Climate apartheid is a fruitful topic for interdisciplinary collaboration due to its multiple meanings. Coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the term generally describes a world where the rich insulate themselves from the most catastrophic effects of climate change while racialized and formerly colonized people bear its worst consequences.
How does climate apartheid relate to historic apartheid, to the crime of apartheid, and to contemporary (and historic) global inequality? The climate apartheid project aims to foster dialogue on these questions through the contributions of scholars from a variety of disciplines.
My own work on climate apartheid takes very seriously Nancy Tuana’s observation that climate apartheid should not be limited to a description of the disproportionate impact of climate change on groups racialized as inferior. Instead, research on climate apartheid should examine how racism is deeply incorporated into historical institutions and social practices relevant to the current climate crisis.
In my scholarship, I attempt to put the concept of climate apartheid into conversation with the interdisciplinary literature on racial capitalism. Although both concepts originate in South Africa, the scholarly and popular literature connecting them is surprisingly sparse. Exploring climate apartheid through the framework of racial capitalism sheds light on how capitalism’s profit-making processes depend on the stratification of humans into superior and inferior races and on the unbridled extraction of wealth from nature. The outcome of these profit-making and race-making processes is an ecological crisis of epochal proportions – creating privileged enclaves for some and racial sacrifice zones for others.
Law plays an important role in facilitating and justifying the destruction of nature for profit and the racialization of the majority of the world’s population. In one of my presentations at Durham, I examined the role of international investment law in the construction of racial hierarchies and the perpetuation of fossil fuel dependency – creating a legal system that single-mindedly protects the property rights of the fossil fuel industry while relegating racialized communities to what Fanon calls the zone of non-being – of that of dispossession, pollution, and violent repression of dissent. In a second presentation, I examined the pitfalls of adding the crime of ecocide to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. These include international criminal’s tendency to blame a few “bad apples” for injustices that are deeply structural, to selectively prosecute Africans, and to immunize from prosecution state and corporate officials from veto-wielding UN Security Council members who are often most culpable for widespread ecological destruction. Two themes of climate apartheid – racial stratification and segregation are reflected in the dual systems of justice that international law creates. A third theme – law’s construction of nature as an external object to be commodified or saved (reproducing the nature/culture binary) also emerges from this work.
Finally, my research agenda has been deeply enriched by conversations with scholars at Durham University and with other IAS Fellows who presented thought-provoking papers on the material legacy of mining in South Africa (including the containment of waste and of racialized populations rendered expendable), on the use of psychoanalytic theory to understand the links between climate change and authoritarian politics (the mind of climate apartheid), and on the important role of literature in articulating the embodied experience of climate apartheid and constructing emancipatory alternatives. I am deeply grateful to the IAS for creating a forum for these important interdisciplinary conversations.
Carmen G. Gonzalez
IAS Fellow
Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law
Loyola University Chicago School of Law
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