Research project

Climate change and geopolitics: discursive negotiations and new territorializations

Global climate change poses one of the pivotal challenges for the global community in the 21st century. Natural science studies have shown that the consequences of global climate change are going to vary significantly between different regions and are going to show for example in disasters like droughts, floods and tropical storms. These events encounter very different conditions in individual regional contexts.

The potential as well as already observable climate changes are charged and associated with various meanings on the levels of the affected societies and international politics. Decisive for the resulting interests, blame allocations and negotiation strategies are not only ecological considerations but oftentimes also economic and geopolitical aspects.

The project analyzes discursive negotiations in the context of global climate change and natural disasters associated with it in two regional case studies. Special focus is laid on the territorializations and spatializations within the debates.