Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2025, Athens, Yunanistan, 29 - 30 Mayıs 2025, (Yayınlanmadı)
In light of the increasing geopolitical contestations in climate
change-related matters and the EU’s growing emphasis on the security
implications of climate actions, it would be a fair expectation that, as in
other policy areas, the EU has adopted a securitising perspective towards China
with regard to the latter’s climate-related policies and actions. Drawing on
this assumption, this study aims to scrutinise whether the confrontational
dynamics of EU-China bilateral relations in the climate domain could be
explained by the EU’s securitisation towards China. To achieve this goal, the
author uses the securitisation theory as the theoretical framework. Using a
triangulation of the collective securitisation model and the threatification vs
riskification model as analytical frameworks, the author conducts a qualitative
discourse analysis of the primary and secondary sources. The findings reveal
that the risk and threat articulations in the EU’s discourse, together with the
risk and threat dimensions in its policy outputs, point to the existence of a
securitising perspective towards China. With regard to the form of
securitisation, the findings show that for matters in which the European
Commission has already developed a risk perspective and where there is a vocal
audience with a high receptivity to the matter, the securitisation has taken
the form of threatification. Whereas, for matters in which the Commission has
refrained from an explicit threat articulation or in which there has been a
mismatch between the articulations of the securitising actors and the audience, the form of securitisation has remained as
riskification.