The geopolitics of climate change: Climate crises and ecological migrants

This thesis investigates the geopolitical ramifications of climate change by examining how extreme climatic events and environmental degradation precipitate spatial and social crises in the context of ecological migration. The climate crisis extends beyond a mere environmental phenomenon; it constitutes a multidimensional process intricately linked to spatial governance, state border regimes, and international migration frameworks. Adopting a critical geopolitical perspective, this study interrogates the intensification of climate change effects and their transformation into disasters, analysing how this process destabilises socio-spatial configurations in vulnerable regions. This dynamic engenders mobility and immobility regimes within a geopolitical framework, particularly reshaping migration trajectories in designated "hotspots" and "tipping points" of socio-ecological fragility. This research underscores that climate-induced migration cannot be sufficiently explained through environmental determinism alone, as it is inextricably embedded within broader structures of state migration policies, economic systems, security apparatuses, and the socially constructed nature of vulnerabilities. The thesis critically examines the intersection of extreme climatic disruptions and socio-economic precarity, exploring their role in conditioning migration patterns. Furthermore, it interrogates the framing of the climate crisis as a geopolitical construct and its instrumentalisation as both a discursive and material tool in inter-state power struggles. Ultimately, this study contends that climate migration does not emerge as an inevitable by-product of environmental deterioration but as a historically contingent and politically mediated process shaped by spatial, economic, and geopolitical power asymmetries. It challenges reductionist narratives that portray climate-induced displacement as an apolitical consequence of ecological transformations, instead situating it within the structural logics of capitalist accumulation, postcolonial inequalities, and state-driven spatial governance. In this regard, policies addressing climate-induced mobility must transcend securitised paradigms and instead adopt frameworks that critically engage with structural inequalities, spatial justice, and historically embedded systems of dispossession. Keywords: Climate Change, Geopolitics, Hotspots, Tipping Points, Climate-Induced Mobility and Immobility Regimes.