As storm surges, flooding, heatwaves, and prolonged drought, as ever more regular features of life under deteriorating climate conditions, are unmistakably violent, and their effects on the lives of vulnerable human populations and ecosystems across the world are devastating.
At the same time, a legal order that denies the victims of such ecological persecution a safe haven, no matter how great its use of force (e.g., detention, arrest, forced return) cannot, by definition, be violent. This assumption is challenged in this paper.
It argues that legal instruments are increasingly used to exclude those displaced by climatic conditions and to deny them sufficient normative status to ensure their safety.
The author calls for a new critical normative understanding of the relationship between climate change, violence, justice, and law, an approach that would reassess the democratic justifications for existing policies and reaffirm the legal and political status of climate-displaced people as equal members of the international community.
Learn more about this paper here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431015579967
Reference
Skillington, T. (2015). Climate justice without freedom: Assessing legal and political responses to climate change and forced migration: Assessing legal and political responses to climate change and forced migration. European Journal of Social Theory, 18(3), 288-307