Precarious work characterised by low pay, inadequate and variable hours, and short-term/temporary contracts refers to the employment conditions that include the situations of uncertainty’, ‘instability’, and ‘insecurity’. Precarious work arrangements skyrocketed in the 1970s as a result of the worldwide recession and the weakened power and forced reduction of organised labour. As a result, considerable power shifted back to employers who steadily repeal employment protections whenever possible. This chapter seeks to shed light on the missing link between diversity and precarious work from the viewpoint of sexual and gender identity minorities whose voices have been silenced and marginalised in mainstream discussions. Due to the long history of legalised discrimination and the stigmatisation they experience, LGBTQ+ employees are overrepresented in precarious work arrangements. Since LGBTQ+ employees are already a vulnerable population, the adverse effects of precarious work arrangements are exacerbated. We adopt an institutional approach to explore the challenges LGBTQ+ individuals face in precarious work concerning macro-institutional factors (e.g., social, organisational, political, legal, and economic) and micro-level factors (e.g., interpersonal discrimination, exclusion, incivility within organisations). Through case studies from Turkey and the United States, we demonstrate the political and social mechanisms that legitimise and proliferate precarious work arrangements for LGBTQ+ individuals. We conclude the chapter by highlighting research questions that scholars should pursue further to uncover the unique challenges LGBTQ+ individuals endure in precarious work arrangements.

Understanding the climate-security nexus requires framing risks and resilience, which often reflects a negative cycle of fragility, climate vulnerability, and human insecurity. Climate actions, however, can enhance a society’s climate resilience and generate pathways toward improved peace and security. These actions include constructing a tighter continuum from humanitarian assistance to development processes, providing early warnings for food security planning, building local capacity to translate early warnings and climate-informed advisories, climate-smart mapping and adaptation planning, designing adaptive safety net programs, and enabling risk finance to facilitate early action. Additional changes and interventions, such as improving multi-level governance, utilizing climate security evidence, creating conflict-sensitive policy, and linking innovation with resilience, can also help break the cycle between climate and conflict, align climate actions to peace objectives, and thereby contribute to a climate-resilient peace.

This concluding chapter summarises and synthesises the book's main arguments on four levels: in relation to its five ‘divided environments’; with regard to what these cases, and the similarities and differences between them, suggest about the relations between water and (in)security; with reference to the broader significance of the analysis for understanding ecological politics and the study thereof; and on what, by extension, all this might tell us about the likely future conflict and security implications of climate change. Neither the eco-determinist nor liberal traditions, the book as a whole shows, are adequate to understanding water security and insecurity today, or to grasping the wide-ranging conflict and security implications of climate change; political ecology–informed premises are required instead. But what does this tell us about the coming landscape of climate change and conflict? The book closes by offering a series of tentative predictions.

This full-length chapter introduces the book’s central themes and approach to analysing them. It starts by summarising the current public and policy ‘common sense’ on climate security, and by showing that the evidence base for this orthodoxy is weak or, at best, contested: this establishes the book’s primary research puzzle. With this set out, the remainder of the chapter details the book’s approach to exploring this crucial but contested issue. It does this first with regard to epistemology and method – critiquing extant environment-centric, quantitative and discourse-centric approaches, and via that articulating an alternative ‘international political ecology’ framework for the analysis of environment–security relations. It does it, second, in substantive terms, explaining the book’s focus on water as a key variable in, and analogue for understanding, climate–security linkages. And it does it, third, with regard to cases, introducing the book’s empirical focus on the five ‘divided environments’ of Cyprus, Israel–Palestine, Sudan–South Sudan, Syria and the Lake Chad basin. The chapter concludes by briefly explaining how the remainder of the book is organised.

Crystal Parikh’s chapter on dissolution takes up narrative fragmentation to thematize outward-moving fictions of “interruption, isolation, suspense, and precarity.” Starting with Valeria Luiselli’s interviews with migrant asylum-seekers, Parikh argues that a defining feature of contemporary literature is its formal techniques of “dissolution and the fragment as vital aesthetic and stylistic forms to convey the splintering effect that global modernity in the twenty-first century induces.” From Luiselli to George Saunders’s short stories and novels by Celeste Ng and Jesmyn Ward, among others, Parikh argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative techniques have been remixed by contemporary authors who draw on realism and experimentalism to tell stories of ongoing and unresolved dislocation and vulnerability.

Hamilton Carroll considers shifting trends across nearly two decades of post-9/11 novels from early works grappling with the unrepresentability of terror to recent narratives by Susan Choi, Mohsin Hamid, Joseph O’Neill, and Jess Walter that depict the everyday experiences of racialized precarity in a period of perpetual warfare, nuclear proliferation, migration catastrophes, and neo-ethnonationalisms. Political turmoil and violence by state and non-state entities remain central to twenty-first century life, even as the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted from recent trauma to historical retrospection.

Chapter 8 considers implications of digital technology trends for issues related to insecurity and precarity. Rural and urban spaces are discussed in the context of digital technology trends. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of protest movements, such as #EndSARS in Nigeria, that illustrate ways in which digital technologies create digital communities and have an impact in contested spaces that exist around societal fissures, including intergenerational and other forms of conflict.

This chapter returns to white workers’ voices. Drawing on interviews with men who entered blue-collar work and joined the MWU before or during the Wiehahn reforms, it demonstrates the persistence of proud working-class identification, the presence of deep ambivalence around race and whiteness, and working-class resentment towards wealthy Afrikaners. This contradicts the simplistic racial tropes, naturalisation of ethnic identity, and denial of class in the Solidarity Movement’s official framing. At the same time, the union veterans display deep commitment to the Movement and its ideals in the face of the loss of past certainties, perceptions of social decline, personal vulnerability, and anxiety about the future they perceive. This sees them subjected to pressure from the leadership to manage Solidarity’s race- and culture-based membership on the ground. Together, the men’s counternarratives, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities demonstrate the specificity of blue-collar subjectivities and workplace experiences. In this way, the testimonies presented in this chapter expose the persistent reality of class otherwise not readily visible within the white, Afrikaner population, and provide striking insight into how white workers experienced and sought to negotiate the demise of the racial state.

This chapter examines how the situating of individuals and states in societal contexts holds implications for understanding the causes conflict and the generation of peace. It challenges the strict agent-centered state-centricity of traditionalist approaches and looks at the roles played by different societal constraints, norms, and processes at the international and domestic levels.I provide a discussion of the core assumptions of social constructivism andcompare social constructivism’s approach to peace with the other major paradigms (and their subparadigms) assessed in this book. Iconsider how the rational default mechanisms of security studies and the realist or power political paradigms, which have dominated the discourse for much of the period of scientific study, have come to be critiqued. This will be followed by detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between social constructivism and liberal approaches, functionalism, English School rationalism, critical approaches, and cosmopolitanism. I assess the contribution of social constructivismto the transformation of conflictual relations between states and the social construction of peace.

Sadness and fear are usually considered as basic emotions. In society and in education, they are normally cast as undesirable, but also as partly unavoidable. This chapter examines sadness, fear, and anxiety in society and education. It argues that these feelings should not be judged as simply negative, devoid of value or positive function. On the other hand, they should be critically considered and explored, rather than simply accepted, in education and society. Neither good nor bad in themselves, feelings of sadness, fear, and anxiety can be righteous, functional, and normal, and interrelated with critical understanding. Yet they can also be problematic and pathological in other cases.