PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The “face” of security has changed significantly in the past decades. It is neither an issue simply of military capabilities nor does it merely pertain to states. There is currently a marked tendency to approach security as a complex global matter, combined with a variety of issues such as climate change, energy access, or human rights, which more than ever justifies multilateral solutions. Drawing on the approach that treats international organizations as bureaucracies, this chapter aims to investigate how they construct particular issues—including climate change—as complex global security challenges. It also uses the conceptual framework of this volume to show how the process of construction involves the modes of bundling and upscaling in particular. For this purpose, the focus is on the security discourse of international organizations, especially the United Nations, since 2005, and two cases: those of the UN Secretariat and the UN Economic and Social Council.