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Book Review: Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-first CenturyWennerstenJohnRobbinsDenise. (2017). Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-first Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 272 pp. $20.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-253-02588-3.
This article seeks to highlight the existing 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (hereinafter referred to as Refugee Convention) and the possibilities of the document to encompass climate-induced migration by modifying, reconstructing and establishing a specific legal regime, considering that the concept of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) has been inadequate and incapable to incorporate the ‘newly introduced’ type of migrant. The definition of refugee in the Convention explicitly limits the scope of people who are forced to flee their home into migrants due to warfare and civil disturbance. In fact, there are people who can no longer gain decent livelihood due to environmental and social problems including poverty, drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, floods and other environmental deterioration. However, these people have not been legally accepted as ‘refugee’ in the international arena. The author argues that ‘environmental refugee’ or ‘climate refugee’ is a clear and present issue, as climate change-related disasters are rampant and deteriorating. Therefore, this article will examine the existing and potential role of international law in effectively responding to climate change and its related humanitarian problems in the future. The development of a specific legal document on environmental refugee and the global acceptance of the status of the people not only represent a short-term solution for the affected people, but also introduce a long-term commitment of international community to alleviate poverty and guarantee the fulfilment of basic human rights and social justice for everyone. This article primarily investigates relevant legal documents and discovers some legal and non-legal concepts that are connected to the central topic of this article.
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 horizons of meaning in politics, philosophy, media, art and literature. Life Adrift is a collection of essays from across the interpretive social sciences and humanities which treats climate change and migration as a relation that demands theoretical and historical explanation, rather than a problem requiring technical and expert solutions. The result is a unique collection, offering readers a means for reconceptualising migration and environmental changes as a site of politics and of political possibility. Along the way it addresses a range of topics current in cultural and political theory, including democracy, place, neoliberalism, humanism, materiality, borders, affect, race and sexuality. If climate change stands to redistribute humans and material across the globe, then Life Adrift offers a set of critical resources for analysing this coming phenomenon and reimaging what it might mean to be political in a fully immanent world of bodies in flux.
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Climate-induced migration, and particularly the issue of climate refugees, is subject to growing attention in global climate governance. The debate on the topic sees the convergence of conflicting discourses (ranging from those of conservative European governments to southern NGOs) onto apocalyptic narratives that forecast massive, abrupt and unavoidable flows of climate refugees. Such dystopian narratives, either framed within humanitarian or ‘national security’ agendas, relegate the concerned populations to the status of victims (either to protect or to fear). This article, applying elements of poststructuralist discourse theory, analyzes the narratives via a set of influential reports on climate-induced migration and argues that apocalyptic narratives on climate refugees, although not totalizing or uncontested, represent a case of the depoliticization of global climate governance. The convergence into such narratives favors the drive towards a post-political discursive configuration, which, by supplanting politics with governance, leaves underlying power relations untouched and (re)produces present forms of representational and material marginalization. It therefore argues that such narratives, although often employed with the aim of attracting attention to a pressing issue, are detrimental for an emancipatory approach to climate change.
Numerous recent reports by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and international organisations have focused on so-called ‘climate refugees’. This article examines the turn from a discourse of ‘climate refugees’, in which organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of ‘climate migration’, in which organisations promote migration as a strategy of adaptation. Its focus is the promotion of climate migration management, and it explores the trend of these discourses through two sections. First, it provides an empirical account of the two discourses, emphasising the differentiation between them. It then focuses on the discourse of climate migration, its origins, extent and content, and the associated practices of ‘migration management’. The second part argues that the turn to the promotion of ‘climate migration’ should be understood as a way to manage the insecurity created by climate change. However, international organisations enacts this management within the forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the framework of governance. Therefore, the promotion of ‘climate migration’ as a strategy of adaptation to climate change is located within the tendencies of neoliberalism and the reconfiguration of southern states' sovereignty through governance.
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 which climate change influences migration alongside the myriad social, political, and economic reasons people migrate. This challenge is far from being settled. Importantly, the unsettled question of causality exposes how the crisis of humanism is central to the construction of the climate migrant or climate refugee. Coming to terms with this crisis means having to confront how issues of power and knowledge shape how we understand the relationship between climate change and migration. But even more importantly it means having to ask probing questions about what it means to be human today. The study develops these arguments through an engagement with the concept of the monster and with Timothy Morton's concept of the hyperobject. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e460. doi: 10.1002/wcc.460
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• Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts
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 connects up two related phenomena: racial neoliberalism and the relationship between affect and biopower. The white affect of climate change and migration discourse is here understood to be an 'object-target' of biopolitics. White affect thus becomes an important concept for understanding how racial neoliberalism functions through affective proxy. © 2015 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World works at the intersection of three fields-environmental studies, security studies, and immigration studies. It argues that climate-induced migration has been increasingly framed as a security concern by policy makers and analysts. Although people will undoubtedly migrate internally and across borders as a form of adaptation to global warming, treating such migration as a security threat to North Atlantic countries is an inappropriate response. It takes crucial energy and political capital away from efforts to mitigate GHG emissions, adapt to climate change, and pursue development strategies that have environmental concerns at their core. Securitizing climate-induced migration is politically successful; it may play easily to constituencies anxious about immigration and climate change. But it does not address more fundamental issues. It also results in a willingness to support authoritarian transit states as an ostensible bulwark against unwanted migration. The book focuses on the Sahel and other sub-Saharan regions in Africa, as these regions are cast as the source of climate-induced migration flows first to North African countries, with the European continent as the final destination. It is based on the natural science scholarship on the impact of climate change on Africa. Strikingly, there is evidence that environmental change actually reduces migration pressures. In the case of the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, when migration does occur it is more likely to be oriented not toward European destinations to the north but to megacities of the African coast. This is a profound dynamic and needs to be addressed, but not by a security-minded approach by North Atlantic officials and electorates.
This paper critically examines the perceived threat of 'climate refugees' and 'climate conflict'. It locates the ideological roots of these concepts in development theories and policy narratives about demographically induced migration, environmental refugees and environmental security. While alarmist rhetoric around climate refugees and conflict has been deployed by a variety of actors, including U.N. agencies, development NGOs, national governments, security pundits and popular media, the paper concentrates on its strategic use by U.S. defence interests. It raises the question of how the portrayal of climate change as a security threat could further militarise the provision of development assistance and distort climate policy. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Rising Tide of Color against World-White Supremacy
- L Stoddar
Stoddar, L. 1925. The Rising Tide of Color against World-White Supremacy. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons.