GECHS

GECHS Associate Betsy Hartmann has published Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.). This edited book addresses how environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the ‘enemy Other’.

GECHS SSC Member Hans Bohle has been appointed the MRF Chair at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). He will serve as Chair for the 2006/2007 academic year. The MRF chair was established by the MunichRe Foundation (MRF) to enhance the involvement of leading scientists in the work of UNU in the area of social vulnerability.

The Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia recently launched the 2005 Human Security Report: War and Peace in the 21st Century. The report, published by Oxford University Press, tracks and analyses trends in political violence around the world.

The October 8 earthquake that killed over 45,000 people in Northern Pakistan occurred in a region that already faces multiple challenges to human security. Aviso 10, written in 2001 by Richard Matthew, Director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs (CUSA) at the University of California Irvine, describes these challenges and sets the context for current relief and recovery efforts.

Aviso 14: Hurricane Katrina Reveals Challenges to Human Security is now available as a pdf file. Paper copies are available from the GECHS International Project Office in Oslo.