Emergency from Below: Climate Emergency from Colonial and Decolonial Perspectives

This project introduces the concept of ‘emergency from below’ as an alternative to influential efforts to declare a global state of climate emergency.

Though these measures are intended to promote sustainability, development scholars have shown that they transform climate change into a security threat, and so shift agency in climate policy-making to security institutions in the developed Global North.

In this way, climate emergency declarations risk bypassing climate-vulnerable postcolonial regions, and therefore replicate the dynamic of colonial power.

Informed by these arguments, but also by the view that ´emergency´ remains valuable for communicating a need for urgent action, this project rethinks the concept from the vantage of formerly colonised nations and groups.

Where existing studies are located in the social sciences, and operate at the macro-level of policy, the project brings together researchers in literature and history, and employs the transdisciplinary method of reading ´from below´.

Participants examine cultural production and archival material from (post)colonial India, South Africa and North America, focusing on instances where emergency governance has been imposed to manage socio-ecological crises.

The aim is to develop an account of these emergencies that arises out of the experiences of those most afflicted, and to examine how this paves the way for sustainability across North and South.