Breaking Climate Borders

How will climate change intersect with human migration? This question has gained significant traction in recent years, gesturing towards fundamental issues concerning sovereignty, planetary habitability, and justice. However, most often the question has been answered by projecting present-day migration frameworks into the future. Instead of reimagining what (im)mobility might – or should – look like under conditions of accelerating climate change, the figure of the climate migrant or refugee has been mobilised as a harbinger of future “migration crises.” Thereby, today’s unequal socio-ecological relations and constrained geographies of mobility, displacement, and immobilisation are projected into an even direr future.

Drawing on critical migration and border studies, this intervention develops the notion of climate borderscapes to capture how climate change does not deterministically cause human mobility and displacement, but rather is among the multiple processes intervening in and configuring regimes of (im)mobility and bordering – and, ultimately, influencing the territorialisation of sovereignty, democracy, and political subjectivities. Building on nomadic theory (as introduced first by Deleuze and Guattari, and elaborated upon by others), this intervention problematises two key tenets of mainstream discourses on climate migration and mobilities: the biopolitical nexus State-territory-citizenship and the reification of the migrant as a fixed figure amenable to governmental control. To move beyond those, a de- and re-territorialization is needed, loosening future imaginaries of mobility from the deadlock of state-centric and crisis-driven narratives, opening space for alternative articulations of (im)mobility and habitability, climate justice, and solidarity.

Giovanni Bettini is Senior Lecturer in International Development and Climate Politics at Lancaster University. In his research Giovanni has been investigating how environmental change – in its planetary but uneven character, and entangled with a series of contemporary ‘crises’ and historical legacies – is generating new spaces, modes of governance, subjectivities and forms of resistance. He has published extensively on the links between climate change and human mobility. Giovanni coordinates the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Digital Climate Futures: a decolonial and justice perspective on digitalised climate change adaptation, which explores the role of the digital in reshaping adaptation, resilience and justice.