Description
Does surviving a climate crisis necessarily mean cooperation? Drawing on Parenti’s concept of the ‘armed lifeboat' (2011), wherein wealthy states use repressive and exclusionary border policies to ‘defend’ against climate displacement, this paper explores the extent to which some ideological entrepreneurs and state actors have proposed strategies that safeguard individual state security at the expense of the broader ecosphere. These as-yet largely unimplemented strategies include solar geoengineering, extractive industry in pursuit of a ‘Green New Deal', and political alliances with far-right groups in the name of 'eco-bordering' (Turner and Bailey, 2022). Such strategies are potentially disastrous for scholars and activists working on ecocide and human security: a set of seductive promises that climate impacts can be deflected, by tolerating (or even worsening) widespread or long-term damage to the environment elsewhere.
By studying national security strategies, think tanks, and individual policy advocates, this paper seeks to investigate whether such strategies have support among Global North states, whether they are politically unworkable (as per Burnett and Mach’s ‘precariously unprepared Pentagon (2021)), or whether a cooperative approach on behalf of the entire biosphere remains paramount.
