Climate-Induced Migration: Rethinking International Law and the Crisis of International Solidarity

Mobegi, Tomkeen Onyambu (2022) Climate-Induced Migration: Rethinking International Law and the Crisis of International Solidarity. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

Climate-Induced Migration: Rethinking International Law and the Crisis of International Solidarity by Tomkeen Onyambu Mobegi This thesis raises critical questions about international law’s capacity to address climate-induced migration. Using Third World Approaches to International Law perspective, it exposes the role of colonial, imperial, and capitalist legacies in causing, framing, and addressing climate-induced migration. By focusing on how international law cyclically reproduces slow violence, enables securitisation, and undermines international solidarity through its violently capitalist and colonial predatory frameworks, the thesis argues that international law cannot address climate-induced migration. It further posits that the solution lies not in a binding legal definition of climate-induced migration, as the corpus of law associated with the phenomenon is ill-equipped to address it. Climate-induced migration traverses time and space, co-evolving with and within the dominant histories, structures, inequalities, attitudes, assumptions, and practices of international law. Within this continuum are systemic and structural violences that intertwine with climate change to exacerbate vulnerability, and are reified and legitimised by international law. Gaps in addressing climate-induced migration are situated in a larger pattern of hegemonic practices that use claims of newness to prompt a racialised crisis discourse and prevent a deeper understanding of climate-induced migration. This has amplified the push for climate-induced migration into ‘the crisis model of international law’ and made latent the causative and reactive reality of slow violence and securitisation. While a solution to this legal quagmire may lie in the reconceptualisation of the practice of international solidarity, this can only be achieved by simultaneously addressing the often under-emphasised colonial legacies, racial inequalities, economic structures, geopolitical biases, and other cycles of domination that have historically formed the place of marginalised and vulnerable peoples in international law. This thesis contributes to, first, providing critical insight into the international law history and histories that constitute, shape and define climate-induced migration; and, second, advancing TWAIL’s critical discourse and attempts to unravel how empire and the Global South have interacted through time and space to reproduce, sustain, and legitimise violence in international law.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Law and Social Justice
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	25 Aug 2023 11:40
Last Modified:	25 Aug 2023 11:40
DOI:	10.17638/03169773
Supervisors:	Farrell, Michelle Knox, Robert Currie, Samantha
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3169773