Keeping Disaster at Bay: Securing the Climate Threat in “America’s Mediterranean”
The contours of what we refer to as the Caribbean have been indelibly shaped by US empire: fault-lines inscribed in the landscape, as in the Panama Canal; in more classically colonial articulations as US commonwealths; a reach extended through bases, bananas and business. Adopting the analytical lens of ‘securityscape’, I explore 21st century US empire in relation to the construction of a Caribbean climate threat. Taking inspiration from Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ‘scapes’, the suffix ‘scape’ accounts for the multi-perspectival and historically contingent global flows of security: security is neither a fixed nor fundamentally good relation, rather encompassing a shifting constellation of peoples, institutions, and ideas which define, perceive, and govern threat.[1] The relations of coloniality and climate change in the Caribbean are not only embedded in past and present extractions and racist dispossessions, but also in the assumptions guiding the management of climate change. Through the prism of environmental […]