Introduction

Life Adrift

Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini

Migration is life.

— Anonymous

Migration is one of the defining features of contemporary political life. Figured in opposition to the citizen, the nation and the sedentary, migrants are constitutive of some of today's most cherished political identifications. Celebrated or denigrated as a matter of political expedience, migrants bear the mark of the other. They are racialized, sexualized and dehumanized, even while represented as hardworking, desirable and prosperous. That migration has and will continue to shape the twenty-first-century global order is a truism evident in the ever-increasing number of migrants in the world today alongside a full-fledged political antipathy for immigration. But in addition to migration, global climate change looms over the present as another world-shaping phenomenon. Indeed it is now a commonplace in today's global political economy to argue that climate change is itself a migration crisis in the making.

As climate change becomes ever more apparent, many expect large areas of the planet to become uninhabitable, producing what some have referred to as 'dead zones' (see Goldberg and Colebrook, this volume). But what of the inhabitants of these dead zones? What fate awaits those who will bear the brunt of climate change while having contributed the least to its creation? One view is that the impacts of climate change, whether in the form of sea-level rise, extreme weather events or drought, will 'induce' a complex pattern of human mobilities, including migration, displacement and resettlement, on an unprecedented scale. Such mobilities, whether real or imagined, are mobilized for quite different political ends. Some characterize environmentally induced displacement as one of climate change's most severe injustices. The popular yet deeply fraught figure of the 'climate refugee' here becomes a touchstone for planetary fate, humanity adjudicated on the ethical stance adopted in relation to it. For others, the anticipated mobilities induced by climate change are a potentially ungovernable, and therefore, dangerous, phenomenon. Here, climate change promises the radical redistribution of people around the world, with those expected to be set in motion, in turn, inscribed with the near-mythical power to disrupt entire economies, political institutions and identities. Climate change thus becomes dramatized not only as a problem of excessive greenhouse gas emissions, but also as one that demands new mechanisms for anticipating and controlling 'flows' of people who, many expect, will be unleashed by climate change. At a time of heightened political anxiety when the figures of the migrant and refugee are easily mobilized to undermine European integration, or when both feature centrally in hateful political speech (i.e. Trumpism), how we approach the relation between climate change and migration is of profound significance.

Life Adrift intervenes in the problem space opened up when climate change and human migration are made to intersect, when climate change is configured as a problem of migration. The contributors to this volume represent an eclectic mix of the humanities and interpretive social sciences – political and cultural theory, literary criticism, linguistics, migration studies, philosophy, geography and media studies. The essays gathered together in this volume thus offer a wide-ranging, and we hope fresh set of, insights for thinking anew the relation between climate change and human migration. Common across these essays is a shared conviction amongst the authors that climate change is a real, material circumstance with potentially dire consequences for much of the world's population, especially those already living on the fringes of capital. In compiling these essays, our intention is not to trivialize this. Like so many other forms of violence, including imperialism, colonialism, economic austerity, genocide and patriarchy, the violence of climate change will reverberate for generations to come. It may even threaten long-term human survival. Yet in this introduction we take a slightly counter-intuitive view; we argue that the relation between climate change and human migration must be understood foremost as a relation of power rather than as a hard fact awaiting to be discovered, or an empirically observable phenomenon. Climate change designates a real crisis of contemporary political economy, but its migration effects are mediated at every turn by all manner of other social, cultural, political and even geological, relations (on the geological see Clark, this volume). Consequently, we argue that the very act of thinking (or speaking or imagining) climate change as a problem of migration is explicitly political. By bending our view of the world, such thinking becomes a powerful means by which social attitudes are governed, which is what we mean when we say that climate change and human migration is a relation of power. In its more hegemonic expressions, it orients publics to climate change in a way that reinforces the exceptional status of the migrant or refugee. It demands that we view the migrant and refugee as the 'other', the constitutive outside or excess of what is otherwise imagined as the pairing of 'normal' even if fraught geopolitical and climatic conditions. It reinforces the belief, erroneous in our view, that life internal to the modern nation state is settled, sedentary and at some degree of remove from the transnational flows of labour, capital and technology, imagined to lie beyond state borders. And in a more abstract sense, it is a relation that often constructs movement and change as inimical to social order rather than as its founding and ongoing condition (Nail, 2015). (Later, however, we discuss how this relation of power might be used to reimagine the future.)

As a system of power, the discourse of 'climate change and human migration' – by which we mean a...