Andrew Baldwin

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Durham University

On what basis can it be said that climate change contributes to human migration? What are we to make of new statistical models used to construct the relationship between these two epochal phenomena? This article proposes Collier’s conception of topology to characterize the novel politics of gravity modelling, a technique increasingly used to calcul...

In response to narratives of the mass movement of people triggered by climate change, a number of “managed retreat” models have been proposed as policy options, especially for densely populated urban areas in the Global South. Reviewing a case study from Mongla, a secondary city in southwestern Bangladesh, we argue that a “crisis narrative” unhelpf...

This book explores the complex literature on climate migration and investigates the epistemological and ethical challenges the topic poses for anyone who takes an interest in the relationship between climate change and human migration. At the heart of the contemporary preoccupation with climate change is a concern for its societal impacts. Among th...

Many will remember the 1990s alarmist narratives of how a human tide of up to a billion climate refugees would flood “our” borders by 2050. By 2011, a new character joined the discourse: the trapped figure. No longer would climatically vulnerable people be forced to move, they could also end up immobile. This review examines the narratives that sur...

Global South scholars have long documented and theorised their communities’ struggles against the ecological degradation, toxic contamination, and climate change–related extreme weather events which result from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Building on that existing work, contributors to this collection ex...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that...

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

The interaction between environmental change and human mobility is attracting global attention, both in policy circles and in the contemporary literature. This introductory essay proposes using the concept of pluralism to explore the multi-dimensional relationship between climate change and migration and to advance new perspectives and concepts to...

This short intervention argues that Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang's notion of an ethic of incommensurability might serve as the basis for rethinking the democratic function of the university in the context of calls to decolonialise geographical knowledge and higher education.

Life Adrift critically engages with two of the most defining issues of our contemporary global political economy: migration and climate change. In their own right, both are discrete areas of politics, theory, practice, and resistance. But as climate and migration are increasingly imagined together as a singular relation, they are giving rise to new...

Climate change is more and more said to be a problem of migration. The common refrain is that climate change will bear in some way on patterns of human mobility, resulting in either insecurity, humanitarian crises, or all manner of inventive adaptive responses. The inherent challenge in such claims is, however, that of causality: the degree to whic...

Drawing together experts in this field, Climate Change, Migration and Human Rights offers a fresh perspective on human rights law and policy issues in the climate change regime by examining the interrelationships between various aspects of human rights, climate change and migration. Three key themes are explored: understanding the concepts of human...

Migration is now often conceived as a legitimate adaptive response to climate change. Numerous critiques have been made of this so-called ‘migration-as-adaptation’ discourse, arguing that the discourse is consistent with the political rationality of neoliberalism. This paper argues that by neglecting to account for ‘race’, these critiques obscure t...

This paper extends existing debate about the relationship between climate change and migration by locating this debate within the registers of race and difference. The paper argues that the discourse on climate change and migration generates a particular racial orientation to climate change called 'white affect'. To make this argument, the paper co...

This commentary offers a set of sympathetic reflections on Noel Castree’s recent interventions on geography, the environmental humanities and the Anthropocene. Whilst largely endorsing Castree’s exhortation that geographers engage analytically and institutionally with debates about the Anthropocene, the commentary sets out three limits to Castree’s...

This article serves as the introduction to this special issue in Critical Studies on Security. It begins with a brief overview of the academic debate and policy context concerning climate change and human migration. The principal claim is that critical evaluation of the security dimensions of climate change and migration must begin with the epistem...

This article aims to understand the political theologies at stake in the discourses and practices of climate change-induced migration. The argument proceeds from the idea that climate change-induced migration is an example of the absolute. It then traces how the absolute finds expression in two versions of the discourse on climate change and migrat...

This paper contextualises the relation between climate change and human migration using the concepts of neoliberalism, sovereignty and otherness. The paper is intended to provide a general account of climate change and migration research, which seeks to extend understanding of the relation beyond a focus on policy and policy-relevant research. The...

This paper analyses the growing discourse on climate change and migration from the perspective of critical race theory. The main contention put forward is that the figure of the climate change migrant is racialised to the extent that it is made to bear racial connotations. The paper traces the racialisation of the figure of the climate-change migra...

This paper provides an account of ‘vital ecosystem security’. The central claim is that ‘vital ecosystem security’ and the processual ontology of ‘complex adaptive becoming’ provide useful terms with which to think environmental citizenship biopolitically within the contingent matrix of climate change. The paper identifies how complex adaptation, t...

This article theorises the notion of environmental citizenship in the context of climate change and migration discourse. The central claim of the article is that postcolonial theory is inadequate for fully coming to terms with the way in which the figure of the climate change migrant works as an oppositional referent to the environmental citizen. T...

The category whiteness has received considerable attention in geography over the last 15 years. This paper argues that this research is oriented almost exclusively towards some notion of the past and as such fails to consider the way the category of the future might shape geographies of whiteness. The paper explores this proposition by showing how...

Building on recent argumentation concerning the relationship between wilderness and multiculturalism and whiteness in Canada, this essay argues that the relationship between wilderness and tolerance, one of multiculturalism's operative terms, offers a potentially rich vein for researching and theorizing liberal biopolitics and whiteness in Canada....

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conserva...

  Critical geographers have paid remarkably scant attention to issues of climate change, even less so to forest carbon management policy. Building on geographic debate concerning the ontological production of nature and race, this paper argues that at stake in the climate change debate are not simply questions of energy geopolitics or green product...

Wilderness and multiculturalism are frequently invoked as central features of the official national imagination in Canada, but seldom are these foundational ideas recognized as genealogically proximate. Instead, both are routinely made to occupy discrete cognitive spaces, with the effect being that they are reified as distinct zones of Canadian lif...

This article addresses the ontological status of nature in environmental politics by taking up the question of sustainable forest management in the Canadian boreal. In particular, it draws from Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality to argue that the historicity of "forest-nature" is indispensable for understanding the politics of sustainable...