The missing subject: Enabling a postcolonial future for climate conflict research

Abstract

This paper suggests that the dominance of one debate on climate related conflict – establishing whether climate change leads to conflict, or not - is the product of Imperial knowledge produced in the Global North Orientalising the Global South. This debate is also one in which the subdiscipline of political geography has been inadvertently complicit by accepting positivist approaches, that erase the subject and their subjectivities from this discussion, and frame them as science. The argument in this paper problematises the fundamental understanding of ‘climate conflict’, as defined and universalised by Western science in the Western academy. Instead, it argues that the subaltern's lived experience and interpretation of hazards and their relationship with conflicts needs to be located and centred in this conversation – not just as that of a hapless victim but as knowledge producers able to set the agendas and re-orient the focus of this field. Research examining conflicts around floods and evictions begins to map a new future for how that might be possible.