Calculating ‘climate migrants’: An emerging topology of power

Abstract

On what basis can it be said that climate change contributes to human migration? What are we to make of new statistical models used to construct the relationship between these two epochal phenomena? This article proposes Collier’s conception of topology to characterize the novel politics of gravity modelling, a technique increasingly used to calculate numeric estimates of ‘climate migrants’. These models do not simply signify a revival or repetition of political sovereignty, nor an affirmation of biopower, but a novel recalibration of power arising in response to the climate crisis. This recalibration signals the early stages of a new topology of power organized around intuitive calculation. To make this claim, the article draws on recent discussions in geography on the relationship between calculation, number and the political to first situate the models within contemporary critical scholarship on climate change and migration. It then examines the models’ statistical logics, in particular how intuition, inference and the incalculable shape three facets of this emerging topology: the correlation of Earth science data with population-level economic data; the calculation of mobile populations; and the unique spatiality at stake in gravity modelling.