Book review: Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change by Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle

Abstract

Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; ISBN 9780230249622, RRP 24.99[pounds sterling] Within the last year or so, a number of books have been published that critically examine how strategies of security have become attached to environmental problems. Robert Marzec's (2015) contribution, for instance, draws together the history of the enclosure movement with the politics of climate adaptation to evoke a sometimes bleak biopolitical analysis of humankind's relationship to the planet. A more recent intervention by Diez et al. (2016) takes a case study approach to the construction of environmental risk and security. Both the methods and the conclusions in this latter publication resound well with the critique of climate policies addressed in the book under review here. Unlike the publications above, however, Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change directly addresses the geopolitics of climate change from a southern hemisphere perspective. Its premise is that the politics of climate change has been framed by the military, commercial and economic interests of northern hemisphere actors. Whereas geography, political economy and history determine the consequences of climate change for communities in the global south, wilfully blind doctrines of national security and globalization strive to dominate the debate. In this book, Chaturvedi, an Indian critical geographer, and Doyle, an Australian radical environmentalist, venture deep into strategies of hegemony and resistance to explore how the biographies of place and culture are contesting formations of globalization predicated on a hollow empathy of environmental concern. The journey they take exposes the reader to the great dangers posed to the cultures and economies of southern states by solutions that emerge from a universalist, market-oriented, post-political and militarized dogma. Seeking to underline the inherent violence it contains, the authors have termed this conservative environmentalism climate terror'. Climate terror is a set of strategies that share a similar root, and act interdependently, within the means and ends of the US-led war on terror. As the authors explain, what is common is the speculative pre-emption of future threats and dangers to justify the manipulation of socio spatial consciousness and policy interventions by the power that be in the name of a moral economy that is heavily skewed in favour of securing the future citizen, (p. 13) The analysis offered by the book describes a post-political world, one governed by apocalyptic imaginaries. The future citizen alluded to above is actually a future consumer, whose lifestyle and spending power need to be protected from the chaos that will ostensibly be unleashed by the effects of climate change. Chaturvedi and Doyle implicitly draw on the methods developed by the Copenhagen School of security studies to explain how the rhetoric of catastrophe leads to the 'securitization and inevitable militarization of climate policies. This method looks at how certain phenomena are isolated as existentially threatening and presented to the public using alarmist discourse. Infected with urgency, these issues are portrayed as warranting an immediate response. As with the politics of fundamentalist Islam, once an issue is deemed exceptional, there is no time for the luxury of political debate and negotiation. When the problem is successfully framed as exceptional and pressing, ahistorical, technocratic solutions tend to form in assemblages of intervention with the militarized practices of national security. …