Territorializing the air: Border-crossing air pollution and the geopolitics of atmospheric science in East Asia

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the atmospheric science of transboundary air pollution was employed as a technopolitical strategy to secure a nation’s volumetric territory. In South Korea, border-crossing particulate matter from China has emerged as a controversial diplomatic concern. The Korean government heavily funded atmospheric science to monitor the transboundary incursion and quantify the amount of Chinese influence. The geoscience of polluted air was mobilized to restore the nation’s aerial sovereignty when transboundary materiality threatened its political authority to regulate atmospheric territory. The paper further examines how nationalistic science was challenged by an international air quality survey called KORUS-AQ, a study co-organized by NASA and Korea’s National Institute for Environmental Research. Korean experts used the joint mission with NASA to verify the transboundary impact on Seoul’s air quality and hold China responsible. US scientists, however, challenged this nation-centered vision by highlighting the underestimated domestic sources of air pollution. As a result, the aerial survey did not generate a unilateral understanding of nature but produced multiple and even contrasting territorial imaginations on a single airshed. Atmospheric science, I argue, functioned as a geopolitical arena where different visions on volumetric governance were enacted and competed.