The return of Donald Trump to the White House for a second presidential term has been characterized by deep partisan divisions that have exacerbated polarizing debates around national identity, immigration, patriotism, and freedom of speech. Disquieting images of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention and deportation operations have circulated on social media platforms and in mainstream news reports. The graphic violence and proliferation of inhumane detention centers, exemplified by the rebranding of the South Florida Detention Facility as Alligator Alcatraz, align with Claire Rodier’s insightful analysis of the stakes surrounding contemporary migration debates described in Xenophobie business: À quoi servent les contrôles migratoires. These raids and stops aimed at rounding up individuals categorized as “undocumented” or with “criminal records,” have in fact specifically targeted Central American and Latino populations, including US citizens and legal residents, providing incontrovertible evidence of racial profiling. Elsewhere, in the United Kingdom, the architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage – Member of Parliament for Clacton and Leader of the right-wing populist party Reform UK (itself an outgrowth of the UK Independence Party and subsequently the Brexit Party) – continues to promote anxiety and fear over immigration and currently enjoys the highest voter intention score of any political party.

During the Summer of 2025, an online social media campaign “Operation Raise the Colours” was launched in the United Kingdom, encouraging the widespread public display of the Cross of St. George English flag alongside Union flags. Some argued that these actions were to be understood as acts of patriotism aimed at fostering national pride, but ample evidence supported a more critical interpretation, especially since the campaign was appropriated to promote far-right anti-immigration, migrant-phobic, and Islamophobic agendas. The case for the latter position was relatively easy to make. For example, on September 13, 2025, over 100,000 protestors took to the streets of London in an anti-migrant protest spearheaded by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson who was able to amplify a range of racist conspiracy theories and hate speech. Elon Musk evoked “the rapidly increasing erosion of Britain” via a video conference link, doubling down on his oft-repeated claims concerning “white genocide” in South Africa. And the leader of France’s nationalist party Reconquête!, Éric Zemmour, joined protestors and claimed “We are undergoing the same process of great replacement of our European peoples by peoples from the South and from Muslim cultures. We are colonized by our former colonies and we do not want to become a minority on our own soil. We have a duty to fight to.”

Furthermore, the presence of slogans such as “Stop the Boats” – to which former Conservative Party leaders had previously resorted in order to bolster support for policies aimed at restricting “illegal” immigration with the arrival of small boats crossing the English Channel – at various gatherings and protests left little doubt as to how these sentiments were being instrumentalized. Objecting to immigration has become a dominant feature of contemporary politics and extensive recourse has been made to increasingly vague categories that include illegal, irregular, clandes­tine, undocumented, unauthorized, and unwanted criminals, collectively representing a danger, a menace and threat to the nation-state, one that therefore calls for demonstrable countermeasures. As French author Roman Gary once wrote, “Patriotism is love for one’s own, nationalism is hatred of others.”

The con­sequences of such rhetoric were strikingly evident in the attacks by mobs of white people that took place in various cities in the United Kingdom during the summer of 2024 in the aftermath of the stabbing of three young girls in the seaside town of Southport. These occurred following inaccurate claims that the assailant was a Muslim asylum seeker, rather than a British Christian born in Wales to Rwandan parents. As David Olusoga remarked, “They are not looking to address inequalities but to target those whom they will never accept as fellow Britons. In doing so, they, and those swept up in the chaos they foment, are willing to tear apart the nation to which they preposterously claim to be patriots.” There are of course numerous precursors to the aforementioned rhetoric. After all, Winston Churchill had no qualms championing the usage of the slogan “Keep England White” as the Conservative Party headed for a General Election in 1955. Later, on April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell (Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West) shared his anti-Commonwealth immigration stance at the Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, an intervention that became known as the Rivers of Blood Speech. On this occasion, he claimed to relay the concerns of a growing number of his constituents: “Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.”

These challenges are of course not foreign to France where the afterlives of empire have proven to be equally stubborn. This is a reality that cannot easily be overlooked, as French historian Pascal Blanchard has observed, pointing to the 2022 French presidential election in which, over sixty years since the majority of the French Empire achieved independence, every major candidate made statements about colonial history in a fierce process of one-upmanship. Bringing into conversation colonial history, far-right politics and nationalism, and environmental debates, issues and questions, Climates of Migration examines how environmental and migration issues intersect, and how the instrumentalization of these is shaping contemporary societies as evident in media discourse, propaganda, literature, art, visual culture, policy-making and new technologies. The plural “climates” in the title accentuates the figurative non-literal sense to signify the atmosphere that is attached to anxiety, disinformation, fear and violence. Competing narratives and storytelling mechanisms conjointly operate over a longer history of colonial conquest and remain present in the mind-sets informing the afterlives of empire, as evidenced in debates on identity politics, nationalism, environmental, racial and social justice.

All of these developments have deep roots in colonialism, and planetary climate change and the accompanying disruption to the global ecosystem can be traced to European territorial conquest and expansion and subsequently mapped onto the contemporary institutional (European Union) and political discourses that are structuring our present, while also enabling unforeseen forms of planetary consciousness. Although belated, recognition in 2022 by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the role of colonialism in “dangerous anthropogenic interference” was an important step: “Vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions, driven by patterns of intersecting socio-economic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism.” French philosopher Bruno Latour drew attention to the ways in which a renewed consciousness of the importance of collective action and political engagement were urgently needed in order to confront emerging crises. In one of his last published works, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Où atterrir: comment s’orienter en politique) he convincingly demonstrated the various ways in which climate change had bent the arc of politics in new directions: “We can understand nothing about the politics of the last fifty years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center” and link it with “the migratory crisis” because “it is the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land.”

The response to shifting migration patterns has been overwhelmingly defined by fear-mongering and scapegoating which in turn have influenced the negative characterization of displaced subjects. Extensive recourse that has been made to climate metaphors in order to amplify anti-immigration rhetoric – swamped, swarm, floods, storms, waves, inundations, tides, flows, hurricanes, tsunamis, swarms – collectively delineating the parameters of an invasion narrative that alleges cultural, political and social saturation and submersion. These narratives associated with uncontrollable, menacing, and threatening phenomena that disrupt and overwhelm societies, blaming “the most downtrodden,” serve to legitimize borders, frontiers, ramparts and walls under the pretext of furthering nationalist and protectionist responses, and these representations can only be generative of nativistic rhetoric rather than shining a light on “the system responsible” as Achille Mbembe has shown in La communauté terrestre. In France, the National Front and its successor National Rally have platformed patriotic ecology as an integral component of its broader de-demonization strategy aimed at reforming the party’s image and reputation and widening the appeal of their policies. The appeal is equational: land, territory and identity.

Climates of Migration is not, therefore, a book specifically about climate migrants, but rather, similarly to the title of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Après le changement climatique, penser l’histoire) the plural “climates” allows for a consideration of the various ways in which the term is commonly deployed in a figurative non-literal sense in order to signify atmosphere. Accordingly, it is attached to anxiety, change, disinformation, fear and violence. Conclusions are applicable to other regions of the world given the overarching context in which the “colonial Anthropocene” helps us understand the impact of historical domination, effectively reversing, as Amitav Ghosh argued in The Great Derangement: Climate Chage and the Unthinkable (Le Grand Dérangement: D’Autres récits à l’ère de la crise climatique) as Amitav Ghosh argued, “the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us.” The ensuing scramble for resources was motivated by the mistaken belief that these were bountiful and limitless. Indeed, awareness of the limitations of planetary resources defines what French economist and historian Arnaud Orain has elaborated in terms of a “confiscated world,” one in which a “finite capitalism” operates as “a vast naval and territorial enterprise of monopolization of assets – land, mines, maritime zones, enslaved people, warehouses, submarine cables, satellites, digital data – carried out by nation-states and private companies in order to generate rentier income outside the competitive principle.”

In chapter 1, the tentacular planetary reach of European colonial powers is examined, privileging the conjunction between “nationalism-capitalism.” Expeditions were enabled by new technologies and findings in astronomy, mathematics and physics, while other innovations (including the radio, film, chromolithography and electronically operated presses) enhanced propagandist communication and dissemination and provided citizens with the associated ingredients that were adventure and danger. To this end, a number of board games were produced during this era, featuring various soft and hard commodities associated with each region of Empire and providing important insights as to how people interacted with material culture. These exploited the precarious balance between chance and strategy and capitalized upon the experiential realities of colonial assignments, and the design of the games replicated in this regard the defining elements of the colonial enterprise while also of course mobilizing support for the expansionist drive. Questions of mobility – imaginative and physical – were therefore central to the production and visualization of Empire, and today, border control mechanisms and defending sovereignty can be traced back to this era. In chapter 2, many of these are explored, notably EU policy-making (“Green Deal” and “New Pact on Migration and Asylum of the EU”), the management of migration “crisis” and lingering disagreements and polemics pertaining to the categorization, definition and recognition of climate migrants and climate refugees.

Building on the conclusions of chapter 2, and reappraising the coexistence of insular and open thinking and complex and simplistic reasoning, the focus in chapter 3 shifts towards an engagement with categories such as empathy, sympathy, affect and emotions, and considers how cultural productions enhance relationality rather than disidentification and detachment. Two strands intersect here. These models serve to highlight the real-life consequences of policy-making on individuals and groups, and how works of art and literature play a key role in challenging the logic of official decrees and policies by focusing on intentionality and perspective while also foregrounding the human experience and thereby reversing the rationale informing decision-making. Artistic and literary works are able to deploy a creative apparatus that can confront shifting political realities, mobilize consciousness and foster modes of identification and new ecological relations.

The focus on literary responses continues in chapter 4 through an in-depth analysis of an emerging corpus of works by African writers for whom transhistorical violence motivates political commitment based on scrutiny and witnessing, documenting, recording and calls for accountability. Historically, African literature has been a literature of contestation, and today, authors are increasingly engaging with environmental questions, culminating in what Cheryll Glotfelty has described as a “greening of fiction.” The discussion therefore showcases the distinct ways in which African literatures have been transformed as a result of the reassessment of the longstanding consequences of environmental ecocide, thereby contributing to a renewal of writing. These conclusions are relevant to the genealogy of African literature in which the appropriation of land, exploitation and extraction are ubiquitous. The works considered thus establish connections between colonial era land exploitation and contemporary agricultural practices, examine how extraction was leveraged, while situating these discussions in the broader context of climate change and linking environmental derangement with population displacement as a consequence of these actions.

Chapter 5 focuses on new technologies of communication and extraction, but also in terms of the interplay between ecology and propaganda. In the concluding section, answers are sought to a number of important questions: How has recourse to propaganda been used in order to further an anti-ecological agenda – denouncing warnings concerning global warming as fake news or promoting a lifestyle founded on the exponential use of industrial technologies – and how have pro-ecology positions centered on an unrelenting effort to prevent the systematic destruction of the environment and aimed at raising awareness and consciousness as well as encouraging behavior modification operated? These questions demand of us that we remain attentive moving forward to emerging phenomena such as “technocolonialism” and to what Giuliano da Empoli has termed The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World (L’Heure des prédateurs). The climate is one of uncertainty, raising questions about regulation and the boundaries of free speech. As Jenny Odell (How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy / Pour une résistance oisive) has remarked, “Capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.” Similarly, Hein de Haas has convincingly shown in How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics, that “Migration policies have often failed or been counterproductive because they are based on a series of false assumptions, or myths, about the nature, causes and impacts of migration” and because “Politicians […], interest groups and international organizations perpetuate a series of myths as part of deliberate strategies to distort the truth about migration. Such propaganda is part of active efforts to sow unjustified fear and misinformation.”

Conflating climate change with the ills of immigration and grafting a pernicious meaning on the process (migration) and the people concerned (migrants) generates a logic that operates optimally since it coincides with a diagnosis of catastrophic global warming and the long-term projected impact.