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Abstract: Political leaders describe the climate crisis as the greatest challenge of our time, but it plays only a marginal role in the foreign policy of most states and in the scholarly literature on international relations. Only 0.77 percent of the articles in five top international relations (IR) journals between 2015 and 2019 were about climate change. This is a problem, for when the full impact of climate change and policy responses to climate change is felt, it will redefine international politics. We suggest five broad areas where it is necessary to better understand how climate change will reshape world politics: sovereignty, security, status and reputation, norms and coalitions, and the geopolitics of energy.
Introduction
Climate change has moved from the margins to the center of international politics. From being one among many issues or fields alongside poverty reduction, health, trade, etc., it is now becoming a master frame that will shape foreign policy and relations between states on a par with security and economic interests. Although there is still uncertainty about future climate policy responses, scholars of world politics need to better reflect on climate change within existing theoretical frameworks, and to develop new ones.
Clearly, there is a long tradition of research on specific aspects of climate change. A significant effort has gone into studying the role of nonstate actors in international climate negotiations, regime formation and efficiency, and the link between climate change and violent conflict.1'2,3 Indeed, strategic planners at the Pentagon were first movers in seeking to assess how climate change may affect the security of the United States.4 However, climate change is a marginal issue for what most students of world politics deem to be the major fields of IR research, such as systemic shifts in the international system, the status of sovereignty, the drivers of foreign policy, or the endurance of alliances and functioning of international institutions. A survey of five major IR journals indicates that climate change is not on their radar (see Table 1). Between 2015 and 2019, only 0.76 per cent of the articles in these journals were about climate change or related topics.
Josh Busby, Jessica Green, and Thomas Hale made similar observations in 2017.7-8 The fact that the situation has not changed since...