Abstract
Climate change is a real and major threat to the wellbeing (when not survival) of large parts of the ‘majority world’, which had a minor responsibility in creating the very problem. The production and circulation of knowledge, imaginaries and norms on climate change mirrors and reproduces the (post)colonial divide. While international climate diplomacy is failing to avert dangerous climate change, climate politics are subsumed under neoliberal discourses that further commodify the planetary commons and perpetuate globalized capital relations.
It is in the track of these well-established tenets of critical scholarship that Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle situate their ambitious Climate Terror. It is ambitious because, in a phase when neoliberal discourses seem totalizing, the book sets out to search for the ‘Other’ to those hegemonic scripts, rather than ‘just’ criticizing them and reiterating a call for resistance. Chaturvedi and Doyle set out to explore the conditions of possibility for a different climate – re-appropriated by the global periphery and vehicle for progressive politics rather than for the perpetuation and expansion of the neoliberal rule.
The bar is set high for the book, and the questions addressed difficult: are emancipatory, decolonized, progressive (and non-residual) movements on climate change possible at all, and can these be found anywhere today? These are key questions, antidotes to the mantra that no alternative is possible and nobody is doing anything different – a malaise that creeps also through critical scholarship and is a vital ingredient of every hegemonic ideology.
For sure, the book provides a solid critique of dominant climate discourses, combining at least three research streams within human geography and cognate disciplines: namely, the critical geopolitics of climate change and of the role of security and militarization in governing environmental risk; the deconstruction of the Northern and conservative roots of climate science, imaginaries and policy models, which other the ‘majority world’ and alienate it from climate action; and the diagnosis of the post-political inhibition that affects environmental discourses, whereby ‘politics of fear’ and techno-managerial governance are conjured-up to evacuate the political kernel of climate change – and reproduce the status quo.
I’m not sure the book substantially advances the core of any of these fields. But it fruitfully reads the ‘politics of fear’ often accompanying climate change in relation to emerging strategies and technologies of control and government, with climate terror as a dispositive joining them. Chaturvedi and Doyle read climate change as the quintessential post-modern discourse that, narrated as an existential threat to the whole of humanity or the planet, universalizes the post-industrial and cosmopolitan imaginaries and discourses through which neoliberalism expands at the expense of the majority. This point is crucial in the economy of the book: it is this ability to produce universalizing, globalized narratives colonizing the majority that explains why climate change has proved to be an extremely ‘successful’ political signifier, in spite of the limited success in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. From this ‘climate terror’ draws also its generative power. Indeed, climate change is the terrain in which neoliberal environmentalism finally emancipates itself from the ‘guilt’ over the impacts of industrialized societies that haunted modern environmentalism – a guilt that the idea of sustainable development could anesthetise but not overcome. Climate terror does not only make the emergent issue of global warming docile to dominant economic interests, it is not only business-as-usual. It heralds ‘business better than usual’ (p. 80), as the stewardship of the Earth system becomes a new frontier for capital accumulation and green business, with the latter preached as the solution to (rather than the cause of) the very problem. As said above, none of the individual pixels are particularly new, but the overall picture offered is compelling.
To see whether climate change can be ‘reclaimed’, the book explores the ways in which it is mobilized in the politics of left and non-Western environmentalist and activist organizations, exploring in detail the case of Friends of the Earth International. The conclusion drawn is not positive, as the authors claim – simplifying the message to the bone – that climate change is a right-wing, conservative signifier, that obfuscates the many stories of exploitation and oppression (and rebellion, one could add) that accompany global socio-ecological processes.
The closure of the book is very strong, and does not leave much space for any hopes in the potential of climate change as a progressive political signifier: ‘the Armageddon came many years ago for the globally peripheral peoples of the global South, when their lands were first invaded and colonized by their European oppressors. The flood came long ago’ (p. 208).
It is hard to disagree with the scepticism against the future-oriented character of many climate change discourses and the fact that the spectre of the coming apocalypse in the future hides the catastrophes of the past and the present, not least related to colonial disasters. However, the conclusions of the book can be interrogated in a number of aspects.
The last sentence confirms the impression that the book is conflating climate injustice and vulnerability with colonialism. It is hard to dispute the linkages, as well as the many attempts to sanitize climate politics from the links to colonial pasts and the postcolonial present. But does that justify the flattening on the colonial disaster of all the axes of inequality that play out and are reproduced, renegotiated and sometimes invented in the name of climate change? Moreover, I am not fully convinced by the linearity and rigidity of the North-South (minority-majority) binary that permeates the analysis (e.g. p. 59). A wealth of studies (among others, Arrighi, Negri and Hardt, Mezzadra and Neilson) hint to how the binary North-South is being supplanted by more complex geographies of accumulation and inequality. Climate vulnerability is a good case in point: of course, the North-South axis is crucial, but so are a number of social relations and positions within countries – gender, class, caste, roles in globalized economic processes. Lastly, I’m afraid that the binary does not help in perceiving one of the effects of globalized neoliberalism, i.e. the creation of a number of ‘Souths in the North’ – two among the best examples are institutionalized internal waste ‘colonialism’ in Italy, and the location of fracking sites (with the associated environmental costs and risks) in less affluent areas of England.
In conclusion, the main quality of the book was not the one I was expecting when I first opened it. I was hoping to find visions of how a de-colonized politics of climate change might look and where their seeds are now sprouting. On that side, the book did not fully deliver. However, it offers an invaluable contribution because it combines and fully develops a number of important critical angles – there are not many books doing that, if any at all. The book will represent an important resource for critical scholars approaching the field of climate politics, as well as a necessary starting point for those working on and towards decolonized and progressive climate politics.