Geopolitics of climate change highlighted
Source: Hueiyen News Service / Newmai News Network
Imphal, August 25 2014:
In this new discursively-rhetorical map of the earth, the undifferentiated mass of humanity is imaginatively framed as a integral to 'global soul' and cast within the shadow of a global enemy�climate�which is said to affect all (with the poor and the marginalised as the worst victims) but only can be interpreted and understood by a scientific and economic elite, said Prof Sanjay Chaturvedi of Punjab University on Monday.
Prof Chaturvedi, Director, Centre for Study of Mid-West and Central Asia said this while participating at a talk on "Geopolitics of Climate Change and South Asia: Discourses of Fear & Cartographic Anxieties" organised by Department of Political Science, Modern College, Imphal.
Post-colonial, post-partition South East Asia is no exception to the global trends towards increasing de-/re-territorialisation as well as securitisation of climate 'spaces,' further said Prof Chaturvedi who is also the Coordinator of UGC SAP, Department of Political Science, Punjab University.
He said one of the most alarmist ways in which climate change is folded into a discourse of fear (that in turn requires a geopolitical response) in support of various domestic and foreign policy agendas both within Bangladesh and its immediate neighbourhood in India, is by referencing the 'problem' of millions of 'climate migrants' and 'climate refugees.' The geopolitics of climate change in South Asia will continue to oscillate between various imaginative geographies of fear and counter-imaginative geographies of hope, depending upon their ideological moorings and power-political agendas, he said.