Critical Examination of the United Nations' Discourses on Climate Change and Conflict: Case of South Sudan

Abstract

The aim of this master’s thesis is to examine how the United Nations portrays the interlinkages between climate change and conflict in the context of the South Sudan. The study is narrowed down to focus specifically on one UN specialised agency (FAO) and three UN programmes (UNEP, UNDP and WFP). The analysis is conducted by mapping a set of hypothetical discourses, drawn from the theoretical framework, against the data retrieved from the examined UN documents. The UN discourses are then further critically examined with the help of Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework theory to elaborate on the results from a linguistic, discursive and contextual perspectives. Further on the thesis also discusses the extent to which the UN discourses reflect the academic debates on the topic as well as the situation in South Sudan. The thesis concludes that the UN actors portray the interlinkages with a mixture of different argumentation types, which form so-called hybrid discourses that are often represented, unconsciously or consciously, in a rather vague and discrepant manner. Interestingly, almost half of the examined documents did not contain any references emphasising the interlinkages between climate change and conflict. The further critical examination of the UN discourses also unveiled several alarming linguistic factors regarding particularly the concepts of responsibility and agency. Furthermore, the thesis found only weak alignment between the UN discourses, the academic debates and the existing situation on the ground. All of the highlighted factors run the risk of having a negative impact on the work of the examined UN actors, in addition to hindering the overall credibility of the whole UN system.