mapping the ‘enviro-security’ field: rivalry and cooperation in the construction of knowledge

Abstract

This paper maps out the network of researchers on environmental security from the end of the 1980s to 2014, providing a systematic analysis of how the research is organized in this interdisciplinary field. Drawing on the Web of Science database, we generated a co-citation analysis that exhibits the cognitive structure of the field. Twenty interviews were conducted in order to uncover relationships of cooperation, rivalry and conflict so as to understand the structure of academic debates inside the field over time. The research findings highlight that central authors have had a long-lasting influence on the field despite the evolution of their productivity. We also found that the field is composed of six fairly structured groups as well as a few peripheral authors, which can in turn be distinguished by their epistemological and methodological choices, as well as geographical centre of gravity.