If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that international attempts to govern those who stand to be displaced by climate change are as much or more to do with resuscitating European humanism at a moment in which geophysical phenomena like climate change and the Anthropocene threaten to extinguish the human altogether. Through detailed interpretations of the figure of the climate migrant/refugee, Baldwin traces the contours of an emerging form of planetary racial rule - racial futurism - unfolding in the context of the climate change crisis. He shows how racial futurism takes shape as a political response to the crisis of humanism that is said to lay at the heart of the climate change crisis. Along the way, he examines numerous themes that are at the forefront of contemporary thinking about climate change and politics, including the political, humanism, sovereignty, neoliberalism, the international, and race. Ultimately, the book is a plea for scholars, activists, and policymakers to take seriously the way race and racism are bound up with the political discourse on climate change and migration and to ask what this means for the wider political debate about climate change and the future.
Andrew Baldwin is associate professor of human geography at Durham University. He is the co-editor of Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique and Climate Change, Migration and Human Rights: Law and Policy Perspectives.
Epigraph Acknowledgements Preface Chapter 1 - A Theory of Racial Futurism Chapter 2 - The Racial Other of Climate Change Chapter 3 - World White Order Chapter 4 - From Determinism to Complexity Chapter 5 - Premediating Climate Change and Migration Chapter 6 - Adaptive Migration Chapter 7 - Conclusion
If you think that the climate migrant/refugee is a real thing, think again. Andrew Baldwin rattles our assumptions about global climate change, convincingly demonstrating that the idea of climate migration had to be invented to save white humanism, while protecting the West from the future threat of the non-white migrant. The Other of Climate Change is a brilliant, elegantly written, and much-needed critical reflection on the racial underpinnings of our climate crisis. -- Ilan Kapoor, York University, Canada
