Making and Resisting Uninhabitability: Climate Adaptation, Disasters and Dispossession in Barbuda

As extreme climatic events continue to intensify, so do the injustices they contribute to and the violence they can reinforce. Given this, the de-politicisation of climate change adaptation and the naturalisation of disasters become increasingly problematic, as they not only displace issues of justice, but also conceal violence. This thesis addresses some of the urgent questions that arise in this context, combining theoretical and empirical analyses to investigate how climate uninhabitability, mobilities, and disasters are defined and mobilised in climate adaptation discourse and policies, and with what consequences for people and places in terms of control and accumulation via dispossession. Three articles address this research problem. The first article asks how uninhabitability is used in the context of climate change discourses and policies around climate change (im)mobilities. Tracing the concept's roots in colonial imaginary geographies, the article argues that, today, uninhabitability continues to be a key label in processes of othering and in the production of climate change imaginative geographies, which in turn act as technologies of government. The second article interrogates the multiple and contested character of climate change discourses and practices around uninhabitability and disasters. The empirical analysis focuses on the Caribbean island of Barbuda which, in the aftermath of hurricane Irma, was declared uninhabitable justifying the displacement of its population. The concepts under scrutiny emerge as fundamentally political categories with normative power, susceptible to performative uses aimed at control and dispossession. The third article further delves into the performative use of adaptation and disasters as governmentality tools. The article mobilises the nexus between tourism, disaster capitalism, and colonialism to investigate the violence that post-political climate change narratives help to support. The empirical analysis of Barbuda in the aftermath of Irma is grounded in a critical overview of its history highlighting how disasters and adaptation provide new framings for the reproduction of long-standing violence.