ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical lineage of today’s concerns over climate migration, a topic of increasing salience in international (climate) policy arenas. The starting point is the idea that the widespread emphasis on the novelty of climate migration obfuscates the ‘old’ ideological roots on which contemporary discourses build. By producing a lineage of contemporary debates, the chapter highlights their ideal continuity with ‘ancient’ debates on populations and resources in classical political economy, as well as with the spectre of the unruly and swelling population in the ‘global South’ that has haunted Northern environmental discourses since the late 1960s. The historical vista offered by the chapter also contributes to clearly detecting the emergence of new articulations of the link migration-environment-development, with aspects of radical discontinuity from the past. In the light of these specific continuities and ruptures, the debates on climate migration fall under a shadow – they appear not only as the response to the new set of challenges posed by climate change, but as a (re)emergence of the fear of/fixation with populations in the global South (seen as a dangerous threat to socio-economic and/or ecological stability), rearticulated via neoliberal discourses that aim at ruling through the production of resilient subjects.
