Notes

Introduction

1. Wikipedia, s.v. “Central American migrant caravans: Late 2018 caravans,” last modified January 17, 2020, 17:48, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_American_migrant_caravans#Late_2018_caravans.

2. Oliver Milman, Emily Holden, and David Agren, “The Unseen Driver behind the Migrant Caravan: Climate Change,” Guardian, October 30, 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/30/migrant-caravan-causes-climate-change-central-america.

3. Milman, Holden, and Agren, “Unseen Driver behind the Migrant Caravan.”

4. Jason Cons, “Global Flooding,” Anthropology Now 9, no. 3 (2017): 47–52.

5. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 2.

6. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 119–45.

7. Nicholas De Genova, “The ‘Migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 10 (2018): 1765–82.

8. Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2013), 11.

9. Suyapa Portillo Villeda and Gerardo Torres Zelaya, “Why Are Honduran Children Leaving?,” CounterPunch, June 27, 2014, www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/27/why-are-honduran-children-leaving.

10. Yermi Brenner and Katrin Ohlendorf, “Time for the Facts: What Do We Know about Cologne Four Months Later?” De Correspondent, May 2, 2016, https://thecorrespondent.com/4401/time-for-the-facts-what-do-we-know-about-cologne-four-months-later/1073698080444-e20ada1b.

11. Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps toward an Ecology of Powers,” Theory Culture and Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 153–85; Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2015).

12. Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The US Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

13. Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls 9, no. 2 (2007): 148–61; Atiya Husain, “Retrieving the Religion in Racialization: A Critical Review,” Sociology Compass 11, no. 3 (2017): e12507, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12507.

14. “The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice,” accessed December 1, 2020, https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/#. Thanks to Aimee Bahng for sharing this citation.

15. International Energy Association, “Global Energy Review 2020,” April 2020, www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020. See also Michael T. Klare, “Covid-19 Is Forcing Us to Rethink How We Consume Energy,” Nation, April 29, 2020, www.thenation.com/article/environment/coronavirus-oil-energy-consumption.

16. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “EIA Projects 28% Increase in World Energy Use by 2040,” September 14, 2017, www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32912.

17. Philip Alston, Climate Change and Poverty: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, UN Human Rights Council, 41st sess., June 24, 2019, https://undocs.org/pdf?symbol=en/A/HRC/41/39.

18. The World Bank, for example, forecasts that the pandemic will only temporarily cause migration flows to drop. See COVID-19 Crisis through a Migration Lens, Migration and Development Brief 32 (Washington: World Bank Group, 2020), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/33634/COVID-19-Crisis-Through-a-Migration-Lens.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y.

19. Cons, “Global Flooding,” 48.

20. Etienne Piguet, “From ‘Primitive Migration’ to ‘Climate Refugees’: The Curious Fate of the Natural Environment in Migration Studies,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 14 (2013): 148–62.

21. Shweta Jayawardhan, “Vulnerability and Climate Change Induced Human Displacement,” Consilience 17 (2017): 103–42.

22. See Liisa Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 377–404.

23. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Opposition, and Crisis in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

24. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 34–35.

25. Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

26. See Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016). Wolfe’s description of racial regimes as central avenues through which settler colonial states manage demographics of labor and land is useful for comparative analysis of how race and capitalism intertwine to target minoritized groups. However, Wolfe’s reliance on assessment of human reproduction as a metric for the value of labor requires further analysis, as it tends to gloss over the sexual violence inherent in systems of slavery and indenture. For a critique of the centrality of Black women’s reproductive labor to the U.S. racial regime, see Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. Furthermore, the schematic division between Wolfe’s concept of elimination (used to accumulate native land) and exclusion (used to accumulate racialized labor) can preclude nuanced contextual analysis of multitiered racial hierarchies and phenomena, such as the exploitation of native labor. For an alternative approach that integrates land and labor questions, see Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); for an important if polemical attempt to synthesize multiple colonial regimes of race and labor into a reading of U.S.-Mexico border politics, see Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, “Rethinking Settler Colonialism,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 1039–55.

27. Macarena Gomez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

28. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).

29. On the demography of European genocide in the Pacific and the Americas, see David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). On the environmental history of early colonial settlement in the Americas, see Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). On Indigenous critiques of anthropocentrism as a settler colonial ideology, see Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Kyle Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene,” Routledge Companion to Environmental Studies, ed. U. Heise, J. Christensen, and M. Niemann (New York: Routledge, 2017), 206–15; Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Glen Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

30. Neel Ahuja, “The Anthropocene Debate: On the Limits of Colonial Geology,” September 9, 2016, https://ahuja.sites.ucsc.edu/2016/09/09/the-anthropocene-debate-on-the-limits-of-colonial-geology.

31. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

32. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

33. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

34. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2015).

35. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).

36. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).

37. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222.

38. For examples of widely cited theoretical texts, see Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History; Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Malm, Fossil Capital.

39. Yusoff, Billion Black; Ghosh, Great Derangement; Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now,” 206–15. I have explored such critiques in more detail in Ahuja, “Anthropocene Debate”; Neel Ahuja, “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 365–85; Neel Ahuja, “Posthuman New York: Ground Zero of the Anthropocene,” Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 237–52.

40. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Jason Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016); Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Gregg Mitman, Reflections on the Plantationocene, June 18, 2019, https://edgeeffects.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PlantationoceneReflections_Haraway_Tsing.pdf; Jairus Grove, “Response: The New Nature,” Boston Review, January 11, 2016, http://bostonreview.net/forum/new-nature/jairus-grove-jairus-grove-response-jedediah-purdy.

41. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), esp. xiii–xv.

42. On the layering of these two affective realities of expansion and contraction within lived geographies of neoliberal “globalization,” see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. R. J. Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 261–74.

43. For an important critique of the “great acceleration,” see Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), esp. 98–132.

44. Duncan Green, Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review, 1995); Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (London: Zed, 1997).

45. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

46. Michael Watt, “Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil, and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Geopolitics 9, no. 1 (2004): 50–80.

47. Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Energy Resources,” quoted in Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 191.

48. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 250.

49. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 250.

50. Imre Szeman, “How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures,” Journal of Canadian Studies 47, no. 3 (2013): 145–68 (quote on 146).

51. Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Edward Burtynsky, Oil (Steidl, 2009); Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” New Republic, March 2, 1992, 29–33. For an important critical review of these works, see Brent Ryan Bellamy, “The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, ed. Triangle Collective (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 63–77.

52. Christopher Sall and Urvashi Narain, “Air Pollution: Impact on Human Health and Wealth,” The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018: Building a Sustainable Future (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2018), 171–88.

53. Kanta Kumari Rigaud, Alex de Sherbinin, Bryan Jones, Jonas Bergmann, Viviane Clement, Kayly Ober, Jacob Schewe, et al., Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018), 25–26.

54. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 27.

55. Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2012).

56. Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

57. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 260–61.

58. Both oil and refugees became a central preoccupation in Foucault’s writings in the late 1970s and early 1980s as he responded to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Disappointed that the North Vietnamese struggle against U.S. and French empires had generated the spectacle of the “boat people”—the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled by boat in the wake of the war—Foucault sought other models of revolution elsewhere in the Global South. Foucault claimed that the oil strikes at Abadan, Iran, reflected a new “political spirituality,” a religiosity that articulated what could become a new, non-Western model of revolutionary action. See Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 203–8. For Foucault, the Islamist contingent of the Iranian revolutionaries “struggle to present a different way of thinking about social and political organization, one that takes nothing from Western philosophy, from its juridical and revolutionary foundations. In other words, they try to present an alternative based on Islamic teachings.” Foucault, “Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham,” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 185–86. Representing oil strikers as part of a unified and, for him, refreshingly nonsecular force against U.S. hegemony, Foucault reports that they took on Abadan, the “biggest refinery in the world,” a site no “European has not dreamed about.” Foucault, “The Revolt in Iran Spreads on Cassette Tapes,” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 217.

Such romantic invocations of Islamic revolution would not hold water for long. Foucault’s idealization of the Islamic character of political action came under pressure as the revolution progressed—particularly with the emergence of enforced veiling and repression of dissent by the newly founded oil-rich Islamic republic. Foucault turned away from this model of political spirituality toward an embrace of certain discourses of humanism, internationalism, and even interventionism. Foucault’s eventual argument for protection against torture in his Iran writings anticipates a more open embrace of certain human rights rhetorics emergent with international NGOs like Amnesty International and Doctors without Borders, an organization founded by Foucault’s activist collaborator and former French foreign secretary Bernard Kouchner. Jessica Whyte points to a more elaborated claim for rights—and a neocolonial right to intervene—in Foucault’s speech in defense of the so-called boat people at the UN in 1981. In it he invokes “an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties,” which include the duties of individuals to “wrench from governments the monopolization of the power to effectively intervene.” As Whyte argues, Foucault’s articulation of the right to intervene was explicitly invoked by France in later international contexts that began to shape a neocolonial right of humanitarian intervention. Jessica Whyte, “Foucault’s ‘Distrust of Legalism’: On Human Rights and the Revolution in Iran,” in Law and Philosophical Theory, ed. Thanos Zardalouis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 27–44; Jessica Whyte, “Human Rights: Confronting Governments? Michel Foucault and the Right to Intervene,” in New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, ed. Matthew Stone, Illan rua Wall, and Costas Douzinas (New York: Routledge, 2012), 11–31.

59. Craig Welch, “Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says,” National Geographic, March 2, 2015, www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought.

Chapter One

1. Kanta Kumari Ringaud, Alex de Sherbinin, Bryan Jones, Jonas Bergmann, Viviane Clement, Kayly Ober, Jacob Schewe, et al., Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018), 1.

2. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

3. See Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

4. “2019 Internal Displacement Figures by Country,” Global Internal Displacement Database, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, accessed July 9, 2019, www.internal-displacement.org/database/displacement-data. I added IDMC’s data for the top five countries in terms of disaster-displaced population for 2018. This data reports 12,429,000 internally displaced people in Philippines, China, India, United States, and Indonesia.

5. Essam el-Hinnawi, Environmental Refugees (Nairobi: UNEP, 1985), 22.

6. Myers’s series of essays on the topic follows this trajectory of discussion of climate change as first a humanitarian disaster and then a security risk. See Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees in a Globally Warmed World,” BioScience 43, no. 11 (1993): 752–61; Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue,” 13th Economic Forum, Prague, May 23–27, 2005.

7. Casey Williams, “What Happens When the Alt-Right Believes in Climate Change?” Jewish Currents, August 13, 2018, https://jewishcurrents.org/what-happens-when-alt-right-believes-climate-change.

8. Kate Aronoff, “The European Far Right’s Environmental Turn,” Dissent, May 31, 2019, www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-european-far-rights-environmental-turn.

9. Alexander Ruser and Amanda Machin, “Nationalising the Climate: Is the European Far Right Turning Green?” Green European Journal, September 27, 2019, www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/nationalising-the-climate-is-the-european-far-right-turning-green.

10. “Climate Refugees,” Resource Library, National Geographic Society, March 28, 2019, www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/climate-refugees.

11. Such frameworks were often understood as sympathetic portrayals of peoples affected by colonial rule or social marginalization. See, for example, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). For critiques of this racialized mode of anthropological knowledge, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 139–44; Mwenda Ntarangwi, Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

12. For a classic postcolonial critique of such gendered colonial rescue narratives, see Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 196–220.

13. Bina Desai, Justin Ginnetti, and Chloe Sydney, No Matter of Choice: Displacement in a Changing Climate, Research Agenda and Call for Partners (Geneva: IDMC, 2018), 1, 9.

14. Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2013), 20.

15. Yen Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 13.

16. Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 2–3.

17. Global Report on Internal Displacement 2018 (Geneva: IDMC, 2018), v.

18. Global Report on Internal Displacement 2018, 38.

19. Malini Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 17–33.

20. A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in US Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 91.

21. Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, Environmental Exodus: An Emergent Crisis in the Global Arena (Washington, DC: Climate Institute, 1995), 27.

22. Myers and Kent, Environmental Exodus, 35.

23. Myers and Kent, Environmental Exodus, 26, 31–32.

24. Myers and Kent, Environmental Exodus, 63.

25. See Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968); Lester Brown and Hal Kane, Full House: Reassessing the Earth’s Population Capacity (Washington, DC: Earthscan, 1995).

26. On Mayo’s Mother India and visual stereotypes of Mohanty’s figure of the third world woman, see Neel Ahuja, “Colonialism,” in Gender: Matter, ed. Stacey Alaimo (New York: Macmillan, 2017), 247.

27. Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013): 1181.

28. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 7.

29. “The frame of ‘refugee crisis’ is largely a state- and media-generated response. I don’t know that it emerges from any movements. And I think that is not a coincidence because the language of crisis meant that the crisis was somehow being experienced by states, and not people.” Harsha Walia, interview by Neda Atanasoski and Christine Hong, Critical Ethnic Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020), https://manifold.umn.edu/read/prefiguring-border-justice-interview-with-harsha-walia/section/96855cdc-5a01-45cd-9f1f-fc54b4ea6289. For Walia, the panics over migration invoke “the state itself as victim.” Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 25.

30. Kelly Buchanan, New Zealand: “Climate Change Refugee” Case Overview, July 2015, www.loc.gov/law/help/climate-change-refugee/new-zealand.php.

31. “UN Landmark Case for People Displaced by Climate Change,” January 20, 2020, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/01/un-landmark-case-for-people-displaced-by-climate-change.

32. Melissa Godin, “Climate Refugees Cannot Be Forced Home, UN Panel Says in Landmark Ruling,” Time, January 20, 2020, https://time.com/5768347/climate-refugees-un-ioane-teitiota/.

33. Sam O’Neill, “Amnesty International Expands Remit to Include Climate Change,” Times (UK), April 30, 2019, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/amnesty-international-expands-remit-to-include-climate-change-w9zs38mmn.

34. Philip Alston, Climate Change and Poverty: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, UN Human Rights Council, 41st sess., June 24, 2019, https://undocs.org/pdf?symbol=en/A/HRC/41/39.

35. UN Human Rights Committee, “Views Adopted by the Committee under Article 5(4) of the Optional Protocol, Concerning Communication No. 2728/2016,” CCPR/C/127/D/2727/2016, September 23, 2020.

36. Kenneth R. Weiss, “The Making of a Climate Refugee,” Foreign Policy, January 28, 2015, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/28/the-making-of-a-climate-refugee-kiribati-tarawa-teitiota.

37. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–61 (quote on 151).

38. Cf. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

39. Tim McDonald, “The Man Who Would Be the First Climate Refugee,” BBC News, November 5, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34674374.

40. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

41. Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

42. Suvendrini Perera, “Oceanic Corpo-Geographies, Refugee Bodies, and the Making and Unmaking of Waters,” Feminist Review 103 (2013): 58–79.

43. On climate change’s queer temporalities, see Neel Ahuja, “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 365–85.

44. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 128.

45. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

46. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

47. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 11.

48. Refugee Appeal No. 72185 [2000] NZRSAA 335, August 10, 2000, www.nzlii.org/nz/cases/NZRSAA/2000/335.html.

49. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Opposition, and Crisis in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

50. See Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom.

51. See, for example, Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); David Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); David Pellow, “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge,” DuBois Review 13, no. 6 (2016).

52. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies,” Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 350.

53. Key philosophical texts discuss this shift from biopower vested on the territorialized control of the human-as-species to such visions of ecologically integrated or networked control. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2007), 4–6; Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.

54. Jasbir Puar, “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity,” Women and Performance 19, no. 2 (2009): 161–72, esp. 164–66.

55. See Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

56. IPCC AR5, Working Group II, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, pt. A, Global and Sectoral Aspects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 767.

57. IPCC AR5, Working Group II, Climate Change 2014, 771.

58. Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 1–65. The IPCC describes culture as a threatened resource for adaptation and resilience. IPCC AR5, Working Group II, Climate Change 2014, 762–66.

59. Kyle Powys White, Chris Powell, and Marie Shaeffer, “Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for ‘All Humanity,’ ” in Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power, ed. J. Sze (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 149–79.

60. David Pellow, What Is Critical Environmental Justice? (New York: Polity, 2018).

61. Laura Pulido, “A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research,” Antipode 28, no. 2 (1996): 142–59.

62. Julie Sze and Jonathan K. London, “Environmental Justice at the Crossroads,” Sociology Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 1332; Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint”; Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice, and Settler Colonialism,” English Language Notes 55, no. 1–2 (2017): 153–62.

63. Arun Saldanha, “Some Principles of Geocommunism,” Geocritique (blog), July 2013, www.geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/

64. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Opposition, and Crisis in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

65. Nikhil Singh, “Racial Formation in an Age of Permanent War,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 284.

66. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 244.

Chapter Two

1. Yen Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama, “Transpacific Entanglements,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy Schlund-Vials (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 175.

2. Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 8.

3. This research is varied and includes a wide variety of perspectives on relationships between capitalism, anti-Black racism(s), and the state. See, among others, W. E. B. DuBois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkmatter: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Washington Square, 1920); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938; New York: Vintage, 1989); W. E. B. DuBois, “Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the US,” Monthly Review 4, no. 12 (1953); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review, 1959); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Adolph Reed, “The Black Urban Regime: Structural Origins and Constraints,” Comparative Urban and Community Research: An Annual Review 1 (1988); Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 95–118; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016).

4. See, as key reference points, Glen Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

5. See, most notably, Andre Gunder Frank, “Development and Underdevelopment in the New World: Smith and Marx vs. the Weberians,” Theory and Society 2 (1975): 431–66; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1974): 387–415; L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: Morrow, 1981); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994); Janet L. Abu-Laghod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974); Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review, 1977); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review, 2009); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).

6. See, most notably, Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).

7. Robinson, Black Marxism, esp. chap. 1.

8. See also Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1709–91.

9. One might reasonably object to Robinson’s account by arguing that trade is not synonymous with capital. Distance trades, including trade in slaves, were central to precapitalist economies. See Abu-Laghod, Before European Hegemony. The historical forms of trade across the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and China in the eras prior to the rise of European overseas colonial networks have been the subject of extensive study by world system theorists and historians. As such, economic historians following Robert Brenner often argue that trade itself was not the engine that systemically formed the capitalist system but rather the enclosures and the expansion of capitalist property in land, which displaced the feudal landlord and enabled the bourgeoisie to dominate the emerging markets of Europe. See Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92. Such an argument would tend to center the history of Britain over the southern European merchant subcultures that created the Atlantic slave trade and that became central to Robinson’s account of the rise of capitalism. It would also need to contend with Robinson’s claim that despite the relatively small social groupings of the new merchant class, the spatial relations they developed by first expanding the manufacturing base and then causing monarchal states to invest in massive colonial enterprises helped to generate the systemic nature of colonial capitalism. Regardless, Robinson’s point about the historical development of race is that the tendency toward racialized differentiation of labor and trade was already inherent to feudal production. It would be disingenuous to argue that property in land was not similarly racialized, especially given that European imperial justifications for land seizure in the Americas and justifications for property in persons (slavery) often coincided with dismissals of African and Indigenous sovereignty. See Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” Regardless of whether the property regime or trade practices contributed more to the transnational structure of capital in the colonial Atlantic, racially differentiated labor and property were, according to Robinson, an outgrowth of feudal forms of differentiation that constituted the social milieu of early capitalism.

10. Singh, Race and America’s Long War.

11. Robinson, Black Marxism, 26.

12. Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 119.

13. Taylor, From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation, 205.

14. “Saudi Arabia Regularises Status of 40 Lakh Expatriate Workers,” Zee News, July 17, 2013, https://zeenews.india.com/news/world/saudi-arabia-regularises-status-of-40-lakh-expatriate-workers_862797.html.

15. Bassam Za’za, “45 Indian Workers Sentenced for Unauthorised Labour Strike,” Gulf News, February 24, 2008, https://gulfnews.com/uae/crime/45-indian-workers-sentenced-for-unauthorised-labour-strike-1.86282.

16. Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 67–92.

17. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 34. For Day, writing on the transition in the United States from dependency on enslaved Black labor to migrant Asian labor, “Domestic racial control served a broader logic of exclusion that is inherent in immigration restriction: to underscore and preserve Asians’ alien status by creating policy that exploited the volatility of Asian presence. From the perspective of settler colonialism, we can build on this framework by clarifying the importance of spatial alienation (rather than Indigeneity) as a factor in the exploitation of a racialized labor force. In this light, a logic of exclusion is a prerequisite for the recruitment of alien labor, functioning either to produce an exclusive labor force in the case of African slaves or to render an Asian labor presence highly conditional to the demands of capital. Both are subject to forms of segregation, on either a national or international scale.” On border militarization as the underside of the capitalist demand for labor, see Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013): 1180–98.

18. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

19. For examples in popular history and leftist accounts of empire, see, respectively, Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

20. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 44–45.

21. Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy, “The Afterlives of ‘Waste’: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus,” Antipode 43, no. 5 (2011): 1625–26.

22. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Amsterdam: MetaLibri, 2007), 437.

23. Gidwani and Reddy, “Afterlives of ‘Waste,’ ” 1632–34.

24. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905; Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), esp. 25–28.

25. Michael Watts, “Reflections on Circulation, Logistics, and the Frontiers of Capitalist Supply Chains,” Society and Space 37, no. 5 (2019): 2042–49.

26. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 38–39. According to Mitchell, “Whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an electricity network, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns. These changes in the way forms of fossil energy were extracted, transported and used made energy networks less vulnerable to the political claims of those whose labour kept them running. Unlike the movement of coal, the flow of oil could not readily be assembled into a machine that enabled large numbers of people to exercise novel forms of political power.”

27. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 870.

28. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 209–10.

29. I. J. Seccombe and R. I. Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf, and the International Oil Companies, 1910–50,” International Migration Review 20, no. 3 (1986): 563.

30. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 208.

31. Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, ed. Lisa Rofel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 17. Dai takes particular note of the sketch of Chinese economic dominance in Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007).

32. Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy: ‘The Challenge of Peace,’ ” August 15, 1971, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-outlining-new-economic-policy-the-challenge-peace.

33. Manolo Abella, “Asian Migrant Contract Workers in the Middle East,” in The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. R. Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 418–23; Andrzej Kapiszewski, “Arab versus Asian Migrant Workers in the GCC Countries,” in South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries: Histories, Policies, Development, ed. Prakash C. Jain and Ginu Zacharia Oomen (London: Routledge, 2016), 46–70.

34. Prashad, Darker Nations, 187–88.

35. Prashad, Darker Nations, 187–88.

36. Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire (London: Pluto, 2013), 158–61; Prashad, Darker Nations, 188; Atif Kubursi and Salim Mansur, “The Political Economy of Middle Eastern Oil,” in Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, ed. Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey R. D. Underhill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 313–27; David Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets.

37. Jodi Kim, “Settler Modernity, Debt Imperialism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise,” Social Text 135 (2018): 41–61.

38. David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 74.

39. Saskia Sassen, “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2 (2000): 503–24; Nasra M. Shah, “Gender and Labour Migration to the Gulf Countries,” Feminist Review 77, no. 1 (2004): 183–85.

40. Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2013).

41. Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy.

42. Peter Beaumont, “The $18bn Arms Race Helping to Fuel Middle East Conflict,” Guardian, April 23, 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/the-18bn-arms-race-middle-east-russia-iran-iraq-un.

43. In his study of Nixon’s shift from the gold standard to a floating dollar as central to “the economic strategy of American empire,” Michael Hudson describes the resulting inequality in debt obligations as a primary inequity in the global financial system. Although Hudson uses the term “strategy,” he clarifies that the outcome was not initially envisioned by the Nixon administration. Hudson’s Marxist account of financial empire as a strategy to overcome U.S. balance-of-payment difficulties and to maintain military dominance internationally is unique in its acceptance by some U.S. conservatives in government and think tanks (especially libertarians). They may be attracted by its emphasis on how Nixon’s move enhanced U.S. power or by the possible suggestion that the gold standard provides a more rational system of valuation. After the book was published, Hudson was hired by the right-wing Hudson Institute and spent years there before returning to academia. See Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

44. Phillip Connor, “International Migration: Key Findings from the U.S., Europe and the World,” Pew Research Center, December 15, 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/15/international-migration-key-findings-from-the-u-s-europe-and-the-world.

45. Sabine Henning, “Overview of Global Trends in International Migration and Urbanization” (PowerPoint presentation, UN Expert Group Meeting on Sustainable Cities, Human Mobility and International Migration, New York, September 7, 2017), www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf/expert/27/presentations/I/presentation-Henning-final.pdf.

46. Ting Ma, Rui Lu, Na Zhao, and Shih-Lung Shaw, “An Estimate of Rural Exodus in China Using Location-Aware Data,” PLoS ONE 13, no. 7 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201458.

47. Kartik Roy, Clem Tisdell, and Mohammed Alauddin, “Rural-Urban Migration and Poverty in South Asia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 22 (1992): 57–72.

48. “Urbanization and Migration,” Migration Data Portal, accessed February 2, 2020, https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/urbanisation-et-migration.

49. Nicholas De Genova, “The Borders of ‘Europe’ and the European Question,” in Nicholas De Genova, ed., The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–36; Seth Holmes and Heide Castañeda, “Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 12–24.

50. United Nations Human Settlements Programme, World Cities Report 2016: Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures (Nairobi: UN-Habitat, 2016), chap. 4, http://wcr.unhabitat.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Chapter4-WCR-2016.pdf.

51. Henning, “Overview of Global Trends.”

52. Jennifer Burney and V. Ramanathan, “Recent Climate and Air Pollution Impacts on Indian Agriculture,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 46 (2014): 16319–24.

53. Marco Grasso, “Oily Politics: A Critical Assessment of the Oil and Gas Industry’s Contribution to Climate Change,” Energy Research and Social Science 50 (2019): 106–15.

54. See, most notably, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). On postsocialism and postcolonialism, see Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 6–34.

55. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. R. J. Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 265.

56. Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).

57. Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism,” 63–87.

58. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

59. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Paula Chakravartty, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—an Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 364.

60. Robinson, Black Marxism, 26.

61. Robin Kelley, “What Is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?” (lecture, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, November 7, 2017), https://simpsoncenter.org/news/2017/10/robin-d-g-kelley-racial-capitalism-nov-7; Malini Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint: American Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 17–33.

62. Kasia Paprocki, “All That Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination and Climate Change Adaptation,” Antipode 51, no. 1 (2018): 295–315 (quote on 309).

63. Ariel Cohen, “Saudi Aramco IPO Hits $2 Trillion Mark amid Guarded Forecast,” Forbes, December 18, 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/12/18/saudi-aramco-ipo-hits-2-trillion-mark-but-forecast-still-guarded/#7ef3929942e6.

64. Frantz Fanon, “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, rev. ed. (1963; New York: Grove, 2004), 97–144.

65. Kirk Hamilton, Quentin Wodon, Diego Barrot, and Ali Yedan, “Human Capital and the Wealth of Nations: Global Estimates and Trends,” The Changing Wealth of Nations: Building a Sustainable Future, ed. Glenn-Marie Lange, Quentin Wodon, and Kevin Carey (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2018), 116.

66. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).

Chapter Three

1. Walton Look Lai, Indentured Sugar, Caribbean Labor: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918; Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

2. Ginu Zacharia Oomen, “South Asian Migration to the GCC Countries: Emerging Trends and Challenges,” in South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries: History, Policies, Development, ed. Prakash C. Jain and Ginu Zacharia Oomen (London: Routledge, 2016), 31.

3. Prakash C. Jain and Ginu Zacharia Oomen, introduction to South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries, 2.

4. This is the fourth major geographic formation of the South Asian diaspora, following the Indian Ocean merchant migrations, the indenture and Kangani systems in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, and the postindependence migrations to the North.

5. Andrzej Kapiszewski, “Arab versus Asian Migrant Workers in the GCC Countries,” in Jain and Oomen, South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries, 46–71; Zakir Hussain, “GCC’s Immigration Policy in the Post-1990s: Contextualising South Asian Migration,” in Jain and Oomen, South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries, 93–120.

6. Kapiszewski, “Arab versus Asian Migrant Workers,” 56.

7. Oomen, “South Asian Migration to the GCC Countries,” 22.

8. Rupananda Roy, “The Political Economy of Labour Migration from Bangladesh: Power, Politics, and Contestation” (PhD diss., University of Adelaide, 2016), 115–16.

9. Rita Afsar, “Revisiting the Saga of Bangladeshi Labour Migration to the Gulf States: Need for New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches,” in Jain and Oomen, South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries, 159.

10. Roy, “Political Economy of Labour Migration from Bangladesh,” 113–20, 130–31.

11. Oomen, “South Asian Migration to the GCC Countries,” 24.

12. Kareem Fahim, “Saudi Arabia Encouraged Foreign Workers to Leave—and Is Struggling After So Many Did,” Washington Post, February 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudi-arabia-encouraged-foreign-workers-to-leave----and-is-struggling-after-so-many-did/2019/02/01/07e34e12-a548-11e8-ad6f-080770dcddc2_story.html

13. Global Report on Internal Displacement 2018 (Geneva: IDMC, 2018), 7, www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2018; “Dhaka: Improving Living Conditions for the Urban Poor” (Bangladesh Development Series Paper No. 17, World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007), xiii. IDMC notes that Bangladesh does not maintain systematic data on internal displacement.

14. Afsar, “Revisiting the Saga of Bangladeshi Labour Migration to the Gulf,” 161–63.

15. National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (Alexandria, VA: CNA, 2007).

16. Marcus D. King and Ralph H. Espach, Global Climate Change and State Stability (Alexandria, VA: CNA 2009), 21.

17. Asma Khan Lone, “How Can Climate Change Trigger Conflict in South Asia?” Foreign Policy, November 20, 2015, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/20/how-can-climate-change-trigger-conflict-in-south-asia.

18. Climate Change and Security in Bangladesh: A Case Study (Dhaka: Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies and Saferworld, 2009), 21.

19. Atiya Husain, “Retrieving the Religion in Racialization: A Critical Review,” Sociology Compass 11, no. 3 (2017): e12507, https://doi/10.111/soc4.12507; Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls 9, no. 2 (2007): 148–61; Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), chap. 3. See also Etienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 17–28.

20. German Advisory Council on Global Change, Climate Change as a Security Risk (London: Earthscan, 2008), 3.

21. M. Sophia Newman, “Will Climate Change Spark Conflict in Bangladesh?” Diplomat, June 27, 2014, https://thediplomat.com/2014/06/will-climate-change-spark-conflict-in-bangladesh.

22. Gardiner Harris, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land,” New York Times, March 28, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/facing-rising-seas-bangladesh-confronts-the-consequences-of-climate-change.html.

23. Nicholas Kristof, “Swallowed by the Sea,” New York Times, January 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/opinion/sunday/climate-change-bangladesh.html.

24. See Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

25. Kasia Paprocki, “All That Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination and Climate Change Adaptation,” Antipode 51, no. 1 (2019): 295–315.

26. George Naufal and Ismail Genc, Expats and the Labor Force: The Story of the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 21. Thanks to Naveeda Khan for discussing the IMF’s change in designation with me.

27. Rita Afsar includes an example of crop loss leading to the decision to migrate to the Gulf in “Revisiting the Saga of Bangladeshi Labour Migration to the Gulf States,” 166.

28. Harris, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land.”

29. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (Dhaka: Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2009), 17.

30. Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Armed Conflict and the Environment: A Critique of the Literature,” Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 3 (1998): 381–400; Adano Wario Roba and Karen Witsenburg, Surviving Pastoral Decline: Pastoral Sedentarisation, Natural Resource Management, and Livelihood Diversification in Marsabit District, Northern Kenya (Amsterdam: Mellen, 2008); Ole Magnus Thiesen, Helge Holtermann, and Halvard Buhaug, “Climate Wars? Assessing the Claim That Drought Breeds Conflict,” International Security 36, no. 3 (2011–12): 79–106; Nils Petter Gleditsch and Ragnhild Nordås, “Conflicting Messages? The IPCC on Conflict and Human Security,” Political Geography 43 (2014): 82–90.

31. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: McClure Phillips, 1909), www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4341/pg4341-images.html.

32. IPCC AR5, Working Group II, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, Vulnerability, pt. A, Global and Sectoral Aspects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 758.

33. Don Belt, “The Coming Storm,” National Geographic, May 2011, www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/05/bangladesh.

34. Debjani Bhattacharya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

35. Naveeda Khan, “The Death of Nature in the Era of Climate Change,” in Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance, ed. Roma Chaterji (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 292.

36. Khan, “Death of Nature in the Era of Climate Change,” 292.

37. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Politics of Climate Change Is More Than the Politics of Capitalism,” Theory, Culture, and Society 34, no. 2–3 (2017): 25–37.

38. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 4.

39. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222.

40. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 222.

41. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 221–22.

42. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3–4.

43. Ghosh, Great Derangement, 5.

Chapter Four

1. Colin Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir, “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1421533112.

2. Craig Welch, “Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says,” National Geographic, March 2, 2015, www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought.

3. Robinson Meyer, “Does Climate Change Cause More War?,” Atlantic, February 12, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/does-climate-change-cause-more-war/553040; Courtland Adams, Tobias Ide, Jon Barnett, and Adrien Detges, “Sampling Bias in Climate-Conflict Research,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 200–203, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0068-2.

4. See “Water Conflict,” Pacific Institute, 2019, www.worldwater.org/conflict.html; Peter H. Gleick, “Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria,” Weather, Climate, and Society 6, no. 3 (2014): 331–40, https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059.1.

5. General Charles H. Jacoby (Ret.), “The Biggest National Security Threat You Haven’t Thought Of,” The Climate 25, Weather Channel, accessed December 1, 2020, https://features.weather.com/climate25/project/general-charles-h-jacoby-ret.

6. David Livingstone, “Changing Climate, Human Evolution, and the Revival of Environmental Determinism,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 4 (2012): 564–95; Steven Frenkel, “Geography, Empire, and Environmental Determinism,” Geographical Review 82, no. 2 (1992): 143–53.

7. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 193.

8. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

9. See, most notably, Suzanna Sawyer and Arun Agrawal, “Environmental Orientalisms,” Cultural Critique 45 (2000): 71–108. See also Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Ramachandra Guha, “American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 71–83; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

10. Betsy Hartmann, “Rethinking Climate Refugees and Climate Conflict: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Politics of Policy Discourse,” Journal of International Development 22 (2010): 234.

11. Raymond L. Bryant, “Beyond the Impasse: The Power of Political Ecology in Third World Environmental Research,” Area 29, no. 1 (March 1997): 6–7.

12. Jan Selby and Clemens Hoffman, “Rethinking Climate Change, Conflict, and Security,” Geopolitics 19, no. 4 (2014): 748.

13. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 205.

14. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Bruggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), 63.

15. For classic postcolonial feminist critiques of humanitarian representation, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (London: MacMillan, 1988), 271–313; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 196–220.

16. See, for example, Simon Goodman, Ala Sirriyeh, and Simon McMahon, “The Evolving (Re)categorisations of Refugees throughout the ‘Migrant/Refugee Crisis,’ ” Community and Applied Social Psychology 27, no. 2 (2017): 105–14; Dennis Lichtenstein, Jenny Ritter, and Birte Fähnrich, “The Migrant Crisis in German Public Discourse,” in The Migrant Crisis: European Perspectives and National Discourses, ed. Melani Barlai, Birte Fähnrich, Christina Griessler, and Markus Rhomberg (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2017), 107–26; Ju-Sung Lee and Adina Nerghes, “Refugee or Migrant Crisis? Labels, Perceived Agency, and Sentiment Polarity in Online Discussions,” Social Media and Society (July–September 2018): 1–22; Seth Holmes and Heidi Castañeda, “Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Germany and Beyond,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 12–24.

17. Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Camilla Hawthorne, “In Search of Black Italia: Notes on Race, Belonging, and Activism in the Black Mediterranean,” Transition 123 (2017): 152–74.

18. Nicholas De Genova, “Migration and the Mobility of Labor,” in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, ed. Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–19, Oxford Handbooks Online; Nicholas De Genova, “The Borders of ‘Europe’ and the European Question,” introduction to The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–36.

19. Jessica Corbett, “ ‘We Have to Get This Right’: Historic Bill in the US House Would Create Specific Protections for Climate Refugees,” Common Dreams, October 14, 2019, www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/24/we-have-get-right-historic-bill-us-house-would-create-specific-protections-climate.

20. Rob Bailey and Gemma Green, “Should Europe Be Concerned about Climate Refugees?,” Newsweek, May 18, 2016, www.newsweek.com/should-europe-be-concerned-about-climate-refugees-460661.

21. Tom Bawden, “Refugee Crisis: Is Climate Change Affecting Mass Migration?,” Independent, September 7, 2015, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/refugee-crisis-climate-change-affecting-mass-migration-10490434.html.

22. Frank Biermann, “Migrant Crisis: ‘If We Don’t Stop Climate Change … What We See Right Now Is Just the Beginning,’ ” interview by Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News, September 14, 2015, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13092015/migrant-crisis-syria-europe-climate-change.

23. Nick Watts, et. al. “The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: From 25 Years of Inaction to a Global Transformation for Public Health,” Lancet 391:10120 (October 30, 2017).

24. John Wendle, “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” Scientific American, March 2016, 52–53.

25. Wendle, “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” 52.

26. Jan Selby, Omar Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme, “Climate Change and the Syrian War Revisited,” Political Geography 60 (2017): 238.

27. Lina Eklund and Darcy Thompson, “Differences in Resource Management Affects Drought Vulnerability across the Borders between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey,” Ecology and Society 22, no. 4 (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-09179-220409.

28. Wendle, “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” 52.

29. Wendle, “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” 54.

30. Wendle, “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” 55.

31. Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger, Insurgency, Terrorism, and Organised Crime in a Warming Climate: Analysing the Links between Climate Change and Non-state Armed Groups (Berlin: Adelphi, 2016), 23–24.

32. Samar Yazbek, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (London: Ryder, 2015), 43, 51–52.

33. Yazbek, Crossing, 8–9.

34. Yazbek, Crossing, 5.

35. Marwan Hisham, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, illus. Molly Crabapple (New York: One World, 2018), 74, 68.

36. Hisham, Brothers of the Gun, 83, 105–6.

37. Thomas Friedman, “The Revolution Fueled by Climate Change,” The Climate 25, Weather Channel, accessed December 1, 2020, https://features.weather.com/climate25/project/thomas-friedman.

38. Farah Nasif, “In Syria, ‘Everything Changed with the Drought,’ ” The Climate 25, Weather Channel, accessed December 1, 2020, https://features.weather.com/climate25/project/farah-nasif.

39. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 5.

40. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 99–100.

41. Andreas Malm, “Tahrir Submerged? Five Theses on Revolution in the Era of Climate Change,” Nature Capitalism Socialism 25, no. 3 (2014): 29.

42. Malm, “Tahrir Submerged?,” 30.

43. Andreas Malm, “Revolution in a Warming World: Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian Revolutions,” Socialist Register 53 (2017), https://climateandcapitalism.com/2018/03/17/malm-revolutionary-strategy.

44. Jesse Ribot, “Cause and Response: Vulnerability and Climate in the Anthropocene,” in Global Agrarian Transformations, vol. 1, New Directions in Agrarian Political Economy, ed. Madeleine Fairbairn, Jonathan Fox, S. Ryan Isakson, Michael Levien, Nancy Lee Peluso, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones, and Kalyanakrishnan “Shivi” Sivaramakrishnan (London: Routledge, 2016), 16.

45. On October 9, 2019, Turkey invaded the Rojava autonomous region of northern Syria, displacing 300,000 people and killing dozens.

46. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “The Dark Path of Minority Politics,” April 19, 2019, www.yassinhs.com/2019/04/19/the-dark-path-of-minority-politics/#fn1.

47. Andy Heintz, “Dissidents of the Left: In Conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh,” August 28, 2018, www.yassinhs.com/2018/08/28/dissidents-of-the-left-in-conversation-with-yassin-al-haj-saleh.

48. Abdullah Öcalan, “Abdullah Öcalan on the Return to Social Ecology” [translated excerpt of Beyond State, Power, and Violence], Make Rojava Green Again, April 10, 2019, https://makerojavagreenagain.org/2019/04/10/abdullah-ocalan-on-the-return-to-social-ecology.

49. Make Rojava Green Again: Building an Ecological Society (London: Internationalist Commune of Rojava/Dog Section Press, 2018).

Conclusion

1. Alejandra Mejía, “1.5 Gen Testimonios: My Family’s Journey,” Migrant Roots Media, March 5, 2019, www.migrantrootsmedia.org/articles/2019/3/5/15-generation-migrant-roots-un-testimonio-part-i-alejandra-meja.

2. Macarena Gomez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), xviii–xix.

3. Ting Ma, Rui Lu, Na Zhao, and Shih-Lung Shaw, “An Estimate of Rural Exodus in China Using Location-Aware Data,” PLoS ONE, July 31, 2018, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201458.

4. “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China,” Chuǎng (blog), February 26, 2020, http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion; Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, “One Question: COVID-19 and Capitalism,” State of Nature (blog), March 27, 2020, http://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-covid19-coronavirus-capitalism.

5. Bruce Braun, “Thinking the City through SARS: Bodies, Topologies, Politics,” in Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City, ed. S. Harris Ali and Roger Keil (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 250–66.

6. For discussions of how anti-Black labor exploitation is innovated in particular ways through later models of Asiatic labor accumulation, see Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logics of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Because Day’s book categorizes Asiatic labor regimes within the same “alien” category as enslaved African Americans, it is necessary to complement discussion of such similarities with contextualization of the innovations of finance and distributed production that accompany twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asian diasporas.

7. See Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

8. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 244.

9. On the idealism of posthumanist critique and the problem of anthropomorphizing the human, see Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), viii, 8.

10. Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-racism’?,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 17–28.

11. See Bhishnupriya Ghosh, Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).