Abstract:
Anthropogenic climate change is having a significant impact on human migration patterns across the globe. Bangladesh has been identified as a country that will disproportionately experience the negative consequences of climate change due to its geographical location, socioeconomic conditions and limited adaptive capacities. The experiences of civil society in Bangladesh will be used to construct a more comprehensive understanding of how foreign states, international organisations, governmental and non-governmental organisations and civil society respond to climate change induced migration. This thesis will interrogate three dominant narratives as they relate to environmental migrations, which have been favoured by politicians, business leaders, institutions and academics. The first dominant narrative is that of the climate-migration-security nexus, which characterises environmental migrants as posing a fundamental threat to international security. The second dominant narrative is an environmental discourse that calls for a universalised, cosmopolitan approach to combat climate change, a discourse that is in danger of ignoring the difference in contribution to climate change by the Global North and the Global South, and consequently their share of responsibility. The final dominant narrative characterises the potential environmental migrant as the helpless, vulnerable ‘other’ in need of saving. A construction of vulnerability reduces the agency of the environmental migrant. This thesis will employ a postcolonial framework to deconstruct the power dynamics evident within each of these three dominant narratives. The methodological research tool of critical discourse analysis will be utilized to demonstrate the relationship between language and society. Particular attention will be paid to the inadequacies of traditional notions of security that are entrenched in a state-centric model of international relations. The primacy of the nation state in the climate-migration-security nexus, for example, increases the ‘fear of the other’ through a normalisation of the ‘us vs. them’ dichotomy. All of the aforementioned narratives fail to properly attribute responsibility to high emission states and business corporations, which reinforce the continuation of the ‘status quo’ or ‘business as usual’. This approach fails to ensure human and environmental security. This thesis aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary discussion on climate change and migration, with a focus on deconstructing dominant narratives that perpetuate a continuation of the social, political and economic systems, which are currently failing us.