Description
This article repositions climate change as constitutive of order’s transformation by foregrounding the politics of grievance. While International Relations (IR) scholarship typically treats climate change as a problem for international order it tends to describe justice grievances that emerge from climate effects as epiphenomenal governance issues. Instead, we argue that that climate-justice grievances are not epiphenomenal disturbances but productive forces that unsettle the material and ideational foundations of international order. Developing a taxonomy of climate grievances, differentiated by the severity of losses imposed, the claims expressed, and the (non)responses they elicit, we show how their articulation and contestation reshape the relationship between governance and public spheres thereby shaping and spurring the international order’s transformative processes. In mapping these dynamics, the article makes two central contributions. First, it expands IR’s analytical vocabulary by situating grievance as a driver of systemic change in a warming world. Second, it rethinks the relationship between order and justice, demonstrating that as climate effects deepen and overwhelmingly characterise the experiential reality, the two become mutually constitutive rather than axiologically opposed. The argument suggests that sustaining international order will depend less on its forceful preservation than on how grievances are rendered visible, recognised, and addressed substantively rather than performatively.
