Unsustainable Borders: Globalization in a Climate-Disrupted World

Abstract

Climate change and the responses to it reveal starkly different assumptions about borders, security and the ethical communities for whom politicians and activists speak. Starting with the contrasting perspectives of international activist Greta Thunberg and United States President Donald Trump on climate change this essay highlights the diverse political assumptions implicit in debates about contemporary globalization. Rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly severe climate change impacts and accelerating extinctions are the new context for scholarly work in the Anthropocene. Incorporating insights from earth system sciences and the emerging perspectives of planetary politics suggests a novel contextualization for contemporary social science which now needs to take non-stationarity and mobility as the appropriate context for investigating contemporary transformations. The challenge for social scientists and borders scholars is to think through how to link politics, ethics and bordering practices in ways that facilitate sustainability, while taking seriously the urgency of dealing with the rapidly changing material context that globalization has wrought.