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.