Climate Migration: How Literature from the Periphery of the World System Reveals the Limits of Our Imagination

The UN announced that, in 2023, the global figure of displaced people soared to 110 million, with climate change being a key contributing factor. My study will examine how texts produced on the "periphery" of the world-literary system are conceptualising climate migration. The discourse of crisis often associated with climate migration allows the "border regime" to be legitimised as a stabilising force.

This project relocates the "crisis" of climate migration within the border regime. I am interested in examining global structures of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and how narratives of nationalism and securitization limit the "Global North's" ability to imagine an equitable response to climate migration.

Climate change asks us to re-examine accepted narratives around borders and nation-states. Following Harsha Walia's argument that borders are methods of imperial state formation and social ordering, I will argue that the contemporary border regime is intimately bound up in the same long history of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism that produced the climate crisis.

In this sense, the "crisis" of climate migration is the result of a protracted and historical crisis of global inequality.