Thesis Title:
A European Climate Apartheid? – Bordering mobilities in the context of global ecological breakdown
Thesis Abstract:
Given the EU’s shift towards the normalisation of the far-right in recent years and elections, it is important to pay attention to the emergent interplays of issues related to the climate crisis with anti-immigration sentiments. Despite being extensively debunked and critiqued by migration scholarship, alarmist narratives about ‘uncontrollable floods of climate refugees’ persist in being cited in media and policy to call for increased border control, coinciding with a febrile external border discourse within the EU seeking to ‘secure’ itself from a range of illegalised migrations. However, the relationship of border regimes with climate-related mobilities is as of now understudied in the Global North in general, and Europe in particular.
This project will focus on analysing the structural violences present in governing mobility in the context of climate breakdown caused by an unsustainable economic system upholding coloniality. Rooted in Critical Security Studies, the interdisciplinary research will seek to problematise the logic of producing a specific subjectivity of the climate migrant to govern through bordering practices, while simultaneously structuring the conditions which shape planetary inhabitability and human mobility in the first place. Through interrogating how knowledge is produced and circulated across epistemic and institutional contexts, the research aims to tease out the struggles and resistances of the emergence of the EU’s understanding of ‘climate migration’ as a phenomenon, allowing for the exploration of alternative imaginaries of justice and solidarity.
Primary Supervisor:
Prof Claudia Aradau