Paper short abstract

Reflections and qualms about the possibility of progressive approaches to ‘climate migration’

Paper long abstract

The recent hecatombs in the Mediterranean and rising walls around Europe reaffirm the urgency of climate migration - the bodies drowning or shot while jumping over a fence might bear on their skin also the signs of climate change. However, the dark shadow cast by such tragedies does not per se indicate a line to follow, and the paucity of the approaches that have emerged so far is striking. We have been haunted by the figure of climate refugees - a distillate of colonial imaginaries and Malthusian spectres, heavily criticized by scholarship. More recently, we have seen the affirmation of biopolitical discourses that signify climate migration as a set of mobility responses, including (governed) migration promoted as a legitimate adaptation strategy. All in all, it is hard to spot any progressive approach to so called climate migration.

This intervention argues that a precondition for any radical/emancipatory approach is the recognition that there is no escape from the 'political abyss' associated to migration/mobility - even more so when linked to climate change. Seeing the matter as a battle (or choice) between the geopolitical (and/or humanitarian) optic embodied in the figure of climate refugees, and the biopolitical figure of the disciplined adaptive 'climate migrant' is a shortcut that represses what is at stake - that is, the irreducibly political tension inherent in every form of mobility as much as in every attempt to discipline/govern it.