Unsustainable Borders: Globalization in a Climate-Disrupted World

Abstract


 Climate change and the responses to it reveal starkly different assumptions about borders, security and the ethical communities for whom politicians and activists speak. Starting with the contrasting perspectives of international activist Greta Thunberg and United States President Donald Trump on climate change this essay highlights the diverse political assumptions implicit in debates about contemporary globalization. Rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly severe climate change impacts and accelerating extinctions are the new context for scholarly work in the Anthropocene. Incorporating insights from earth system sciences and the emerging perspectives of planetary politics suggests a novel contextualization for contemporary social science which now needs to take non-stationarity and mobility as the appropriate context for investigating contemporary transformations. The challenge for social scientists and borders scholars is to think through how to link politics, ethics and bordering practices in ways that facilitate sustainability, while taking seriously the urgency of dealing with the rapidly changing material context that globalization has wrought.

Political Geographies of the Far-Right: The Environment, Space and Ideology in a Warming World

“…Furthermore, there is also a significant gap in the geographical analysis of far-right's engagement with the environment and climate change (see also Dalby 2021 for bridging this gap), the topic of this theme issue in Nordia Geographical Publications. As emerging literature on the political ecologies of the far-right has noted, anti-immigration is not the only founding pillar of far-right politics: the far-right has become an important countermovement to the green transition and socially just climate mitigation, also intertwining different localized understandings of nature with their nativists and xenophobic claims (McCarthy 2019;Malm & Zetkin Collective 2021;Bosworth 2022;Varco 2023).…”

Border security interventions and borderland resilience

“…The narrative framing that connects the importance of increasing resilience with the notion of a world of permeable borders is ambiguous and tends to naturalize borders as rigid lines that divide communities and determine their future. Yet global challenges know no borders and cannot be overcome through bordering and border drawing (Dalby, 2019). challenges like climate change need to be mitigated, coped with, prevented, and anticipated with the help of crossborder cooperation.…”