Climate Change and the New Politics of Violence

Abstract

Climate change complicates political violence while producing new forms and scales of it. This has led the climate movement to fail to come to terms with both the violence of climate change and nonviolence as a tactic of resistance. The article begins by counterposing the violence of climate change to the consensus for nonviolence as the only tactic for achieving systemic political change. It then moves beyond that consensus by drawing on Andreas Malm’s Marxist response, Bruno Latour’s claim that climate change puts us in a situation of war, and a critique of the linkages between consumption, carbon, and imperialism. The article concludes that climate change makes the choice between violence and nonviolence a false one, necessitating new hybrid strategies of violence and nonviolence.