Future Directions for the Concept of 'Climate Refugees'

Dear Colleagues:

The concept of “climate refugees” has been salient since the 1980s, but it has taken on special urgency in recent decades. With this attention the concept has become the subject of contentious debates focusing on definitions, demographic estimates, time horizons, and the complex interplay between environmental change and human migration. The considerations are further complicated by legal and historical questions about refugee protection and migration regimes. Some scholars are keen to explore accountability and justice questions—e.g., advanced-industrialized countries are responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to the climate change that displaces people in the Global South. Others are focusing on the implications for national and international security—i.e., climate change is a “threat multiplier” that will destabilize countries and regions with people on the move. Still others focus on the use of “climate refugees” as a racialized discourse—a means of alarming white audiences in the Global North about the threat of hordes of refugees leaving parts of the world made “uninhabitable” by climate change.

This Special Issue offers a venue for scholarship seeking to move to the next level of “climate refugee” scholarship. It welcomes contributions that are “meta-” in their orientation and that seek to take stock of the status of the debate(s). It invites original articles that accept that “climate refugees” is an essentially contested concept that may perpetually defy definitive resolution. While it may be presumptuous to suggest that scholarship should move toward a “post-climate refugee” stance—and leave behind a concept that may have lost its usefulness—it urges contributors to embrace the conceptual muddle and perhaps work to articulate a new paradigm. Questions to be explored include:

• Given the complexity of human migration—and migration politics—what is gained and lost by the use of the concept of “climate refugees”? Is there a useful conceptual and methodological alternative?
• How is a world wracked by inequalities—and ongoing anthropogenic climate change—to contend with the complicated interaction between environmental change and human migration?
• Can discourse pertaining to climate refugees be “desecuritized”?

Dr. Gregory White
Guest Editor

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• climate refugees
• adaptation
• refugee protection
• migration
• climate change