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Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
Handbook on the Changing
Geographies of the State
New Spaces of Geopolitics
Edited by
Sami Moisio
Professor of Spatial Planning and Policy, University of Helsinki, Finland
Natalie Koch
Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University, USA
Andrew E.G. Jonas
Professor of Human Geography, University of Hull, UK
Christopher Lizotte
Post-Doctoral Scholar, University of Helsinki, Finland
Juho Luukkonen
University Lecturer in Geography, University of Helsinki, Finland
© Sami Moisio, Natalie Koch, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Christopher Lizotte and Juho Luukkonen
2020
Cover concept: The State as Abstraction (Michael Heller)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
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15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944128
This book is available electronically in the
Social and Political Science subject collection
http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781788978057
ISBN 978 1 78897 804 0 (cased)
ISBN 978 1 78897 805 7 (eBook)
276
25. Sovereignty and climate necropolitics: the
tragedy of the state system goes ‘green’
Meredith J. DeBoom
25.1 TWO MOMENTS IN CHANGING ENVIRONMENTAL
SOVEREIGNTY
China entered the twenty-first century as both an environmental pariah and a rising geopolitical
power. Media coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics – an opportunity for the ruling Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) to enhance its ‘soft power’ and showcase China’s infrastructural
modernity – was literally and figuratively clouded by images of a smog-choked cityscape.
At the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, the CCP’s insistence on ‘common but differenti-
ated responsibilities’ despite China’s emergence as the world’s largest state-based source of
greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms prompted criticism that it was using ‘last season’s
playbook’ (Conrad 2012, p. 435). More recently, analysts have expressed concerns that the
CCP is using the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to outsource carbon-intensive industries, with
negative implications for global emissions targets and for communities and environments near
investment sites (see Tracy et al. 2017; Elkind 2019; Jun and Zadek 2019).
Persistent geopolitical representations of China as a climate change laggard reflect its
ongoing environmental challenges, but they also mask a significant shift in the CCP’s
approach to the environment at both national and global scales. In the mid-2000s, a new
discourse began to circulate within the CCP: ecological civilization. Initially advanced by
then-vice minister of environmental protection Pan Yue, ecological civilization calls for
environmental protection to be elevated to the domestic priority status long accorded to eco-
nomic growth (Zhou 2006). After several years on the political margins, the CCP incorporated
ecological civilization into its constitution during the 18th National Congress of 2012 (Geall
and Ely 2018; Hansen et al. 2018). The implementation of ecological civilization remains most
evident in the domestic realm, but Xi Jinping has elevated its geopolitical prominence since his
confirmation as president in 2013. In his 2017 report to the 19th National Congress of the CCP,
for example, Xi (2017, p. 5) characterized ecological civilization as a ‘global endeavour’, with
the CCP-led state as its ‘torchbearer’. Although the extra-territorial significance of ecological
civilization remains uncertain, Xi’s discursive rescaling suggests that it may have implications
for global norms of environmental sovereignty as well as for national norms of environmental
management.
Around the time that ecological civilization was gaining traction within the CCP, another
ruling party was making its own case for a change in environmental sovereignty norms. For
Namibia’s SWAPO party, the most pressing issue was not climate change but rather sover-
eignty over a commodity that fuels its mitigation: uranium. As domestic unemployment and
inequality ticked upward, SWAPO faced a populist backlash against the neoliberal mining
policies it had pursued since Namibia’s 1990 independence. In lieu of outright nationalization
– a difficult prospect for a state with little geopolitical clout and limited financial resources
Sovereignty and climate necropolitics 277
– SWAPO launched a state-owned mining company in 2008. It aptly named the company
Epangelo – ‘government’ in Namibia’s Oshiwambo language – and promised that it would
make ‘the people of Namibia meaningful participants in the mining business’ (Katali 2011).
After several years on the margins of Namibia’s mining sector, Epangelo took a modest step
towards pursuing its lofty mission in 2015, when it secured a 10 per cent ownership stake in
the Husab uranium mine.
The planetary ambitions of the CCP’s ecological civilization and the national aims of
SWAPO’s Epangelo initially appear to be at odds. Yet these two environmental sovereignty
projects are deeply intertwined: China’s state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group
(CGN) is the majority (90 per cent) owner in the Husab mine. The rationale beyond CGN’s
ownership stake is self-evident. Husab is expected to become the world’s second-largest
uranium mine upon reaching full production. Its uranium will help the CCP achieve its
ambitious targets for nuclear energy, one of several low-carbon energy strategies prioritized
under ecological civilization. The rationale behind Epangelo’s stake is less obvious. For CGN,
co-ownership with Epangelo provides neither financial nor technical benefits. For Epangelo, a
10 per cent ownership stake is a far cry from national sovereignty over natural resources. Yet
SWAPO’s leadership has welcomed CGN’s majority ownership of Husab, framing the mine
as a ‘win–win opportunity’ (Geingob 2015). CCP leaders have expressed similar support for
the mine’s ownership structure, praising the Namibian government for creating a ‘superior
investment environment’ that is producing ‘win–win fruits’ (Zhang 2018). How can we
explain this unlikely alliance between the Chinese state’s extra-territorial resource ownership,
which might otherwise be characterized as ‘resource grabbing’, and the Namibian state’s
resource nationalism, which is typically associated with anti-foreign investment sentiments?
This chapter introduces ‘climate necropolitics’ as a framework for answering this question
and considering, more broadly, how sovereignty is changing in association with both environ-
mental and geopolitical change – and with what consequences for whom and where. Climate
necropolitics integrates three theoretical concepts from geography, science and technology
studies (STS) and political theory: planetary sovereignty (Mann and Wainwright 2018), soci-
otechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Jasanoff 2015) and necropolitics (Mbembe
2003). Geographers have demonstrated the value of each of these concepts, separately, for
analysing environmental issues (see Sparke and Bessner 2019 on planetary sovereignty,
Bouzarovski and Bassin 2011 on sociotechnical imaginaries, and Cavanagh and Himmelfarb
2015; Davies 2018; Alexis-Martin 2019; Margulies 2019 on necropolitics), but integrating
them into climate necropolitics facilitates new insights into the changing geographies of envi-
ronmental sovereignty. Grounding each concept in the example of ecological civilization, I use
climate necropolitics to consider why climate change could provoke the emergence of a plan-
etary sovereign, how such a sovereign might cultivate support for and implement its strategy
for planetary management, and why planetary sovereignty may simultaneously facilitate rapid
mitigative action and deepened socio-ecological violence. Before turning to these inchoate
environmental sovereignty futures, we need to begin with the paradox that characterizes the
environmental sovereignty present: the ‘green’ tragedy of the state system.
278 Handbook on the changing geographies of the state
25.2 CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ‘GREEN’ TRAGEDY OF THE
STATE SYSTEM
‘[T]he link between the control of nature and the realization of state power’ (Whitehead et
al. 2007, p. 6) has emerged as a major theme in political geographic scholarship on climate
change (Gerhardt et al. 2010; Dittmer et al. 2011; Kythreotis 2012; Dalby 2013; Oels 2013;
O’Lear and Dalby 2015; Bennett 2016; O’Lear 2016). Through both its atmospheric scale and
localized effects, climate change challenges the assumption that environmental sovereignty
neatly aligns with the territorial boundaries of states. Yet despite this scalar mismatch, the
system of state-based environmental sovereignty has persisted. States have decision-making
power over the terms and implementation of international climate change agreements, which
in turn fortify state-based environmental sovereignty by measuring greenhouse gas emissions
at the scale of the state (Kythreotis 2012; O’Lear 2016). These agreements also reinforce the
assumption that the apparatus of the state is the most legitimate means of representing the
interests of the population – the idealized nation – within its borders. Even climate change
inaction has been used to fortify states’ claims to environmental sovereignty. Military and
civilian ‘environmental security’ strategies that frame the state as the last defence against the
anticipated anarchy of the environmental future have proliferated in recent years (Oels 2013;
Dalby 2014). Indeed, ‘far from putting an end to the state framing of nature’, most state actors
have responded to climate change by redoubling their efforts to render nature governable
(Whitehead et al. 2007, p. 203).
The paradoxical entrenchment of statist geopolitics in the context of climate change is the
‘green’ iteration of what Agnew (2017) calls the ‘tragedy of the nation-state’: state-based
sovereignty has proven inadequate and flawed as a structure through which to address climate
change, yet mitigation and adaptation efforts have often reinforced that very structure. In
response to this ‘green’ tragedy, debates over the feasibility and desirability of a ‘world
state’ or ‘world government’ have intensified in recent years (Wendt 2003; Tännsjö 2008).
Proponents argue that a global sovereign could, ostensibly, identify and enforce a climate
change strategy that transcends the parochialism of the state system to reflect the ‘global
interest’ – or at least claims to do so. Could a sovereign with global environmental authority
overcome the ‘green’ tragedy of the state system? If so, how and from where might such a sov-
ereign emerge, and with what costs for whom? These questions prompt us to move beyond
the state system to consider an alternative structure through which nature might be rendered
governable: planetary sovereignty.
25.3 ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION: A NASCENT SHIFT
TOWARDS PLANETARY SOVEREIGNTY
In Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Mann and Wainwright
(2018) bring together theories of critical political economy (drawing on Karl Marx and
Antonio Gramsci) and sovereignty (including those of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt)
to consider how the foundational political assumptions that structure our world may ‘adapt’
to climate change. They identify the replacement of the current system of state-based sover-
eignty with ‘planetary sovereignty’ as the most likely such political adaptation. Mann and
Wainwright’s (2018, p. 29) combination of planetary and sovereignty is twofold, describing
Sovereignty and climate necropolitics 279
a sovereign ‘capable of acting both at the planetary scale … and in the name of planetary
management – for the sake of life on Earth’. A planetary sovereign, in other words, could both
proclaim a planetary state of exception (a climate emergency) and implement the actions it
deems necessary given that emergency on a planetary scale (such as deciding who may and
may not emit carbon). Its sovereignty would be constrained only by the atmospheric limits of
Earth itself.
Given the persistence of the state system in the face of climate change, Mann and
Wainwright acknowledge that the emergence of planetary sovereignty is not a foregone con-
clusion. Yet they argue that such a change in sovereignty’s character, form and scale is not as
implausible as it may seem. Drawing on Agamben’s (2005, p. 14) identification of the ‘para-
digm of security’ as the ‘normal technique of government’ in the contemporary world, Mann
and Wainwright (2018, p. 31) note that rescaling security to encompass the ‘making-secure of
planetary life’ could provide a pathway for planetary sovereignty’s legitimation. They antic-
ipate that such a pathway is most likely to be pursued by one or more Western states, which
together could form a ‘Climate Leviathan’ ‘armed with democratic legitimacy’ and devoted to
the preservation of the capitalist system (Mann and Wainwright 2018, p. 30). Although Mann
and Wainwright acknowledge that China could someday pursue planetary sovereignty, they do
not dwell on this possibility or evaluate ecological civilization as a potential pathway for such
a pursuit. This is understandable, particularly given the CCP’s fierce opposition to perceived
violations of state-defined sovereignty in the past.
Under the leadership of President Xi, however, the CCP has begun to adopt a more assertive
geopolitical role, including in the realm of the environment. In his 2017 report to the 19th
National Congress of the Communist Party, Xi (2017, p. 5) went so far as to characterize China
as ‘taking a driving seat’ in global efforts to combat climate change. China, he continued,
had become ‘an important participant, contributor, and torchbearer in the global endeavour
for ecological civilization’ (Xi 2017, p. 5). Xi’s rescaling of ecological civilization from
a domestic initiative into a ‘global project’ certainly does not imply that the CCP will seek
planetary sovereignty. Speaking a mere three years after then-United States (US) president
Obama (2014) chastised China for not fulfilling its ‘special responsibility to lead’, Xi may
have merely seized the opportunity to recast China from climate pariah to environmental
leader – particularly in the wake of the US government’s announced intention to abandon the
Paris Climate Accord. Indeed, Xi’s speech carefully contextualized ecological civilization in
the broader framework of international cooperation.
Yet we should not overlook the significance of Xi’s characterization of ecological civ-
ilization as a global endeavour, particularly given the CCP’s historical prioritization of
state-defined sovereignty. Even if this shift remains limited to the realm of rhetoric, it raises
novel possibilities for environmental sovereignty futures – including the prospect of a plane-
tary sovereign whose geopolitical strategy centres around non-interference, ‘win–win’ coop-
eration and state capitalism rather than democracy promotion, ‘soft power’ and ‘free market’
capitalism. How might such a sovereign justify and enact a planetary strategy for environmen-
tal management? And how might it contend with the persistent allure of nationalism, both at
home and abroad? To address these questions, we must consider how visions of the future like
ecological civilization gain collective appeal and are ‘built into the hard edifices of matter and
praxis’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, p. 323).
280 Handbook on the changing geographies of the state
25.4 REALIZING ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION:
SOCIOTECHNICAL IMAGINARIES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY
IN CHINA
Jasanoff and Kim (2009) developed the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ to explain
how ideas of scientific and technological progress become enrolled in the pursuit of col-
lective visions of the future. Bridging STS work on hybridity, including Haraway (1989),
with political theory on social identity, including Anderson (1983) and Appadurai (1990),
sociotechnical imaginaries refer to ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly
performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social
life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technol-
ogy’ (Jasanoff 2015, p. 4). Sociotechnical imaginaries are similar to master narratives (Lyotard
1984 [1979]) in that they provide ‘a rationale for society’s long evolutionary course while
also committing that society to keep performing the imagined lines of the story’ (Jasanoff
2015, p. 20), but they extend beyond master narratives by identifying a specific strategy for
achieving that future. Sociotechnical imaginaries, in other words, are Janus-faced; they are
simultaneously past-grounded and future-oriented; prescriptive and normative. By identifying
futures that are achievable and futures that ought to be achieved, they identify what has been
as well as what can and should be.
In explaining why some sociotechnical imaginaries gain collective support while others
flounder, Jasanoff and Kim foreground contextual factors, including history, national identity,
and culture. They first developed sociotechnical imaginaries to explain why the governments
of the US and South Korea adopted radically different rhetoric and implementation strate-
gies to govern nuclear energy. Whereas US leaders framed nuclear energy as a ‘potentially
runaway technology’ that required a ‘responsible regulator’, South Korean leaders character-
ized it as a transformative technology (‘atoms for development’) that could only be optimized
through the deft guidance of the developmental state (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, p. 119). In each
case, leaders used a dystopian or utopian vision of a technology, grounded in the norms and
history of their respective society, to justify a different ‘necessary’ role for the state. As these
examples suggest, political leaders often play an outsized role in naturalizing sociotechnical
imaginaries, but it is the shared understandings of social life and order (including what consti-
tutes the public good) upon which they are based that facilitate their systemic adoption. This is
why sociotechnical imaginaries, although subject to contestation (Delina 2018), often become
naturalized to such a degree that alternative visions of the future – and strategies by which to
accomplish those visions – are foreclosed upon.
Applying sociotechnical imaginaries to ecological civilization sheds light on why nuclear
energy has emerged as a key strategy for its implementation – and for reasons that extend
well beyond carbon emissions. First, as Mitchell (2011) has demonstrated, particular energy
systems complement and are complemented by particular types of politics. The CCP’s
approach to domestic politics facilitates the rapid development of nuclear energy, which
requires long-term planning (to ensure that its high up-front costs will not be in vain), a tech-
nocratic approach (to counter safety concerns), and centralized structures of authority (to miti-
gate protest and promote regulatory consistency) (DeBoom 2020a). Second, nuclear energy is
associated with technological mastery, military might, and nationalist pride. These overtones
support the ‘Chinese dream of national rejuvenation’, a utopian geopolitical vision that Xi
has promoted since 2012. Third, nuclear energy is a high-wage industry with an expanding
Sovereignty and climate necropolitics 281
export market in the Global South – commercial features that align with the CCP’s ‘going
out’ geo-economic strategy and its descendant, the BRI. Finally, nuclear energy is associated
with an imaginary of ‘limitless’ possibility (Cohn 1997; Hecht 2012). This connotation is well
suited to a ruling party that uses economic development as a governmentality strategy and has
built its legitimacy around promises of limitless progress (Geall and Ely 2018; Grant 2018;
Pow 2018).
The CCP’s quest to make China the world’s nuclear energy leader is already well under
way. Despite connecting its first reactor to the grid only in 1991, China is expected to surpass
the US as the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy by 2030 (WNA 2019a). Yet ecolog-
ical civilization will require more than rapid reactor construction to achieve its geopolitical
potential. Jasanoff (in Jasanoff and Kim, 2015, p. 326) argues that sociotechnical imaginaries
become ‘embedded’ and expand beyond their place of origin by latching onto ‘tangible
things’, including commodities. To implement its nuclear energy strategy, the CCP will need
to secure both the foundational commodity of nuclear energy – uranium – and the cooperation
of actors who control that uranium. The CCP’s current plans for nuclear energy suggest that
China will require 1 million tons of uranium per year by 2050 – an amount equivalent to
what the entire world consumed in 2015 (Zhang and Bai 2015). How will the CCP secure this
supply of uranium, and how might its strategy for doing so intersect with Xi’s characterization
of ecological civilization as a ‘global endeavour’? These questions bring us to the shadow of
utopian visions that promise collective life for some: dystopian realities that require collective
death of others.
25.5 ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION BEYOND CHINA: THE
NECROPOLITICS OF THE HUSAB URANIUM MINE
Achille Mbembe (2003) developed the concept of ‘necropower’ to explain how and why
sovereigns exercise violence against some populations in the name of promoting life for other
populations. Necropower refers to ‘the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who
is disposable [emphasis in original] and who is not’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 27). Whereas biopol-
itics is characterized by ‘the power to “make” live and “let” die’ (Foucault 2003, p. 241),
necropolitics entails ‘the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’
(Mbembe 2003, p. 11). Necropolitics and biopolitics are thus ‘two sides of the same coin’,
as Braidotti (2007, p. 2) argues, but they theorize power from radically different starting
points. Mbembe inverts the Europe-centric genealogy of biopower by tracing the genealogy of
necropower through the extractive violence of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. He argues
that sovereigns can render such necropolitical violence ‘legitimate’ because they execute it
not against subjects but rather against populations deemed to be ‘savages’. These ‘savage’
populations reside at the ‘frontiers’ of the state, places ‘where the controls and guarantees of
judicial order can be suspended … where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to
operate in the service of civilization’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 24).
Does ecological civilization condemn some to death so that others may live? To answer this
question, we need to extend our analysis of environmental sovereignty beyond the territorial
limits of the Chinese state. China’s annual domestic uranium demand has outpaced domestic
supply since the mid-2000s. This situation is not due to a lack of domestic uranium resources.
China ranks eighth in the world in proven uranium reserves (WNA 2019b). Even with the
282 Handbook on the changing geographies of the state
CCP’s ambitious targets for nuclear energy, China could be self-sufficient in uranium through
at least 2030 using only currently operating mines (Zhang and Bai 2015). Yet most of the
CCP’s investments in uranium mining over the past ten years have occurred abroad. By 2019,
China’s two state-owned nuclear giants, CGN and CNNC, had amassed overseas uranium
holdings equal to three times China’s total domestic reserves (WNA 2019b).
The Chinese state’s single largest source of foreign uranium is the Husab mine in Namibia,
which is expected to become the world’s second-largest uranium mine when it reaches full
production. A $5.2 billion project, Husab was the largest-ever Chinese state investment in
sub-Saharan Africa when it began construction in 2012. It is located in the Namib desert,
where annual rainfall rarely exceeds 10 inches and many rural communities rely on aquifers
to support their subsistence livelihoods as farmers and herders. The combination of intensi-
fied uranium mining and a series of climate change-associated droughts has undermined the
sustainability of local aquifers and in turn jeopardized the survival of agriculturally dependent
communities (DeBoom 2017). Uranium mining may also endanger the health of local popula-
tions via gale-force winds that can dislodge radioactive dust and toxins from mine tailings and
structural failures that can contaminate groundwater (DeBoom 2020a). Yet far from protesting
the CCP’s exercise in extra-territorial resource ownership – which appears to undermine both
its own goals for resource sovereignty and the health and livelihoods of rural communities –
Namibia’s SWAPO ruling party has endorsed the Husab mine as a ‘win–win’ project. To make
sense of this seemingly perverse outcome, we need to turn, finally, to climate necropolitics.
25.6 CLIMATE NECROPOLITICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL
SOVEREIGNTY FUTURES
Integrating planetary sovereignty, sociotechnical imaginaries, and necropolitics into the
framework of climate necropolitics reveals that the Chinese state is not alone in executing the
sovereign calculus of who ‘may live’ and who ‘must die’. Reflecting its geopolitical emphasis
on ‘win–win’ cooperation and respect for state-defined sovereignty, the CCP is not imposing
ecological civilization on the Namibian state. Instead, the CCP has enrolled Namibia’s ruling
party, SWAPO, in ecological civilization by providing it with an opportunity to pursue its own
sociotechnical imaginary: a utopian future in which Namibia’s resource wealth is harnessed to
fuel national development. During the mining license approval process, SWAPO negotiated
with CGN to secure a 10 per cent ownership stake in Husab for the Namibian state’s Epangelo
mining company. As a state-owned entity that prioritizes politics as well as profit, CGN wel-
comed this proposal – and, importantly, helped to secure a Chinese government loan to fund
Epangelo’s stake. Once this loan is repaid, Husab is expected to generate $170–200 million
in annual revenues for the Namibian state, an amount roughly equivalent to 5 per cent of its
pre-Husab annual revenues. The Husab loan raises additional sovereignty issues (see DeBoom
2020b), but it is unlikely that Epangelo – which previously operated on annual budget of
$500,000 in an industry in which one haul truck costs $4 million – would have an ownership
stake in a world-leading uranium mine without it.
Husab’s benefits for SWAPO extend beyond revenue. Resource nationalism ‘is rooted in
the question of who gets to legitimately speak in the name of the state or the nation, where, and
at what scale sovereignty or autonomy is claimed’ (Koch and Perreault 2019, p. 617, emphasis
in original). Epangelo was created in 2008 in response to rising populism, which SWAPO’s
Sovereignty and climate necropolitics 283
leadership interpreted as a threat to the party’s longstanding electoral dominance. SWAPO
attempted to co-opt these populist sentiments by arguing that problems like unemployment
and inequality were caused by an inadequate state role in mining – not, as some populist
leaders claimed, by SWAPO’s failed leadership. Epangelo, SWAPO officials promised, would
end Namibia’s status as an ‘Eldorado of speculators’ by making ‘the people of Namibian [sic]
meaningful participants in the mining business rather than rent-seekers’ (Katali 2011). Today,
SWAPO officials cite Husab as the first step towards fulfilling that promise. When I asked
one SWAPO leader to explain how increased government revenue from Husab will benefit
Namibians, he replied, visibly bewildered by the question, ‘government is the people. As
government benefits, the people are beneficiaries.’ This sentiment and others like it suggest
that Husab is not only a tool to strengthen SWAPO’s electoral dominance; it is also a tool to
consolidate the Namibian state – under SWAPO’s leadership – as the legitimate guardian of
both natural resources and the ‘national interest’.
Returning, then, to the question set out at the beginning of this chapter, climate necropolitics
reveals that the alliance between the CCP’s ecological civilization and SWAPO’s resource
nationalism is not as unlikely as it first seems. Far from undermining one another, these two
geo-imaginaries have enabled one another. For the CCP, Husab presents perhaps the best of
all possible environmental sovereignty situations. It is a reliable source of uranium to support
the CCP’s nuclear energy strategy that does not directly condemn Chinese subjects or envi-
ronments to mining-associated violence. Even better, the CCP has secured Husab’s uranium
through ‘win–win’ cooperation rather than conflict. This is a valuable outcome at a time when
Western leaders are accusing China of outsourcing its environmental pollution and threatening
the sovereignty of Global South states through initiatives like the BRI.
The CCP is not Husab’s only beneficiary. Just as the mine fuels the CCP’s geopolitical
ascendency, it also fuels SWAPO’s own vision for environmental sovereignty: an extractivist
future in which the SWAPO-led state uses Namibia’s natural resource wealth to consolidate
its status as the ‘legitimate’ representative of the idealized Namibian nation. As for Namibians
living near Husab who may lose their livelihoods and their health to intensified uranium
mining, it is likely not a coincidence that these communities disproportionately consist of
politically marginalized minority groups. In rendering these populations disposable, SWAPO
is also rendering them governable. The result is a mutually beneficial, trans-scalar exercise in
environmental necropower.
Beyond ecological civilization, geographers can use the framework of climate necropolitics
to identify emerging spaces and relations of environmental sovereignty and assess the distri-
bution of their geopolitical and environmental consequences. Are planetary sovereignty and
the state-based system of environmental sovereignty necessarily incompatible? Climate nec-
ropolitics raises the possibility that planetary sovereignty could emerge through rather than in
opposition to state-based sovereignty. Does the persistent allure of nationalism undermine the
possibility of planetary sovereignty? Climate necropolitics opens space for considering how
an emerging planetary sovereign could use nationalism to cultivate support for its vision of
the geopolitical and environmental future at home as well as abroad. Is planetary sovereignty
the best option for overcoming the ‘green’ tragedy of the state system? Climate necropolitics
cautions us that changes in the form, character and scale of sovereignty may facilitate rapid
mitigative action while simultaneously deepening socio-ecological violence. As the impli-
cations of geopolitical and environmental change continue to take shape, transdisciplinary
frameworks like climate necropolitics can help geographers think anew about the assumptions
284 Handbook on the changing geographies of the state
of environmental geopolitics – and consider novel possibilities for environmental sovereignty
futures.
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