Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century

Neel Ahuja argues that journalists,security experts,politicians,and nongovernmental organizations have oversimplified climate change and obfuscated the processes that drive mass migration. He suggests that climate disaster should be reframed as interlinked with the history of capitalism and the global politics of race, and that the oil industry has transformed the economic and geopolitical processes that lead to displacement. To build a sustainable and just future for those most affected by environmental change, we must reckon with how climate change emerges out of longer histories of race, colonialism, and capitalism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 09 November 2021
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Neel Ahuja has been closely following the portrayal of climate refugees in public media and policy over the past decade. He argues that journalists, security experts, politicians, and non-governmental organizations have often oversimplified climate change and obscured the processes that drive mass migration. To understand the systemic reasons for displacement, Ahuja suggests reframing climate disaster as interconnected with the history of capitalism and the global politics of race. Racist assumptions about agrarian underdevelopment and Indigenous knowledge, he argues, mask how financial, development, migration, and climate adaptation policies reproduce growing inequalities.

Drawing on the work of Cedric Robinson and theories of racial capitalism, Ahuja examines how the oil industry transformed the economic and geopolitical processes that lead to displacement. From South Asia to the Persian Gulf, Europe, and North America, Ahuja studies how Asian trade, finance, and labor connections have changed the nature of race, borders, warfare, and capitalism since the 1970s. Ultimately, Ahuja argues that we can only begin to build a sustainable and just future for those most affected by environmental change by reckoning with how climate change emerges out of longer histories of race, colonialism, and capitalism.

Weight: 360g
Dimension: 156 x 233 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781469664477