Abstract
The extraordinary research in Neel Ahuja’s recent Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-first Century has transformed my understanding of climate change. Turning the last page, I was left with a sense of gratitude. Ahuja is an astute and skillful researcher and I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to make sense of the most colossal topic of our time. Defaulting to thinking climate change is primarily about environmental processes, or that we are all in it together, are likely tendencies given the deluge of writing and talking that continues to rest on these presumptions. This book is a gift to broaden our understanding because it so carefully and persuasively deconstructs these dominant narratives, teaching its readers how to know otherwise.
Beginning Planetary Specters, I was familiar with how Indigenous climate change studies view climate change as a continuation of colonialism (Whyte 2017) and how different discourses of climate security depoliticize climate change, leading to border closures and viewing humanitarian victims as threats (MacDonald 2021). I also knew the—by now—paradigmatic suggestions that the Anthropocene is more aptly labelled the Capitaloscene, Plantainoscene or Eurocene (Moore 2015; Haraway 2015; Grove 2018). Lastly, I am conscious to be weary of any talk of resilience and adaptation - I have myself theorized the violence of climate change in a way “that pushes back against the idea that forced climate migration is a practical problem of adaptation and not a genocidal process” (du Plessis 2020:16). These are all attempts, we could say, of re-politicizing climate change. Planetary Specters builds on such insights, expands them, and introduces important new perspectives. First and foremost, what Ahuja powerfully adds to the equation is race and racial capitalism. Secondly, analyzing the politics of climate change from the vantage point of the figure of the climate migrant—coupled with keen attention to processes of racialization—is groundbreaking in how it turns political analysis of climate change on its head. And thirdly, Ahuja’s detailed and focused empirical studies from Bangladesh and Syria, as well as South Asia and the Gulf more broadly, show informative examples of how the global politics and economies of climate change manifest locally in the Global South.
Planetary Specters consists of four main chapters.
The first explores how the icon of the climate migrant does not naturally follow from weather changes or ecological destruction. Rather, this imagery has been “invented” because it offers a discourse of migration that appeals to “a set of racialized presumptions about human conflict and population dynamics that fit into increasingly apocalyptic and conservative northern political imaginaries of climate change’s destructive social effects” (p. 38). Because displacement and migration have long been a consequence of the inequalities produced by systems of coal, oil, and globalizing trade and extraction, migrants in the Global South are subjects responding to political and economic inequalities, not disabled victims of climate change. Assuming the latter, however, leads to security thinking rather than a humanitarian focus, which maps onto a shift from attempts to mitigate climate change by limiting carbon emissions, to a focus on adaptation and establishing defenses to what is now seen as its inevitable outcomes. Taking readers through different examples of racializing images and narratives, Ahuja demonstrates how the climate migrant “stands as an icon of social vulnerability, tied deeply to public images of racial differentiation” (p. 43), and how climate change discourse subtly marks environmental refugees as agents – not just victims – of environmental destruction, as climate migration is linked to loss of arable land and neo-Malthusian tropes of overpopulation. And while migration becomes something to be controlled by security measures, it is also viewed as a resource for adaptation ideas in ways where race is vital to how climate migrants are represented: “racial difference is mobilized in order to represent both the current harms of and the potential for future adaptations to climate change” (p. 65) – in other words, racialized representation of climate refugees “toggles between a Malthusian nightmare and a liberal adaptation fantasy” (p. 120).
The second chapter analyzes links between debt, oil, state-policies, and inter-Asian migration though the theoretical lens of racial capitalism, i.e. “how race is structurally reproduced in the rescaling and expansion of different forms of capitalist networking” (p. 71). Ahuja places large emphasis on the rapid economic expansion of the Gulf states following the 1973-74 and 79 oil price spikes, which he links to deepening international debt, growing transborder migration, and intensified anthropogenic climate change, all of which affected agrarian populations in debt-dependent poor countries. These people were, Ahuja asserts “pushed into neoliberal development strategies that today contribute to significant displacement conceived as climate migration” (p. 72). Ahuja details how the oil industries in the Gulf depend on exploiting migrant labor from a handful of Asian countries who embrace “human capital” export and remittance as important parts of their economies. Weather disasters today often move migrants along these migration corridors established precisely by oil. Ahuja also describes how the consolidation of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency following the 1973 oil embargo not only allowed the U.S. and Gulf States to collaborate in reinforcing U.S. power in the world system, but also lead to “massive forms of war-driven displacement and racialized contests over migration in the present” (p. 88), while prompting neoliberal debt, market liberalization, and development under the banner of globalization, which crowded out socialist or welfarist ambitions of many countries trying to redress the inequalities created by colonialism. The lesson, Ahuja writes, is that the populations that are today labelled as “climate migrants” are in effect world systems migrants – oil migrants, neoliberal migrants, or colonial migrants. However, “the very forms of knowledge used to narrate their diminishing present and unlivable futures entrench the suppositions of underdevelopment that make the long histories of extractive colonialism and oil-fueled neoliberalism generative of mass environmental racism” (p. 97).
The third chapter focuses on Bangladesh, which, because it is described as highly prone to climate-driven displacement, has become an epicenter of Western climate security thinking. Again, security speculation of climate-driven state collapse, ethnic conflict, and mass migration are, Ahuja writes, overblown, and hinge on islamophobia. Sometimes, climate adaptation discourse can itself provoke populations to migrate when “preemptive migration” out of flood-plain areas, for example to replace local agriculture with shrimp farming that destroys the floodplain in advance by adding salt to it, are in essence climate security driven displacement. Bangladeshi migration is “irreducible to the weather”, Ahuja writes. Instead, we should again look to how neoliberal industrialization and development intersect with environmental changes: “The types of mobility networks that are available to people who experience weather disasters have everything to do with the outcomes of how environmental violence grafts onto the existing violences of racism, colonialism, and capitalism” (p. 130).
The fourth chapter powerfully debunks the so-called Syrian War thesis, which posits climate change as an important causal factor in the Syrian War, in turn ignoring economic grievances and political critiques of the Assad government. Over-emphasizing scarcity and Malthusian ideas of resource conflict, Ahuja writes, builds on older racialized narratives of social breakdown caused by the inability of the colonized to properly manage resources, reinforces neoliberal ideas of dependency of rural populations, and reproduces a geopolitical mapping of Muslim-majority states as particularly subject to mismanagement and insurgency (p. 132). The Syrian War thesis therefore again sidelines how environmental factors intersect with social, economic, and political dynamics. All in all, the widespread narrative of climate change as a “threat multiplier,” which is to say the environmentally determinist idea that climate change leads to armed conflict, also popularly labelled “resource wars”, is dubious. Ahuja further details how Western fear of Islamist insurgency, and colonial representations of disabled and vulnerable Syrian bodies, justifies intervention and again turns attention away from how “national borders both create zones of privileged security and reproduce transborder violence” (p. 138). At the end of the chapter, Ahuja presents Syrian critiques and counter-activism to environmental determinism and neoliberal policies embraced by the Assad regime.
A real strength of the book is how it is in conversation with a very broad range of subfields, which not only makes the book relevant to a broad range of scholarship, but also allows its readers to familiarize themselves with research at the forefront of all these fields. In the conclusion, for example, Ahuja describes how the book can be useful specifically to the following fields and subfields: Critical refugee studies, Asian American, studies, comparative racialization studies, Asian diaspora studies, critical migration studies, critical race theories, critical border studies, critical security studies, environmental racism research, and feminist, queer, and disability studies. Reminding us that “environmentalism can be entirely compatible with fascism”, which in relation to the “threat” of climate migrants is exemplified by border walls and the normalization of racism and xenophobia that comes with neo-racist ideas of incompatibility between different cultures, Ahuja suggests that the best path forward for anti-racist, environmental and immigrant movements is to “forcefully critique and challenge security thinking” (p. 170). Throughout the book Ahuja discredits even human security, which in critical security studies (and my own work) has been the last holdout for an articulation of security that did not merely benefit those already in power.
Overall, Planetary Specters left me with a clear sense that climate change is not the biggest threat humanity is facing. Rather, the biggest threat to humanity is capitalism and imperialism. This threat is not new, and more importantly, humanity faces it in staggeringly and racially unequally distributed ways. Ahuja’s book also details the most horrific aspect of this lesson, namely that neoliberalism – as a contemporary form of racial capitalism – can monstrously shape-shift its way through whatever climate change has in store for different human populations, remaining unscathed, as climate change merely presents it with new ways of reinforcing the same structures of inequality, exploitation, and premature death. Planetary Specters demonstrates that contemporary preoccupation with the dangers of climate change has essentially become preoccupation with a continuation of the status quo. Instead of being afraid of floods, droughts, and fires, one should therefore be afraid of the political systems that not only cause them but are now burying this causality in apocalyptic narratives of climate security. In shifting the focus, Ahuja’s book is not calling for climate denialism. It is calling for a dismantling of climate security while presenting a way forward for studies of climate change that never looks back from racial capitalism. 1