We are excited to announce that former ICI Fellow (2010-2013) Sanjay Chaturvedi recently published a new co-authored book titled Climate Terror, A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change with Palgrave Press. Professor Chaturvedi was part of the third cohort of India China Fellows who were working on the theme of Social Innovation for Sustainable Environments.
Chaturvedi is Professor of Political Science and Centre for the Study of Geopolitics at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India. He is a member of multiple editorial boards and committees and has been a member of delegations representing the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences. He has written dozens of books, articles, and journal publications on the geopolitics of climate change, energy security, and the political geography of the polar regions. He used the ICI Fellowship to co-design and teach a course on climate change, ecological justice, and human security, and to develop a chapter in his now published book dedicated to sustainability questions, further exploring the critical geopolitics of climate change.
Here is the short summary of the book from the publisher.
Climate Terror investigates the highly differentiated geographical politics of global warming. It explores how fear-inducing climate change discourses could result in new forms of dependencies, domination and militarized ‘climate security’. In this revealing study from Chaturvedi and Doyle, the concept of environmental security is brought to life through cases of the most pressing environmental issues confronting the Global South, which are creating desperate realities for billions of people. The book proposes the following key questions, crucial to our understanding of this issue: Can the climate discourse be re-configured to provide a place where issues of environmental justice and sovereignty are paramount, rather than neo-liberal responses to climate? Can climate change give a voice to the global periphery, and can it be used as a vehicle for emancipation?
Chaturvedi and Doyle’s study concludes by taking note of the more optimistic response of ’emancipatory’ groups and networks to concepts such as climate justice and climate debt, and the ways in which these groups have attempted to use this global climate moment for more democratic purposes. Is the climate story, regardless of its diverse intentions, a discourse now captured by the affluent North to control the development of the Global South? Has the emancipatory moment now passed or is there still hope for the re-emergence of subaltern perspectives on climate futures? The authors further discuss the deployment of terror vocabulary to address climate change, which is a part of refurbished designs and technologies of control, regulation and domination in a neo-liberal, post-political, globalized world marked by profound asymmetries in terms of economic growth and human development. They argue for an increased understanding of the environment, not as an external enemy force, but as a diverse nature that is inclusive of people, a nature that has the potential to provide secure access to citizens of all countries to basic nutrition, adequate access to health, appropriate shelter, and a security to practice a diverse range of livelihoods.
Below is a list of the chapters in his new book, which is available from Palgrave or your local bookstore.
1. A Critical Geopolitics of ‘Climate Fear/Terror’: Roots, Routes and Rhetoric
2. Climate ‘Science’: Categories, Cultures and Contestations
3. Terrorizing Climate Territories and Marginalized Geographies of the Post-Political
4. The Violence of Climate ‘Markets’: Insuring ‘Our Way of Living’
5. ‘Climate Borders’ in the Anthropocene: Securitising Displacements, Migration and Refugees
6. Climate Security and Militarization: Geo-Economics and Geo-Securities of Climate Change
7. Climate Justice: An Attempt at an Emancipatory Politics of Climate Change
8. Making ‘Climate Futures’: Power, Knowledge and Technologies
We would like to send a big congratulations to our former ICI Fellow on a successful new book publication on an important and timely issue.