The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

Seen in this light, climate change is not a danger in itself; it is envisaged rather as a ‘threat multiplier’ that will deepen already existing divisions and lead to the intensification of a range of conflicts. How will the security establishments of the West respond to these threat perceptions? In all likelihood they will resort to the strategy that Christian Parenti calls the ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’, a posture that combines ‘preparations for open-ended counter-insurgency, militarized borders, [and] aggressive anti-immigrant policing’. The tasks of the nation state under these circumstances will be those of keeping ‘blood-dimmed tides’ of climate refugees at bay and protecting their own resources: ‘In this world view, humanity has not only declared a war against itself, but is also locked into mortal combat with the earth.’ The outlines of an ‘armed lifeboat’ scenario can already be discerned in the response of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia to the Syrian refugee crisis: they have accepted very few migrants even though the problem is partly of their own making. The adoption of this strategy might even represent the logical culmination of the biopolitical mission of the modern nation state, since it is a strategy that conceives of the preservation of the ‘body of the nation’ in the most literal sense: by a reinforcement of boundaries that are seen to be under threat from the infiltration of the pathological ‘bare life’ that is spilling over from o...