of a rich wilderness offering unlimited resources. Sarah Palin was photographed with her bearskin trophies as the “new” frontier woman. This was the Party’s way of trying to restore some illusion of control and omnipotence through the regressive belief the group could once again possess a wilderness with endless boundaries, like an ever-flowing breast. In this way, a segment of the US population tried to regain a sense of identity and security. Trump’s subsequent ascension to power and his mantra, “Make America Great Again!”, is a response to the wish to turn back the clock to a time when change was not associated with loss but with prosperity. 

Dr. Covington’s full presentation is available for review here: Climate Change Conference Revised

 

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