Confronting Climate Apartheid: law, economy, culture

The term ‘climate apartheid’ was first coined in 2007 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to raise alarm about uneven patterns of climate change adaptation. In 2019, the concept gained international attention when the legal scholar Philip Alston warned the UN Human Rights Council that ‘climate apartheid’ was a ‘scenario’ in which the ‘wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict, while the rest of the world is left to suffer.’

Since then, the notion of ‘climate apartheid’ has been invoked or implied in a range of contexts from academic analyses to climate and racial justice activism, border enforcement and immigration policy, infrastructure development, law, the development of emergent technologies, climate colonialism, responsibilities for loss and damage, climate adaptation, and climate-resilient urbanism. However, despite the proliferation of the concept’s use in different contexts, it remains unclear how the concept is and ought to be comprehended and utilised, for whom the concept is available, and what opportunities or barriers it creates. In this project we take an integrative interdisciplinary approach is key to understanding how climate apartheid is, has been, and could be used by focusing on the overlap of four contexts in which it appears: international law, political activism, markets, border policy.

This Major Project aims to make a groundbreaking contribution to debates concerning climate justice, environmental politics, and narrative imaginaries in a changing world by interrogating the logic of what many now call ‘climate apartheid.’ While ‘climate apartheid’ may become a useful descriptor in the long run, it raises more questions than it currently answers, and it remains unclear how the concept is comprehended and utilised in contexts where it arises. This project is, therefore, primarily concerned with answering the following two questions: What and for whom is ‘climate apartheid’? And what – if anything – distinguishes it from other concepts concerned with the links between climate and inequality? The project team approaches these more conceptual questions from a concrete interdisciplinary framework which foregrounds the concept’s implications for normative politics, its significance for international law, and its spatial logic spanning law, economy, and culture. In doing so, they will draw from their own disciplinary methodologies in law, philosophy, and geography but combine these with other approaches in order to understand, define, and think through the future of ‘climate apartheid’ in an integrated way.

This project specifically seeks to understand how contested or shared values, normative commitments, and/or narratives undergird the concept of ‘climate apartheid,’ what consequences or potential opportunities are made available to (and by) different actors in contexts where it is operationalized, and therefore how these distinguish the concept from others. It will explore, for example, the significance of underlying moral values and narratives as they relate to law and politics, how legal regimes invoke and create spatial logics of their own, how spatial logics can have legal implications, and the potential descriptive, evaluative, and normative implications to elucidate the concept’s scale and scope. As such, an integrative interdisciplinary approach is key to understanding how climate apartheid is, has been, and could be used.

In light of the various spaces in which ‘climate apartheid’ appears (either explicitly or implicitly), focus will be placed on distinct points of overlap between several of these spaces. In particular,

1. the space of the international legal regime in which the concept of ‘apartheid’ exists as a discrete legal tool but is currently more often deployed for its discursive signalling function;
2. political activist spaces, including ‘reactionary’ climate movements (e.g. the recent European farmers’ protest movements, anti-fifteen minute cities protests) and activism that is not explicitly climate-oriented (e.g. the current anti-war movement, which have elements that may focus on resource allocation in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict);
3. how ‘markets’ are implicated explicitly and implicitly by the dynamics of climate change and its spatial implications (for example in the form taken by real estate developments, or in the form of climate insurance markets);
4. how narratives regarding border enforcement find justificatory force in relationship to the concept, specifically in terms of concern about climate migrants

The team will conduct and bring together discursive, ethical and logical, cultural-visual, legal-doctrinal, and spatial-theoretical analyses to examine specific questions across each of the four dimensions.

An interdisciplinary group of world-renowned scholars will be assembled to address our themes and questions. A series of seminars given by each of the three project investigators, its Fellows and members of the Durham community who might wish to be involved. In addition, a workshop with scholars from around the world will be convened to share the findings of the PIs, the Fellows and and Durham scholars and to bring in further perspectives.

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