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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how climate refugees, excluded by law and exposed to environmental crises, reveal shared vulnerability. It further proposes relational agency as frameworks for a more inclusive and interdependent vision of justice across human and morethan human worlds.

Paper long abstract

Human climate refugees face an uphill battle from the outset, beginning with the contest over the term itself. Their legal and political status remains undefined, caught between national and international frameworks that fail to recognise their existence. Their displacement exposes the limits of humanitarian and legal protection, rendering them outside the bounds of anthropos and the privileges of anthropocentrism. The uncertainty surrounding climate refugees reveals a dual pressure from both state authority and environmental forces, resulting in a condition of rightlessness. Through Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of State of Exception and Homo Sacer, climate refugees can be understood as embodying a form of bare life, stripped of rights by sovereign mechanisms of control. An examination of Amitav Ghosh’s "Gun Island," alongside historical and policy discourses, demonstrates how state systems perpetuate vulnerability and suppress refugee agency. Building on the critical insights of New Materialism, this paper develops a framework of relational agency that recognises the interconnected vulnerabilities of climate change refugees covering both human and nonhuman entities. The concept of “ethico-cosmopolitical hospitality,” drawn from Derrida’s ethics of absolute justice, is proposed as a way to reimagine development in terms of inclusivity, shared responsibility, and collective agency.