I’ve been prone to seeing contemporary geopolitics in terms of a long interregnum, in which Gramsci’s new world cannot be born because cascading crises preclude systemic stabilisation. Even a pernicious stabilisation necessitates, well, stability which is precluded under conditions of climate breakdown, unravelling unipolarity and epistemic chaos. The literature on eco-apartheid would suggest this is a dangerous misreading, which misses the apparatus of climate apartheid which is being built up internationally. This is how Kai Heron describes it in this paper:
In 2019 the then UN special rapporteur on extremely poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, warned that the world was increasingly at risk of a “climate apartheid scenario” in which the wealthy pay to escape the devastating effects of ecological collapse while the poor are exposed to insufferable heat, floods, wildfires, storms, and crop failures (United Nations, 2019). In Alston’s evaluation, the efforts of world governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations are “patently inadequate” and “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and the magnitude of the threat.” Alston went on to suggest that “democracy and the rule of law, as well as a wide range of civil and political rights are every bit at risk…the risk of community discontent, of growing inequality, and even of greater levels of deprivation among some groups, will likely stimulate nationalist, xenophobic, racist, and other responses” (United Nations, 2019).
Climate and border scholars have similarly expressed concern about an emerging regime that they have variously called eco-apartheid or climate apartheid (Brisman et al., 2018, Bruce, 2019, Rice et al., 2022). Oulifemi Táíwò, for example, has written about the role that police will have in a warming world. He shows that a growing body of literature suggests the activity of today’s police departments is oriented towards securing particular spaces for particular classes of people – controlling the spatial and social distribution of crime rather than its frequency. As the climate crisis bites down, he concludes, “policing will not be aimed at preventing climate crises from harming everyone, but instead police will be tasked with protecting elites from its downsides” (Táíwò, 2020). The result will be a regime of eco-apartheid within counties and within cities.
Daniel Aldana Cohen, meanwhile, argues in a more planetary register that “a massive global investment in climate related infrastructure is coming” and that, quote, “under eco-apartheid, longstanding environmental harms and the burdens of the no-carbon transition would be yoked to the necks of poor and racialized workers, while the spoils go to the rich — and especially, in Europe and the Americas, the white” (Cohen, 2019). The key here is that the transition to net zero carbon economies will create new spaces of “green extraction” (Voskoboynik and Andreucci, 2022). Lithium for eclectic car batteries will flow from the lithium triangle between Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, rare earth minerals for wind turbines and solar panels will flow from the Congolese coltan mines, and landgrabs for biofuels, energy infrastructure, and carbon credit forests, will dispossess Indigenous peoples, the poor, and racialized — as it does today — while the toxic waste materials from producing this new infrastructure will be dumped — again, as it is today — near racialized and poor communities in the capitalist core and beyond (Dunlap, 2019). The green transition in the capitalist core, in other words, is more than likely to take place at the expense of the land and labour of racialized and poor communities in the global north and the global south.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523002002#s0035
The ‘uprising’ against 15 minute cities gives a sign of what far-right responses to the intra-national class politics of transition costs might look like. Furthermore, the ambiguous politics of the gilets jaunes illustrates how the politics of transition do not determinate particular sociopolitical responses. But a failure to grapple with the distribution of transition costs against a background of economic immiseration and spiralling anxiety risks feeding into the affective structure of eco-apartheid: ‘we’ cannot maintain ‘our’ living standards so we need to keep ‘them’ out. The notion of global concern for the climate then comes to figure as an emblem of ‘them’, the placeless ‘global elites’ pushing climate change as the corollary of the placeless ‘climate migrants’ hit by its catastrophic effects. John McDonnell’s former advisor James Meadway is excellent on this which leaves me feeling that a Corbyn government could have negotiated this critical juncture, despite the many other obstacles they would have faced. But Starmer’s government will be tone deaf about the cultural political economy of climate under these conditions, compounded by the increasingly dominant strand within their project which seeks to unravel their now modest commitments entirely.
This leaves me incredibly worried about the scale of what is coming, particularly with the political formation feeding into an entrenched failure of transition. This is Heron’s summary of the landscape from the same paper:
Evidence that the world is heading towards a regime of eco-apartheid is everywhere. Depending on population growth and the severity of global heating, around 1–4 billion people risk being displaced from their homes by war, conflict, and the effects of global heating by 2100 (Xu et al., 2020). Though it is difficult to disaggregate climate change induced displacement from other factors, the International Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that around 40.5 million people were displaced in 2020 alone (International Displacement Monitoring Centre., 2021), with so-called ‘natural disasters’ (Smith, 2006), including the effects of global heating, prompting over three times more displacement than conflict or violence. At the same time, the capitalist core is intensifying the securitization of its borders and moving towards far-right, racist, and nativist positions (Malm and Zetkin Collective, 2021). Evidence can also be found in Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine. In a widely reported act of compassion, Poland accepted more than two million of what the Polish government called their ‘brothers’ from Ukraine. At the same time, Poland has been busily building a wall costing 353-million Euros to keep African and Middle Eastern refugees out (Harlan, 2022). These are the wrong kinds of refugees. They are not European. They are not white. Then there is the UK’s recent decision to militarize its borders by putting the Navy in control of patrolling the English Channel and its policy of transporting refugees to Rwanda, a country that is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of global warming due –— first and foremost to the legacies of underdevelopment imposed upon it by European colonial and neo-colonial rule — such as its dependence on rain-fed agriculture and need for investment in healthcare, infrastructure, and water resource management (World Bank Group, 2021). These are signs of a racialized and racializing regime of border management. A lethal precursor of what is to come in a warming world.
But eco-apartheid need not be overtly reactionary or authoritarian. Democracy, Mboti says, “is completely compatible with apartheid” (Mboti, 2023, xvii). As Max Ajl shows, neo-Keynesian versions of the Green New Deal and other Global North-focused efforts to mitigate the worst of ecological collapse, though well meaning, may unwittingly contribute to the building out of an infrastructure of eco-apartheid (Ajl, 2021). A state-led or capital-led green investment program in the Global North that fails to challenge capitalist and neo-colonial social relations, or that fails to put international climate justice at its core, will exploit the lands, labour, and resources of the Global South in ways that are both very similar to today and novel in their exploitation of the periphery to secure the core against the worst effects of climate collapse.
Eco-apartheid is the accumulation strategy proper to capitalist catastrophism. In order to act on their promise to protect at least some of the imperial core’s population from the worst — without of course changing anything essential about capitalist and colonial relations of power — imperial states distribute social and ecological harms to their internal and external peripheries. The cancellation of the future for the world’s working class and racialized majority, the putting in harm’s way of the oppressed, is at the same time the building of a future for the minority.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523002002#s0035
The paper led me to return to this interview with Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, with a view to better understanding the sociotechnical developments likely to constitute the infrastructure of eco-apartheid:
Mark Carrigan 