Nations without Borders: Climate Security and the South in the Epoch of the Anthropocene

The standard narrative on modern geopolitics is being re-scripted. Previous ingredients that made up the literature on high politics such as securing resources, rivalries over the control of territory and war plans are increasingly being replaced instead by concerns about the ‘mundane’ politics of global energy plans, food systems, infrastructure and city design. Meaningful geopolitics in the time of climate change, in other words, would now have to grapple with the inescapable urgency for sustaining key ecological, biological and atmospheric indicators at the planetary level. If ‘planetary boundaries’ are being crossed in the Epoch of the Anthropocene, however, should governments in the global South and the developing world worry about becoming nations without borders?