Climate Borders in Anthropocene

5
‘Climate Borders’ in the

Anthropocene: Securitizing
Displacements, Migration and
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to RMIT University Library - PalgraveConnect - 2015-08-16
Refugees
Introduction
At the heart of contemporary, fast multiplying climate-security narra-

tives originating largely (but not entirely) from the global North are the
imaginative geographies of millions of impoverished Afro-Asians being
uprooted and displaced from their habitat and crossing borders in search
of the greener and securer pastures. The latest 5th Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for the first
time added a detailed discussion on ‘human security’ and ‘sustainable
development’ in Chapter 20 of Working Group II. This undoubtedly is
a welcome addition to the IPCC agenda and to some extent blunts the
social science critiques of its earlier four assessment reports. Having said
that, the citation above raises a number of complex questions, largely
unaddressed, about the context in which to approach the complex but
connected issues of climate induced displacements (cited hereafter as
CID) and climate induced migrations (cited hereafter as CIM).
Once the issues referred to in this citation (i.e. poverty, violence,
economic inequalities, loss of biodiversity etc.) are approached as inter-
connected outcomes of what John Bellamy Foster (2009), inspired by
Marxian thinking, would refer to as ‘metabolic rift’, a far more systemic
perspective emerges. In this perspective (which we prefer for the pur-
poses of this chapter) political ecology and political economy are two
sides of the same coin that is capital accumulation; ‘the necessity of
continued, rapid growth in the production and profits’ (Foster 2009:
57). The notion of the metabolic rift suggests that,
the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift between

society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction.
109
10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

110 Climate Terror
This raises the issue of ecological sustainability – not simply in rela-

tion to the scale of the economy, but also, and even more impor-
tantly, in the form and intensity of the interaction between nature
and society under capitalism. (Foster 2009: 49)
As imaginative geographies of threatening incremental climate

change seek embodiment in the figure of a ‘climate migrant’, new
walls/borders of otherness (both mental and physical) are being
erected and in the process the old ones are reinforced. Who and how
many of these millions (terrorizing figures indeed) will be migrating
from one place to another in search of more secure spaces within
their respective national boundaries and how many would dare to
cross international borders? The answers are not easily forthcoming.
And yet this is the category of CIM (which encompasses the notion of
‘climate refugees’) that seems to have caught the most strategic atten-
tion and imagination of fast multiplying ‘national security’ and even
‘human security’ narratives.
Our central argument in this chapter is that similar to the ‘war on
terror’, the so-called ‘war on climate’ invokes – through the deployment
of certain metaphors – a borderless, flat ‘global society’ at ‘risk’, but the
practices it gives rise to are resulting in highly territorializing but invis-
ible borders both within and across national boundaries. These new
fences and walls (both material and discursive) are being conceived,
constructed and imposed by the ‘minority world’ in anticipation of a
large number of ‘climate migrants’ fleeing from the ‘majority world’;
an overwhelmingly impoverished world that is allegedly falling terribly
short of ‘capacity’ and ‘resilience’ while struggling to adapt to ever soar-
ing temperatures.
Ironically enough, some of the imaginative geographies of a ‘plan-
etary emergency’, demanding a universal-global governance response,
construct (through a techno-market approach), inward looking ‘climate
territories’ that in all probability might terrorize millions of displaced
populations by frightening them away from asking value loaded ques-
tions of political accountability. These marginalized displaced commu-
nities now face the specter of being re-located (doubly displaced) into
new contexts and texts of the ‘Anthropogenic’ and the ‘Anthropocene’,
where ‘expertise’ is being privileged over day-to-day experiences of
livelihood struggles on social-political margins. It is the politics of the
‘non-political’, ‘apolitical’, and ‘post-political’ discussed by us at some
length in Chapter 1, that is likely to subject the losers of neo-liberal

‘Climate Borders’ in the Anthropocene 111
globalization to ‘climate terror’, as the market-military combine gains

salience, bordering hegemony, in climate change discourses.
For the purposes of this chapter we restrict the illustrative part of our
analysis largely to Bangladesh. The reason we choose to do so is two-
fold. First, wary of generalizing the bordering cause-effect of the CIM
across varying scalar, spatial and power-political equations, we believe
it is important to acknowledge the role played by the geo-historical
and geopolitical specificities. Our choice of Bangladesh we hope, aptly
illustrates the point we are trying to drive home in this chapter. The
geopolitics of ‘climate borders’ is entangled in growing contestations
between impulses of national security and imperatives of human-
livelihood security. Second, we would like to argue and illustrate that
Bangladesh is a good example to show how climate change discourses,
despite their boundary defying, global commons rhetoric, are causing
the ‘thickening’ of already existing stubborn borders.
This chapter is based on the premise that the science of climate
change is fast becoming a powerful orthodoxy amongst many intellec-
tuals, governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations,
particularly in the global North. In recognizing this dominant category
in scholarly and political discourses, our key intention here is not to
deny or validate the premises and conclusions of climate change scien-
tists in any essentialist manner, but to build on and develop the insights
offered by a number of recent studies by political geographers explor-
ing the how and why of the discursive production of geographical
knowledge (in plural) of climate change by various actors/agencies, in
support of certain domestic as well as foreign policy agendas. We argue
that it is the geopolitics of fear that appears to be dictating and driving
the dominant climate change discourses in Bangladesh. The chapter
first develops a theoretical perspective through which to analyze the
imaginative geographies of climate change-induced displacements and
their implications for South Asia. Next, we focus on various facets of the
geopolitics of fear and on some of the key sites where climate change
knowledge production about Bangladesh is taking place. One of the
ways in which climate change is folded into a discourse of fear (that,
in turn, requires a geopolitical response) is by referencing the ‘problem’
of refugees. Penultimately, then, we then move on to deconstruct the
official discourses and political speeches both within Bangladesh and its
immediate neighborhood in India, in order to reveal the underlying geo-
politics of fear and boundary-reinforcing cartographic anxieties about
climate change-induced displacements and migrations. We conclude

112 Climate Terror
the chapter by examining the prospects for counter-imaginative geogra-

phies of hope and the role they could possibly play in approaching the
issue of CIM from the angle of human security and human rights of the
socially disadvantaged, dispossessed and displaced in the global South.
The invisible world of the ‘Displaced’:

perspectives on and from the Global South
The International Organization for Migration, while mapping out the
complexity surrounding the issue of climate-induced displacements and
migrations, has been sounding a note of caution against the geopolitics
of exaggeration from time to time (IOM 2009). A major catalyst for
research on issues related to migration and environment appears to be
the ‘fears that millions of people from some of the poorest countries
in the world could be forced to migrate to richer parts of the world
due to climate change.’ In order to ensure that the research agenda on
migrations is not framed too narrowly, ‘It is essential to start from the
position that migration is not always the problem, but can in certain
circumstances, where migration contributes to adaptation, be part of
the solution. In short, migration linked to climate change will create
both risks and opportunities.’ What is needed therefore is far more
serious and systematic research aimed at teasing out the complex rela-
tionship between the environmental/climate change and migration.
It is not inevitable that environmental and climate change ‘will in
all circumstances automatically result in the increased movement
of people.’ For example, the ‘number of persons affected by natural
disasters has more than doubled in recent years but we have not seen
a major increase in international migration in many of the disaster
affected regions.’
Even a cursory glance through the website of Internal Displacement
Monitoring Centre (IDMC 2013) reveals that highly alarmist accounts
of climate induced migrations make the universe of those ‘frightened
and forced away from their homes by armed conflicts, communal vio-
lence, abuses of human rights and humanitarian law, natural or man-
made disasters’ more or less invisible. A vast majority of victims simply
do not have the capacity and resources to cross international borders
and maybe that is one of the reasons for their relative invisibility.
‘Whereas in 1982, it was estimated that some 1.2 million were forcibly
displaced in 11 countries, by 1995 an estimated 20 and 25 million IDPs
were located in some 40 countries, approximately double the number
of refugees worldwide’ (Goldman 2009: 38).

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC

2013: 6), during 2012, disasters associated with natural hazard events
added nearly 32.4 million people in 82 countries to the category of dis-
placed. And out of around 144 million people forced from their homes
in 125 countries, between 2008 and 2012, nearly three-quarters were
affected by multiple disaster-induced displacement events. Not surpris-
ingly, as a result of repeated displacements, the overall resilience of
the victims was seriously impaired and the affected communities were
caught up in an unending vicious cycle of multiple vulnerabilities.
It is important to note that the figures cited above relate to just one
category of internal displacement caused by natural hazard events.
According to yet another report by the same organization (IDMC 2014: 9),
There were 33.3 million internally displaced people in the world as

of the end of 2013. They were forced to flee their homes by armed
conflict, generalized violence and human rights violations. This
figure represents a 16 per cent increase compared with 2012, when
we reported 28.8 million IDPs, and is a record high for the second
year running.
According to this report at least 526,000 in India, 631,000 in Afghanistan,

746,700 in Pakistan, 280,000 in Bangladesh and 90,000 in Sri Lanka
were displaced under this category. And in the case of Palestine the
number is said to be at least 146,000 (ibid.).
Geopolitics of ‘climate borders’: ‘destabilizing orders’ and

‘threatening others’
David Newman (2010) argues that ‘Borders are the constructs which
give shape to the ordering of society ... Notions of territory and bor-
ders thus go hand in hand.’ There is much more to a border than
its physicality and materiality on the ground. Borders are conceived,
constructed, imposed and even resisted primarily through emotional
geographies that are far from being politically innocent or eternally
disembodied. These boundary producing (between ‘us’ and ‘them’)
imaginative-emotional geographies are often deployed at the service of
power-political-policing practices of the institutions of statecraft.
As pointed out in Chapter 1, a critical geopolitics of climate change,
in our view, enables us to expose various scripts and narratives of
climate change in terms of a knowledge power nexus, and to explore
how they frame various places on selectively drawn regional and global

114 Climate Terror
maps of threats and insecurities. What provides an extraordinary com-

plexity to such scripts and their imaginative geographies of fear is that
all of them, despite political ideological agendas of their own, claim
to derive their respective authority, legitimacy and efficacy from the
natural science evidence of global warming and climate change; a point
to which we shall return shortly in the section to follow.
Dominique Moïsi in his book entitled The Geopolitics of Emotion: How
Cultures of Fear, Humiliations and Hope are Reshaping the World (2009)
makes a number of thought-provoking observations. His argument is
that geopolitics is not only about materiality and resources but also
about emotions; ‘one cannot comprehend the world in which we live
without examining the emotions that help to shape it’ (Moïsi 2009: xi).
According to him, the reason that he has chosen ‘fear’, ‘hope’ and
‘humiliation’ as the key emotions for analyzing contemporary global
geopolitics is because all three are related in one way or another to the
notion of confidence: ‘which is the defining factor in how nations and
people address the challenges they face [e.g. climate change] as well as
how they relate to one another’ (Moïsi 2009: 5). According to Moïsi,
Fear is the absence of confidence. If your life is dominated by fear,

you are apprehensive about the present and expect the future to
become more dangerous. Hope, by contrast, is an expression of
confidence; it is based on the conviction that today is better than
yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than today. And humili-
ation is the injured confidence of those who have lost hope in the
future; your lack of hope is the fault of others, who have treated you
badly in the past (ibid.).
Moïsi’s argument is that after having dominated the Westphalia state

system for almost two centuries, the West is now in the grip of acute
cartographic anxiety, feeling increasingly vulnerable and insecure due to
perceived loss of control over fast multiplying forces emanating from the
global South, including immigration. In his view, in its most dominant
variant, ‘fear is an emotional response to the perception, real or imag-
ined, of an impending danger’ (Moïsi 2009: 92). Moreover:
In the last few years a new cycle of fear, one that shares many com-
mon features in Europe and the United States, has invaded our
consciousness. I do not think it actually began with 9/11, which
only confirmed and deepened it. In both regions of the West, this
new cycle includes fear of the Other, the outsider who is coming to

invade the homeland, threaten our identity, and steal our jobs. In
both regions, it includes fear of terrorism and fear of weapons of mass
destruction, the two being easily linked. It includes fear of economic
uncertainty or collapse. It includes fear of natural, environmental,
and organic disasters, from global warming to disease pandemics.
In sum, it involves fear of an uncertain and menacing future, over
which there is little, if any, possible human control. (ibid.: 94)
It may be that the writings of Moïsi (however attractive to our pur-
poses here) are, in part, problematic. His ascription of characteristics
to countries and regions is often contrary to the emphasis on contin-
gency and aversion from time-transcendent essences that characterize
so much of our argument. Regardless of these foibles and partial logical
inconsistencies, it can be said, however, that the geopolitics of fear is
fundamentally conservative. It draws upon and, in turn, feeds into vari-
ous alarmist imaginative geographies and sits too easily alongside realist
schools of thought within the most hide-bound and archaic traditions
of international relations scholarship. With world spheres constructed
within this tradition as an anarchic system of mercantilist nation-states
engaged in zero-sum political and economic games, the fear of chaos
lies at the heart of Westphalian political dreaming. In turn, this fear
of chaos is often used to justify the use of the big Northern ‘stick of
reason’, to discipline and to order the global South to supply the much
needed natural authority to control the imminent chaos (Doyle and
Chaturvedi 2011), whether through agendas of climate change, military
intervention, development, or modernization.
As we will argue and illustrate in the following sections dealing with
Bangladesh, the written geographies of climate change science, imagina-
tive geographies, therefore, legitimize and create ‘worlds’. Paradoxically
enough these imagined worlds are constructed among other things
through simultaneous metaphorical invocation of a borderless, flat
global space and a tamed minority world, (having unconsciously com-
mitted the ‘crime’ of polluting the atmosphere due to the then lack of
scientific evidence since the industrial revolution), at the receiving end
of consciously polluting fast growing economies of Asia.
In his thought-provoking book entitled Security and Borders in a
Warming World: Climate Change and Migration, Gregory White (2011)
draws attention to how the concept of ‘climate-induced migration’,
despite considerable ambiguity and contestation surrounding it, has
started galvanizing military-security-intelligence agencies around the
world, especially in North Atlantic; a region he describes as including

116 Climate Terror
the US, Canada, the European Union (EU), and its member states. In our
view, he is absolutely spot on in his observation that,
‘Getting tough’ – responding in a militarized fashion – is an easy,

cynical step in a warming world. It may be politically successful with
anxious electorates. It may tap into the public’s fears about climate
change and the prospect of desperate hordes of ‘refugees’ inundating
North Atlantic borders. And it may be more politically palatable than
policies that mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Building a
fence is easier than changing lifestyles. Yet the injection of security
imperatives into climate-induced migration is unethical and unwork-
able (White 2011:7)
White’s critical gaze focuses on the case of Sahelian and Sub-Saharan

African migration to Europe, and shows how the ‘unethical’ and the
‘unworkable’ are causing considerable cartographic anxieties among
institutions of statecraft that remain somewhat embedded in highly
resilient Westphalian territoriality even in the case of EU, the most
celebrated example of the post-Westphalia experimentation with the
traditional notions of sovereignty and security. We also share his con-
cerns that what is needed is a careful mapping of the complex ‘empiri-
cal realities that affect migration factors’ (the so-called push and pull
factors), a critical reflection on how to ‘‘desecuritize’ the discourses and
policy associated with CIM’, and while questioning the growing mili-
tarization of climate change, ‘craft an ethical and practical set of policy
initiatives to address climate change and the migratory flows to which
it might contribute.’
Framing Bangladesh as a climate ‘black hole’
In the vortex of alarmist imaginative geographies of ‘catastrophic’

anthropogenic climate change, Bangladesh is being increasingly
implicated as a ‘black hole’. These reports occur at multiple sites: in
many think tanks engaged in strategic forecasts and planning (CNA
Corporation 2007), official discourses and speeches, non-governmental
organizations and the media. At the heart of this geopolitics of fear is
the widely circulated image of a densely populated region. In 2006,
140 million people lived in an area of 144,000 km2 at a density
of over 950 persons/km2. Furthermore, it is low-lying (two-thirds
of the country is less than five metres below sea level) and natural

disaster-prone (e.g. six severe floods in the last 25 years). This country’s
position in the Bay of Bengal has made it the source and site of millions
of displaced and dispossessed ‘climate migrants’ and ‘climate refugees’.
Both the manner in which Bangladesh has come to embody the abstract
notion of ‘climate’ (and ‘dangerous climate change’) against the back-
drop of its long standing history of ecologically unsustainable ‘devel-
opment’ and ‘natural disasters’, and the ways in which the so-called
‘climate refugees’ are being discursively transformed into unwanted,
threatening internal and external ‘Others’, demands attention of a
critical social science of climate change.
Scientific framings of climate change and their implications

for Bangladesh: conceptualization and contestation
At the forefront of the ‘scientific knowledge’ production about climate

change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the
mandate of which, according to the UN General Assembly, is to under-
take international assessment of the current state and status of scientific
knowledge about climate change, to examine its impacts and the range
of possible mitigation and adaptation strategies. As a hybrid agency
comprising scientists and bureaucrats ‘it was to be governed by a Bureau
consisting of selected government representatives thus ensuring that the
Panel’s work was clearly seen to be serving the needs of government and
policy. The Panel was not to be a self-governing body of independent
scientists.’ In reality, as Hulme (2009: 96) points out, the boundary
between science and policy is neither easy to maintain nor to ‘police’
(Hulme 2009: 96).
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR 5), in Chapter 5, entitled,
Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, focuses on
‘coastal systems and low lying areas’. It is pointed out that,
For the 21st century, the benefits of protecting against increased

coastal flooding and land loss due to submergence and erosion at
the global scale are larger than the social and economic costs of inac-
tion (high agreement, limited evidence). Without adaptation, hundreds
of millions of people will be affected by coastal flooding and will be
displaced due to land loss by year 2100; the majority of those affected
are from East, Southeast and South Asia (high confidence); At the same
time, protecting against flooding and erosion is considered economi-
cally rational for most developed coastlines in many countries under

118 Climate Terror
all socio-economic and sea level rise scenarios analyzed, including

for the 21st century GSML rise of above 1 m (high agreement, low
evidence).
The relative costs of adaptation vary strongly between and within
regions and countries for the 21st century (high confidence); Some
low- lying developing countries (e.g. Bangladesh, Vietnam) and small
island states are expected to face very high impacts and associated
annual damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of
GDP; Developing countries and small island states within the tropics
dependent on coastal tourism will be impacted directly not only by future
sea level rise and associated extremes but also by coral bleaching and
ocean acidification and associated reductions in tourist arrivals (high
confidence). (IPCC 2014: 21; emphasis added)
It is in Chapter 12 of the IPCC AR 5 (IPCC 2014b) that we find a dis-

cussion focused on the ‘migration and mobility dimensions of human
security’, citing a good deal of pertinent literature from social sciences.
It is important to note that it is for the first time that the IPCC has
decided to engage with human security issues and from a critical
social science perspective this is a welcome move. While acknowledg-
ing that mobility and migrations have a complex geography (Banerjee
and Samaddar 2006; Basu 2009) along with varied historical contexts
and key drivers, it is pointed out that, ‘As with other elements
of human security, the dynamics of interaction of mobility with
climate change are multi-faceted and direct causation is difficult to
establish.’
One of the key findings of the IPCC 5 AR, which has a special
resonance for this chapter is that places experiencing protracted
conflict or recovering from conflict are much more susceptible and
have fewer resources for dealing with weather extremes and climate
variability.
Even though the IPCC presents itself as the international authorita-
tive body on earth climate science, it has its critics and many criticisms
relate to the politics of both knowledge production about climate
change and related scenario building. Grundmann (2007: 416) points
out that ‘‘contrarian’ scientists and other critics think that the IPCC mis-
represents the state of knowledge and exaggerates the size and urgency
of the problem. While the skeptics accuse IPCC scientists of being
environmentalists in disguise, others point to the processes of exclu-
sion of specific social groups representing different knowledge claims’.

In contrast, James Lovelock (2010: 23) questions the deployment of the

term ‘consensus’ on issues related to science and points out that ‘it is
a good and useful word but it belongs to the world of politics and the
courtroom, where reaching a consensus is a way of solving human dif-
ferences. Scientists are concerned with probabilities, never with certain-
ties or consensual agreement.’
All said and done, Bangladesh, largely by virtue of its geographical/
geopolitical location, is widely perceived and reported as one of the
most vulnerable countries to climate change-induced sea level rise
(Brown 2009; Dodds et al. 2009; Faris 2009; Giddens 2009). Yet it is only
by combining imaginative geographies of fear and hope that one of the
leading and widely cited climate scientists like James Hansen (2010:
258), is able to convey the ‘catastrophic’ effects of climate change and
sea level rise for ‘developing’ countries like Bangladesh:
The consequences for a nation like Bangladesh, with 100 million

people living within several meters of sea level, are too overwhelm-
ing, so I leave it to your imagination. No doubt you have seen images
of the effects of tropical storms on Bangladesh with today’s sea level
and today’s storms. You can imagine too the consequences for island
nations that are near sea level. We can only hope that those nations
responsible for the changing atmosphere and climate will provide immi-
gration rights and property for the people displaced by the resulting chaos.
(emphasis added)
It is difficult to deny that for coastal states such as Bangladesh, tropi-

cal cyclones, with major economic, social and environmental conse-
quences, have always been a challenge. Countries that are most exposed
for example, China, India, the Philippines, Japan, and Bangladesh
have densely populated coastal areas, often comprising deltas and
mega deltas (UNDP 2004). Every year, up to 119 million people are
on average exposed to tropical cyclone hazard (UNDP 2004). From
1980 to 2000, out of a total of more than 250,000 deaths caused by
tropical cyclones worldwide, nearly 60 per cent occurred in Bangladesh
alone. Even this figure is less than the 300,000 killed in Bangladesh in
1970 by a single cyclone. Although ‘The death toll has been reduced
in the past decade due largely to improvements in warnings and pre-
paredness, wider public awareness and a stronger sense of community
responsibility’ (ISDR 2004), as pointed out by the IPCC (see Nicholls
et al. 2007: 337), Bangladesh remains one of the ‘key hotspots of

120 Climate Terror
societal vulnerability in coastal zones’ due to ‘highly sensitive coastal

systems where the scope for inland migration is limited.’
Most of the land area of Bangladesh consists of the deltaic plains

of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. Accelerated global
sea level rise and higher extreme water levels may have acute effects
on the human population of Bangladesh (and parts of West Bengal,
India) because of the complex relationships between observed trends
in SST over the Bay of Bengal and monsoon rains, subsidence and
human activity that has converted natural coastal defenses (man-
groves) to aquaculture. (Nicholls et al. 2007: 326)
Floods are among the most reported natural disasters in Africa, Asia
and Europe, having affected nearly 140 million a year on average
(Kundzewicz et al. 2007). In Bangladesh, three extreme floods have
occurred in the last two decades, and in 1998 about 70 per cent of
the country’s area was inundated (Kundzewicz et al. 2007). In the case
that global temperatures were to rise by 2°C, the area in Bangladesh to
be flooded is likely to increase at least by 23–29 per cent (Kundzewicz
et al. 2007: 187). So far, the efforts made by Bangladesh to put into
place a sizeable infrastructure to prevent flooding have fallen short of
desired results.
Against the backdrop of growing trends to securitize climate change-
induced migrations in different parts of the world (Smith 2007), Barnett
is quite right in pointing out that, ‘The crux of the problem is that
national security discourse and practice tends to appropriate all alterna-
tive security discourses no matter how antithetical’ (Barnett 2003: 14).
He also proposes that the IPCC scientists should downplay such climate
change militarist discourses being ‘cautious on the issue of violent con-
flict and refugees’ and, instead, focus on climate justice issues. In his
view, this approach ‘might helpfully integrate science and policy and
usefully elucidate the nature of the “danger” that the UNFCCC ulti-
mately seeks to avoid’ (Barnett 2003: 14).
We are quite in agreement with Barnett that the IPCC scientists should
be extremely cautious while speculating over the geopolitical, strategic
‘consequences’ of climate. We would like to point out how a speech
made by R. K. Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, and Director General,
The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi, at the convoca-
tion of the Military college of Telecommunication Engineering, Mhow,
on 26 June 2009, has been reported in the media under sensational
headlines such as ‘Global warming and how it encourages terrorism in

India’ and ‘Climate change your biggest enemy’. The press release of The
Energy and Resources Institute (TERI 2009) reads as follows:
Dr. Pachauri stressed on the global issue of climate change. ‘Climate

change poses new threats to India.’ ‘Melting snows in the north open
up passages for terrorists, just as melting glaciers affect water supply
in the subcontinent’s northern part, sharpening possibility of conflict
with our neighbours. Changing rainfall patterns affect rain fed agricul-
ture, worsening poverty which can be exploited by others.’ He added,
‘Our defence forces might find themselves torn between humanitarian
relief operations and guarding our borders against climate refugees, as
rising sea-levels swamp low-lying areas, forcing millions of ‘climate
refugees’ across India’s border.
The science-geopolitics interface of climate change, as the above quota-

tion appears to suggest, is rather complex, and as David Demeritt (2001,
329) succinctly points out,
given the immensely contentious politics, it is tempting for politicians

to argue that climate policy must be based upon scientific certainty.
This absolves them of any responsibility to exercise discretion and
leadership. This science-led politics is also attractive to some scientists
since it enhances their power and prestige. However, this political reli-
ance on the authority of science is deeply flawed: it provides neither a
very democratic nor an especially effective basis for crafting a political
response to climate change.
The Synthesis Report, the concluding document of the Fourth

Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(quoted in IPCC 2010: 1) had stated:
Climate change is expected to exacerbate current stresses on water

resources from population growth and economic and land-use
change, including urbanization. On a regional scale, mountain snow
pack, glaciers and small icecaps play a crucial role in freshwater avail-
ability. Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow
cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the
21st century, reducing water availability, hydropower potential, and
changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from
major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where
more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.

122 Climate Terror
‘Open borders to climate refugees’: official claims and

counter-claims in Bangladesh
In a speech delivered at the 64th Session of the United Nations General
Assembly, on 26 September 2009, Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister
of Bangladesh, talked about the implications of climate change for her
country. It is worth noting that she not only makes a reference in this
speech to millions of ‘climate migrants’ and ‘climate refugees’ but also
emphasizes the need for an international legal regime for ensuring
special social, cultural and economic rehabilitation of climate induced
migrants. The tone and the tenor of her narrative of climate change,
ably supported by natural science evidence, are visibly marked by the
geopolitics of fear and cartographic anxieties:
What is alarming is that a meter rise in sea level would inundate 18% of
our landmass, directly impacting 11% of our people. Scientific estimates
indicate, of the billion people expected to be displaced worldwide by 2050 by
climate change factors, one in every 45 people in the world, and one in every
7 people in Bangladesh, would be a victim.
Rapid, unplanned urbanization, occupational dislocations, food,
water and land insecurity are some of the consequences of climate
change. The affected communities would not only lose their homes,
they would also stand to lose their identity, nationality, and their
very existence, and in some cases, their countries (United Nations
2009; emphasis added)
It was in the same month (that is, September 2009) that the ‘Bangladesh
Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan 2009’ was released. In her
message to the Action Plan, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina expressed
the resolve of her government to ‘free’ the people of her country from
the ‘terror of climate’ and to ensure that ‘people are fully protected
from its adverse impacts as promised in our manifesto’ (Government of
Bangladesh 2009: xi). However, the following excerpt from the report
seems to suggest that the government of Bangladesh has not only
accepted, rather uncritically, the category of ‘environmental refugees’
but has also embraced the fear-driven geopolitical assumption that
‘more than 20 million’ displaced Bangladeshis will be migrating to
other parts of the world:
It has been estimated that there is the impending threat of displace-

ment of more than 20 million people in the event of sea-level change

and resulting increase in salinity coupled with impact of increase in

cyclones and storm surges, in the near future. The settlement of these
environmental refugees will pose a serious problem for the densely
populated Bangladesh and migration must be considered as a valid
option for the country. Preparations in the meantime will be made
to convert this population into trained and useful citizens for any
country. (Government of Bangladesh 2009: 17; emphasis given)
The quotation above raises a number of intricate and intriguing ques-
tions (Doyle and Chaturvedi 2011). Who are environmental refugees?
Who among the imagined millions of displaced Bangladeshis, ‘in the
event of sea-level rise’, for example, would qualify to be ‘environ-
mental refugees’ and why? Is there no difference whatsoever between
‘climate refugees’ and ‘environmental refugees’? What are the grounds
for assuming that those displaced due to either sudden onset of natural
disasters or gradually unfolding climate change or even abrupt climate
change would necessarily choose to cross the borders in search of safer
and greener pastures? Elizabeth G. Ferris (2008: 83), has argued that
‘It is also likely that most of those displaced by these types of events
will remain within their country’s borders.’ Who would decide what
kinds of preparations are needed to turn the displaced millions ‘into
trained and useful citizens for any country’? Why can’t these potential
‘Others’ be trained into useful work force as citizens of Bangladesh;
their homeland?
‘UK should open borders to climate refugees’: this is how the
Guardian newspaper (see Grant et al. 2009) reported the first ever
alarmist statement by any senior politician of Bangladesh (the finance
minister, Mr. Abdul Maal Abdul Muhith), just before the Copenhagen
climate summit (COP 15). He emphatically pointed out the moral
responsibility of Britain, the USA and other countries of the global
North to accept climate refugees from Bangladesh. Mr. Abdul Muhith
is reported to have told the Guardian, ‘Twenty million people could be
displaced [in Bangladesh] by the middle of the century ... We are asking
all our development partners to honor the natural right of persons to
migrate. We can’t accommodate all these people, this is already the dens-
est [populated] country in the world’ (ibid.). Curiously enough, he also
underlined the need for the UN to redefine international law in such
a manner that climate refugees are provided with the protection at par
with people fleeing political repression. Echoing the assurance provided
in the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (2009),

124 Climate Terror
pointed out by us above, Abdul Muhith expressed the hope that if

properly ‘managed’ inter-state migration could be positive for both
Bangladesh and the west:
We can help in the sense of giving the migrants some training, mak-
ing them fit for existence in some other country ... Managed migra-
tion is always better we can then send people who can attune to life
more easily ... Total aid in Bangladesh today is less than 2% of GDP. It
is almost the same in China and in India. So we, the most populated,
least developed country, get peanuts. This inequity is terribly intoler-
able. (Grant et al. 2009)
Whereas the concept of ‘managed migration’ mentioned above

remains alarmingly vague, the response of Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman
IPCC, to the statement made by the finance minister of Bangladesh,
and quoted by The Guardian, also raises a number of intricate issues:
This is clearly a warning signal from Bangladesh and similar coun-

tries to the developed countries. And I think it has to be taken very
seriously. If you accept that those countries that have really not
been responsible for causing the problem, and have a legitimate
basis for help from the developed countries, then one form of help
would certainly be facilitation of immigration from these countries
to the developed world ... If you had 30 or 40 million migrating
to other parts of the world, that’s a sizable problem for which we
have to prepare. And if it requires changes to immigration laws
and facilitating people settling down and working in the developed
countries, then I suppose this will require legislative action in the
developed world.
It is to state the obvious, perhaps, that if (and this is a big if) 30 or 40

million climate migrants were to cross international borders, that will
be a ‘sizeable problem (but for whom?) for which we (does this “we”
imply the host country like the UK or USA, the developed West, or the
so-called, geographically undifferentiated international community)
have to prepare’, and that would need, among other things, huge sums
of money. And in his response, Douglas Alexander, the international
development secretary of the UK was quick to point out: ‘As the larg-
est international donor to Bangladesh, Britain has been urging the
international community to provide extra money for climate change
adaptation’ (Grant et al. 2009). The Guardian also quoted Jean-Francois

Durieux, Deputy Director, Division of Operational Services at the United

Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as having said,
The risk of mass migration needs to be managed. It’s absolutely

legitimate for Bangladesh and the Maldives to make a lot of noise
about the very real risk of climate migration they hope it will make
us come to their rescue. But reopening the 1951 convention would
certainly result in a tightening of its protections ... The climate in
Europe, North America and Australia is not conducive to a relaxed
debate about increasing migration. There is a worry doors will shut if
we start that discussion. (Grant et al. 2009)
The Guardian story provides a useful insight into the fact that climate
change rhetoric often deploys a calculated politico-legal ambiguity,
depending upon the interests of the actors and agencies involved, in
order to hide the underlying anxieties and fears. It is to the legal dimen-
sions of the geopolitics of fear that we turn next. However, before we
do, it will be instructive to take note of the fact that the imaginative
geographies of climate change-induced, trans-border migrations are also
creating considerable cartographic anxieties in the immediate neighbor-
hood of Bangladesh, especially India.
A major contribution to the special issue on climate change of Himal
South Asian (Chowdhury 2009), a leading and widely read scholarly
magazine published from Kathmandu, Nepal, refers to various facets
of fast ascending geopolitics of fear about ‘climate refugees’ in South
Asia. The narrative begins by posing a couple of questions. ‘Could
India afford to refuse sanctuaries to Hindu (climate change) refugees
from Bangladesh, which would certainly be a demand of many Hindu
Indians? And if the state were to do so, how would Indian Muslims
react?’ (ibid.). The argument then becomes that were India to discrimi-
nate in favor of Hindu refugees, millions of Muslims, including Bengali
Muslims in India, would seriously doubt the secular credentials and
claims of the Indian State. Moreover, such a policy choice would further
strengthen the hands of various regional and global radical, right wing
organizations and their propaganda networks. Given India’s ongoing
battle against cross border militancy, ‘If it were to begin to refuse entry
to climate change refugees, the country would suddenly have to face
a far larger extremist problem from both and with a far larger hostile
population within, to boot.’
And were India to decide in favor of letting even some refugees in on
certain grounds, including humanitarian, the prevailing social-political

126 Climate Terror
sentiment in the Indian northeast, (bordering on resentment) against

Bangladeshi/Muslim refugees and migrants would become more pro-
nounced. This may even result in more frequent attacks on refugees,
provide a further fillip to ongoing insurgencies, and lead to further
proliferation of the perception that the Indian state is unable to secure
the communities of the northeast against the new influx of refugees.
‘The echo effect across the border would likely escalate the crisis.’
Chowdhury (2009) concludes on the note that come what may, India
simply does not have the ‘capacity’ to cope with the ‘flood’ of mil-
lions of ‘climate change refugees’. Questions such as the following
remain unanswered in his view: ‘Living next door to Bangladesh, can
India handle the problems, apart from challenges in the context of
climate change? It may not fail but could it prevent itself from being
overwhelmed? And if India were to be overwhelmed, could the region
survive in any conventional sense?’ (ibid.)
Issues raised by Chowdhury acquire significance and salience in the
light of statements made by India’s new BJP Prime Minister, Narendra
Modi, during his election campaign in India’s Northeastern state of
Assam. He was reported by The Times of India (24 February 2014) to
have said:
As soon as we come to power at the Centre, detention camps hous-

ing Hindu migrants from Bangladesh will be done away with ... We
have a responsibility toward Hindus who are harassed and suffer in
other countries. Where will they go? India is the only place for them.
Our government cannot continue to harass them. We will have to
accommodate them here.
Geopolitical fears and legal hopes: rhetoric and realities

B.S. Chimni (2000: 1) has argued that, ‘the definition of a “refugee” in
international law is of critical importance for it can mean the difference
between life and death for an individual seeking asylum.’ According to
the 1951 Protocol and Convention Related to the Status of Refugees
(Hathaway 2005), subscribed to by more than 100 states, a refugee is
one who,
as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to

well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group or political
opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or,

128 Climate Terror
in 1995, there would be around double that figure by 2010, and by the
end of the 21st century nearly 200 million would migrate due to climate
change. What the tyranny of numbers ably hides is the question of who
will choose to migrate, when, where and how far?
Our intention here is not to dismiss outright the notion of fear as of
no moral or practical value in answering the question as to who is a
refugee. What we do intend is to raise the following question: in various
imagined or actual encounters between those seeking the refugee status
and those who had the authority to grant that status, whose ‘fear’ is
likely to dictate the process and decide the outcome?
Existing legal structures, such as the Refugee Convention and the
Framework for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), were built for dis-
parate reasons and, at best, have been limited in their application;
at worst, these structures are fundamentally inept within the climate
context. An alternative is a regionally defined regime operating under
the rubric of the UN Climate Change Framework. Williams argues that
although
the Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol currently

call for regional cooperation regarding adaptation activities, it is
argued there should be an explicit recognition of so-called climate
change refugees in the post-Kyoto agreement that allows for, and
facilitates, the development of regional programmes to address the
problem. Such a strategy would remedy the current protection gap
that exists within the international legal system, while allowing
states to respond and engage with climate change displacement in
the most regionally appropriate manner. (Williams 2008)
(Moberg 2009: 1107), on the other hand, maintains that, although

governments could utilize current international and domestic defini-
tions of refugee to protect environmentally displaced persons, ‘it is
unlikely that any government will do so.’ Even if they did ‘extend these
existing refugee and asylum laws to include environmentally displaced
persons’, the protection would be inadequate. It would also ‘consume
judicial resources needed for persons currently receiving protection
under refugee and asylum laws’. Instead, Moberg argues, new domestic
and international laws should be made in order to put environmentally
displaced persons under a more ‘protective, cost-sharing approach’ (ibid.).
Moberg also suggests that environmentally displaced persons (EDPs)
should be granted protection under their own Environmentally Based
Immigration Visa (EBIV) Program: ‘Similar to the current refugee pro-
gram, countries should share the burden of accepting and supporting

EDPs, with that burden resting more heavily on wealthier nations’

(Moberg 2009: 1135).
Conclusion
As argued earlier in this work, we have no intention either to deny the

science of global warming (although we do feel that expressions such as
‘certain’ and ‘consensus’ go against the very nature and purpose of sci-
ence and scientific pursuits), or to dismiss wide-ranging implications of
climate change for the state, society and, in this specific chapter’s case,
Bangladesh. What we have questioned with all emphasis at our com-
mand, however, is the geopolitics of climate fear and the underlying
alarmist imaginative geographies of ‘climate migrants’ and ‘climate refu-
gees’. These imaginative geographies of doom, disaster, and development,
framed and flagged at various sites in the service of diverse agendas, are
increasingly shaping the world-view of and on Bangladesh. We have
tried to show how fear is aroused and mobilized in the service of vari-
ous agendas of political, economic and cultural controls. We have also
shown how, in the process of the national and local priorities becoming
skewed, the discourses of mitigation and related structural approaches
(with concomitant aid seeking strategies) overshadow adaptive strategies
to climate change, especially migration. The failure to arrest and reverse
such trends might result in what Foster and Clark (2009: 260) describe as
the ‘Fortress World’ with its ‘protected enclaves’; ‘... a planetary apartheid
system, gated and maintained by force, in which the gap between the
global rich and global poor constantly widens and the differential access
to environmental resources and amenities increases sharply.’
This chapter has further argued that the meaning, nature and scope
of ‘climate change’ discourses need to be broadened and deepened
much beyond the science, ethics and politics of ‘global warming’ and its
various manifestations such as the melting of polar icecaps, glaciers and
rising sea levels. There is a need to acknowledge that global warming
and its several facets labeled ‘climate change’ are, no doubt, a compel-
ling, but not the only, issue on the agenda of environmental security
in the Indian Ocean Region (Doyle 2008). Climate change is neither a
moment of rupture nor departure (although it is often made out to be
so) in the long-standing history of ecological destruction and deeply
entrenched ecological irrationalities in modern-capitalist societies. In
the absence of such an acknowledgment, the climate change discourse
becomes both limited and limiting.
Our analysis of complex ground realities in Bangladesh also under-
lines the fact that ‘there is ample conceptual muddle regarding CIM’

130 Climate Terror
(White 2011: 29) and furthermore ‘the invocation of present and future
refugee crises stemming from climate change can be politically loaded,
and the potential for political misuse is profound’ (ibid.). Acknowledging
the presence of global North-South dichotomies in human rights,
equity and social justice dimensions of climate change, our engage-
ment with Bangladeshi discourses on these issues shows that the
issue of CIM in particular cannot (and should not) be divorced from
the complex geopolitical and social-ecological entanglements and
contestations. The ‘innocence’ of the power-political elite in the global
South (as in the case of Bangladesh) cannot be taken for granted, nor
the addition of ‘climate walls’ to existing assemblage of walls/barriers
be overlooked.
Our discussion of competing fear-inducing imaginative geographies
of climate change at various sites, and the manner in which Bangladesh
is being implicated in them, reinforces Gregory’s insightful comment
that, ‘imaginative geographies are spaces of constructed (in)visibility
and it is this partiality that implicates them in the play of power’
(Gregory 2009: 371). Imaginative geographies of ‘coming climate catas-
trophe’ (Hansen 2010) make the long history of ecological degradation
and ecological irrationalities, perpetuated by the economic growth
oriented models of development (and further legitimized by the powers
that be in the name of ‘national interest’ and ‘national security’) almost
invisible. On the other hand, ‘diverse environmental problems have
essentially been laid at the door of climate change ... New problems
have been grafted onto old ones and given a single cause; an example
of a “garbage can anarchy”, where once isolated phenomena become
systematically interrelated’ (Connell 2003: 98).
Having noted that, our analysis of the dynamics and dilemmas of
climate change in the case of Bangladesh reveals that, depending upon
their power-political moorings and power-political agendas, geopolitics
of climate change will continue to oscillate between imaginative geog-
raphies of fear and hope. Equally important, however, is the geopolitics
of humiliation to which the displaced communities in Bangladesh are
likely to be increasingly subjected, both discursively and on the ground.
The geopolitics of fear, articulated through highly alarmist imaginative
geographies of climate change-induced displacements, will continue
to discursively displace the equity-based notion of ‘ecological debt’
by the consequence-based, neoliberal notion of ‘carbon footprint’. We
fully agree with the wise contention that the ‘fear agenda’ should be
questioned and challenged so that the media and the governments do
not incite unhelpful and inaccurate slogans on immigrants and the

comprehension of the term ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ should be expanded

to that which meets his/her human security (Gupta 2009: 77). After
all, there are millions, and a vast majority of them in the Indian Ocean
Region, who live in fear of their ‘human security’ being seriously com-
promised but without giving up the hope of a better, just and humane
‘world order’, with or without a changing climate. We have argued
that in relation to climate change-induced displacements and migra-
tions, in the case of Bangladesh and its immediate neighborhood, fear
rather than hope seems to be growing, fuelled by Northern-centric
cartographic anxieties. But, as we began with Moïsi’s thoughts on the
geopolitics of fear, so too, we wish to conclude by revisiting the mirror-
opposite of this emotion: hope.

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5

‘Climate Borders’ in the

At the heart of contemporary, fast multiplying climate-security narra-

the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift between

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

This raises the issue of ecological sustainability – not simply in rela-

As imaginative geographies of threatening incremental climate

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

globalization to ‘climate terror’, as the market-military combine gains

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

the chapter by examining the prospects for counter-imaginative geogra-

The invisible world of the ‘Displaced’:

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC

There were 33.3 million internally displaced people in the world as

According to this report at least 526,000 in India, 631,000 in Afghanistan,

Geopolitics of ‘climate borders’: ‘destabilizing orders’ and

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

maps of threats and insecurities. What provides an extraordinary com-

Fear is the absence of confidence. If your life is dominated by fear,

Moïsi’s argument is that after having dominated the Westphalia state

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

‘Getting tough’ – responding in a militarized fashion – is an easy,

White’s critical gaze focuses on the case of Sahelian and Sub-Saharan

Framing Bangladesh as a climate ‘black hole’

In the vortex of alarmist imaginative geographies of ‘catastrophic’

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

Scientific framings of climate change and their implications

At the forefront of the ‘scientific knowledge’ production about climate

For the 21st century, the benefits of protecting against increased

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

all socio-economic and sea level rise scenarios analyzed, including

It is in Chapter 12 of the IPCC AR 5 (IPCC 2014b) that we find a dis-

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

In contrast, James Lovelock (2010: 23) questions the deployment of the

The consequences for a nation like Bangladesh, with 100 million

It is difficult to deny that for coastal states such as Bangladesh, tropi-

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

societal vulnerability in coastal zones’ due to ‘highly sensitive coastal

Most of the land area of Bangladesh consists of the deltaic plains

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

Dr. Pachauri stressed on the global issue of climate change. ‘Climate

The science-geopolitics interface of climate change, as the above quota-

given the immensely contentious politics, it is tempting for politicians

The Synthesis Report, the concluding document of the Fourth

Climate change is expected to exacerbate current stresses on water

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

‘Open borders to climate refugees’: official claims and

It has been estimated that there is the impending threat of displace-

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

and resulting increase in salinity coupled with impact of increase in

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

pointed out by us above, Abdul Muhith expressed the hope that if

Whereas the concept of ‘managed migration’ mentioned above

This is clearly a warning signal from Bangladesh and similar coun-

It is to state the obvious, perhaps, that if (and this is a big if) 30 or 40

10.1057/9781137318954 - Climate Terror, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

Durieux, Deputy Director, Division of Operational Services at the United

The risk of mass migration needs to be managed. It’s absolutely