Climate change resettlement and inhabitation: Spatialising cultures of colonial pasts and alternative futures in the Global South

Abstract

Climate change is an inherently human-made phenomenon that shapes the mobilities of species and things who, in turn, influence the ways climate change is experienced by humans. These multifaceted climate mobilities are grounded in the spatial histories of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and the legacies of socio-cultural injustice inflicted upon the Global South. Central to climate mobilities is climate change resettlement, which, because it is often informed by colonial cultures of modernity and capitalism, tends to exacerbate environmental change and collapse. Spatial forms of climate change resettlement and related urban and architectural forms of inhabitation, as this special issue highlights, are rooted in the cultural crisis of coloniality, legitimised among colonial powers and local populations in the Global South. An examination of the cultural dynamics and related politics of power embedded in urban and architectural discourses, we argue, is key in understanding and unlearning past and current (neo)colonial approaches to climate change. This introduction to the special issue argues that, by investigating climate resettlement in its broader definition and practices—within the historical complexities of ecological and national coloniality and warfare—enables a more thoughtful engagement with sustainable climate inhabitation. In order to surpass the limitations of coloniality and its entangled cultural-climatic relations with modernity, the articles of this special issue offer new frameworks to spatially examine colonial pasts and imagine situated, yet radically alternative approaches for the future. A broad temporal lens, we argue, is necessary as we face environmental upheaval and learn to cope with the destructive impacts of climate change in the Global South and beyond.

The history of anthropogenic climate change is intertwined with the cultural politics of the environment across spaces and time. These spatial and temporal dimensions are connected to our ever-changing human world and the ways in which we inhabit the Earth. Inhabitation's spatial aspects are relational, spanning local and global contexts; its temporal dimensions concern not only present realities and their futures, but also how the past has shaped the present and may be unlearned. Histories of environmental transformations have been formed by colonial legacies of modernity and capitalism, including resource extraction, land appropriation, and soil and water management. Studying the colonial roots of environmental transformations, we argue in this special issue, is essential for unpacking and altering the current and future cultural politics of climate change, and their imminent vulnerabilities.

The World Bank predicts that by 2050, the number of climate migrants in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America might together surpass some 120 million (Rigaud et al., 2018). Yet as critical geographers have demonstrated, notwithstanding the explicit rationale of climate resettlement developmental interventions, the separation of ‘climate’ and ‘non-climate’ mobilities is generally illusory (Kelley et al., 2022). In an attempt to mitigate the impact of both gradual and abrupt environmental transformations, societies not only move from places that have become uninhabitable, particularly by marginalised people, they also undergo cultural transformations (Klein, 2014; Tsing, 2015) as they adapt their environments, lifestyles and governance structures (Braun, 2014; Beuret, 2021; Ghosh, 2016). Given the significant spatial impacts of environmental change and their embedded social inequalities, extant epistemologies and methodologies have been employed to investigated how people navigate, alter and leave their environments, underscoring the multifaceted cultural aspects of these changes across space and time.

These topics have been central in recent discussions on climate change in this journal, with an emphasis on understanding the role of local and Indigenous knowledge (Rarai et al., 2022; Jerez et al., 2023; Bridel, 2022) and its potential to inform governmental approaches (Machen, 2018). This journal has also shed light on the enduring coloniality of knowledge and praxis haunting contemporary climate change policy and governance (Davis and Robbins, 2018; Beuret, 2021), revealing the ways in which responses to the climate crisis may serve to reinforce discrimination and displacement among marginalised peoples, and entrench a system of climate apartheid (Rice et al., 2022). To better understand their workings today and how we might develop alternative approaches for the future, we must unlearn coloniality—described by Mignolo and Walsh (2018) as the modern/colonial matrix of power—including its past formations, unquestioned concepts and purportedly neutral categories. Such unlearning (Azoulay, 2019) is not only conducted by re-examining the meanings of modernity and capitalism, but through studying the situated cultural-historical geographies and spatialities of environmental change. Unlearning the notions and workings of the colonial past should involve the active recovery of knowledge and practices—including climatically sensitive inhabitation and resilience—with attention to the ecological and environmental harms wrought by colonial settlement and climate resettlement.

This special issue focuses on the cultural politics of climate change and related human mobilities, inhabitation and resettlement in the Global South across the past, present and future. It examines historical and contemporary spatial interventions in environments of climatic change culturally embedded in our un/built environments, part of the Anthropocentric condition of extraction, what Anna Tsing analyses as “Earth stalked by Man” (2016: 2). As demonstrated throughout this special issue, climate change and extractivism cannot be isolated from Western military domination. Ecological and national coloniality and warfare have rendered resource-rich countries economically destitute by constraining access to land and the discriminatory uprooting of human and other-than-human life through expulsion, expropriation, extraction and resettlement. Situating climate change within the violence of imperialism and colonialism—and the progressive transformation of these phenomena into sovereign, neoliberal national powers—is key to mitigating the future impacts of climate change. These imperial and colonial powers continue to reside in our un/built environments, where, as fields for the production of cultural power, architecture and urbanism are crucial to revealing the coloniality and consequences of climate change.

As this special issue demonstrates, to unpack climatic change, we must address the architectural and biopolitical materialisation of colonial cultural power in practices of inhabitation and resettlement across time. This introduction, therefore, begins with an exploration of the spatio-temporalities of the climate crisis and its cultural politics. We then explore how climate resettlement and inhabitation are shaped by these entangled crises.

Spatial temporalities of the climate cultural crisis

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Tsing argues that environmental violence is culturally established in our un/built world, part of the “second nature” of the capitalist interventions in—and transformations of—the environment (Tsing, 2015: viii). For Tsing, the making of this second nature is rooted in the ideals of the Enlightenment that emerged from the spaces and practices of the plantation, meaning “those ecological simplifications in which living things are transformed into resources—future assets—by removing them from their life worlds” and thus creating “machines of replication, ecologies devoted to the production of the same” (Ibid: 3). From this moment on, the boundaries between “nature” and “culture” became questionable, where “naturecultures” and the inherent connection between the biological and socio-cultural spheres are one “story of biopower and biosociality, as well as of technoscience” (Haraway, 2003: 5). The inseparability of nature from culture, and the naturecultures cross-species conversation, individual lifetimes and the temporality of mortal bodies become important, as do their stories and histories. If, as Haraway argues, “history matters in naturecultures” (2003: 3), then climate resettlement and inhabitation are a crucial part of this history, including their discursive power and cultural and political representation.

Amitav Ghosh, in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, argues that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (2016: 9). For Ghosh, culture generates desires with imaginations and fantasies for things yet to come, but also for real artefacts and commodities that are among the principal drivers of the carbon-based economy. This culture—which is inherent to what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,” a post-political and immutable condition to which it is “now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative”—is constitutive of an environmentally damaging way of life whose only interest is further growth (2009: 7).

The past is present. The penetration of the logic of the colonial plantation and its mass-produced agriculture, of industrialisation and its mass-produced artefacts, of mass consumption and mass extraction, including of enslaved labour, is entangled with the ever-increasing logistical apparatuses and “infrastructure of Empire,” which offer “a very different cartography of political life” (Cowen, 2017: n.p.). Indeed, the environment registers ecologically ruinous imperial powers with what Chakrabarty describes as “geological agents” with “invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself” (Chakrabarty, 2023: 207). In order to understand the current climate crisis, scholars of the environment, as Klein (2014) argues, must urgently appeal to both local and global cultural perspectives within the postcolonial prism to explain how humanity has arrived at this dangerous place, and to grasp the transformations required to get us somewhere safer. As this special issue shows, it is through reading histories of imperialism and capitalism, and engaging with their cultural politics produced in architecture, visual art, technology and other creative forms, that we might understand how we found ourselves on the verge of climatic collapse, and how we might see our way out of it.

1972 was a pivotal year, marking the beginning of the end of ignorance of the climate crisis, and the emergence of global environmental consciousness. The publication of The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 2013 [1972]), which highlighted the dangers of fossil fuel-based economic growth, was particularly salient in sparking public action. In popular culture, these novel concerns appeared in film, television and comics; in architecture, experiments with renewable materials, solar systems, utopian communes, and sustainable buildings using local materials emerged as potential solutions (Loorbach et al., 2024). Although architecture envisioned a sustainable future long before the 1970s, concerns during that decade identified architects as part of the problem due to their land and resource management decisions. They were simultaneously viewed as intrinsic to a solution, with architects recognising their potential to help stabilise the Earth against capitalist and militarised violence (Scott, 2016).

Articles in this special issue highlight the fact that climate change and its planetary effects cannot be separated from the architectural, urban, scientific and military technologies developed through the dispossession and exploitation of Indigenous people and their cultural structures. In this respect, Anthropogenic mastery and environmental ruination are intertwined with destructive wars and geopolitical crises, where cultural modes of knowledge production are transformed and transferred from one emergency crisis to another (Abreek-Zubiedat and Phokaides, 2025; Katz, 2025). As revealed in this special issue, the complex relationship between climate change and ecological and national warfare can be better understood by tracing not only the forced displacement of communities, but also their resettlement, including by settler-colonial projects.

Ecologies of resettlement

Scholars of architecture, critical geography and anthropology have been concerned with the various spatial dimensions of resettlement—site plans, power dynamics and environmental impacts, as well as resettlement's effects on cultural practices, identities, cross-cultural knowledge production, and the agency of the resettled in resisting power (Malkki, 1992; Whyte 2013; Rogers and Wilmsen, 2019).

Resettlement is discussed as part of the universalised discourse of humanitarian practices of care, control and governance in times of warfare (Abreek-Zubiedat, 2023), or of large-scale economic development (Johnson, 2012; Wood, 2014) that forms part of the imperialised and globalised capitalist network reproducing and reinforcing injustice (Arnall, 2018). The complexity of how marginalised communities’ “right to stay put” in the Global South is set against systems of relocation and resettlement—ones that use the climate crisis as a mechanism for displacement—is seen in the cases of Ethiopia (Woldemeskel, 1989), Laos (Baird and Shoemaker, 2007) and others.

The visible and invisible structural violence of resettlement—whether in the form of counterinsurgency, humanitarian aid or development—is spatially and discursively manifested in the resettlement of rural and pastoralist communities in new settlements, or as urban resettlement projects following initiatives of renewal development (Katz, 2022; Abreek-Zubiedat, 2023; Nyima and Yeh, 2023). As articles in this special issue demonstrate, climate resettlement practices and their cultural understandings are imbued with ecological violence and national warfare, displacing even as they purport to resettle.

As a term, ‘resettlement’ was not in common usage until the mid-1960s, when it was described as a mechanism for the consensual transfer of refugees from a temporary place of asylum and be granted permanent residence. Yet resettlement has colonial legacies, grounded in historical counterinsurgency practices that have been transferred and culturally transformed (Abreek-Zubiedat 2025a; Abreek-Zubiedat, 2025b). Nor should resettlement as a mechanism of counterinsurgency—more aptly understood as models of displacement and expropriation—be thought in isolation from what Grove (1995: 8) identifies as “green imperialism,” developed by the British, French and Dutch colonial expansion between the 15th and 19th centuries in the pursuit of the “Eden” of tropical islands. Further, these resettlement models have embedded within them cultural knowing and systems of scientific classification of flora and fauna designed to facilitate land clearing for plantations and counterinsurgency, and constituting a power to resist such violence across geographies and times.

Resettlement prompted by climatic disasters has long been part of population movements and the development of alternative dwellings, sanctuaries and livelihoods, managed by both local and colonial powers. From the eighteenth-century famine relief camps in British-controlled India (Forth, 2017), to the climatic upheaval in Palestine's Negev district in the early twentieth century (El-Eini, 2006), and resettlement following the floods of 1931 in China (Courtney, 2018), climate resettlement is as much a part of local coping mechanisms as it is part of the movement of European colonial powers across the globe. These movements formed new modes of modern design, which, as architectural climate historian Daniel Barber (2020: 26) notes, “rendered scientific the traditional practices that they sought to replace,” attempting to formalise local cultures of climatic adaptability and “render optimizable a range of building strategies that reach back millennia.” New modes of modern design, including resettlement camps, were also adopted to deal with environmental crises.

The cultural prism for investigating climate resettlement, as several authors in this special issue illustrate, reveals how resettlement targets both human and other-than-human life in a variety of geopolitical contexts. Here, human resettlement is examined through spatial mechanisms—such as the resettlement camps in Brazil that produced the flagelados (i.e., drought refugees) as landless subjects to be resettled (Belik, 2025)—or with the use of climate as a form of racialised classification, as with the Zionist scientisation of the bodies of Jewish settlers and Indigenous Arab-Palestinians, making it easier to exclude, displace, and resettle Palestinians (Klein, 2024). In the same geographic context, bananas featured in eco-nationalist struggles to both settle and resist dispossession in Palestine (Khayat and Abreek-Zubiedat, 2025). Similarly, the British colonial resettlement of other-than-human life (cash crops) altered the local landscape of subsistence under famine conditions in India (Bathala, 2025). Human and other-than-human resettlement, therefore, acts as a political and territorial tool that alters the relationships between plants, people and land, as well as the climate itself.

In her thorough presentation in the case of northeast Brazil, Laura Belik demonstrates resettlement to be the constitutive core for claims of citizenship and the distribution of resources through ideals of modernisation and development. According to Belik, the drought that hit northeast Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century forced the flagelados to relocate to the coastal and capital cities of the region. The first drought, in 1915, positioned them as poor, landless individuals to be encamped in temporary concentration camps built in the state of Ceará by the government. The economic and social isolation of the flagelados from the locals and city elites was expanded following the subsequent drought in 1932, with the establishment of camps to control a public works labour force in the northern and northeastern regions of the country. These camps served not only as biopolitical spaces of humanitarian aid, but also as ‘enslavement’ sites for the extraction of forced labour. Even with the dismantling of the camps at the conclusion of the drought, climate, spatial and social injustice continued to shape the everyday lives of Nordestinos (i.e., the inhabitants of northeast Brazil). To this day, the cultural racialisation of the Ceará concentration camps in Brazil shapes urban infrastructure planning and modernisation of the country. Dams, roads and other infrastructure in Northeast Brazil cannot therefore be thought of separately from the flagelados who built them.

Not only do national projects embody racialised climate resettlement, but nation states themselves may be formed through a developmental approach to climate legitimised through scientific justification, as in the case of Palestine and Israel. Acknowledging resettlement not only as a byproduct of climate mobility, but a targeted aim of settler colonialism achieved through physiological justification, Tuvaal Klein's fascinating study underscores the profound influence of colonial, national, military and Indigenous praxis on the development of acclimatisation in Palestine and Israel between 1930 and 1970. Klein demonstrates how Zionist scientists and thermal physiologists replaced the regionality of climate with universal notions of acclimatisation, creating new forms of exclusion—particularly for Arab Palestinian and Bedouin peasants whose ostensible racial advantages were forfeit under an imposed scientific-cultural taxonomy that viewed Jewish settlers as better adapted to heat. The desire to conquer heat and aridity, Klein argues, was epitomised in the Eilat-Metula march. This 21-day experiment examined the effects of the summer climate on Israeli soldiers’ bodies during physical exertion as they crossed five climate zones—mapped with correlation to meteorological divisions—to examine their various impacts. The experiment's research team facilitated Israeli efforts to populate the nascent state's Negev/Naqab and southern region with Jewish settlers, facilitated through dispossession of the Indigenous Bedouin. By Adopting scientific discourses of the 1960s describing human acclimatisation as a universal physiological phenomenon, Zionist scientists established the basis of using air conditioning as the best way to live with heat. This served to exclude and dispossess the Indigenous people, offering instead a modern, industrial society driven by economic growth in place of local knowledge, practices and sound environmental stewardship.

As Nicole Khayat and Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat demonstrate, it is not only racialised bodies that may be resettled, but also other-than-human life—banana cultivation in Palestine under the British Mandate contributed to shaping the Zionist-Arab conflict and Palestinian resistance to their settler-colonial dispossession. Such conflict was embedded within “eco-nationalism,” a modern project positioning the economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control. Khayat and Abreek-Zubiedat highlight that colonial settlement of the land was achieved not only through familiar Zionist mechanisms of settling local ecologies and their mobilisation through biblically symbolic landscapes and nationalist myth-making, but also through the emplacement of a plant that lacked regional environmental sustainability and featured, in its ‘secularity,’ as a capital crop. Moreover, as demonstrated by Klein in the context of Bedouin resilience to heat, banana cultivation in Palestine undermined Zionist narratives of Indigenous backwardness. Palestinian farmers—particularly in Jericho in the southern Jordan River valley—consistently outperformed their Jewish counterparts and provided Palestinians with a platform to demonstrate their own place in modernity. The resettlement of bananas in Palestine was achieved despite weather, soil and hydrological constraints on the crop's economic potential. Arab success in their cultivation marked a turning point in Palestinian national economic consciousness, and underscored the importance of local, year-round production to forestall their dispossession from the land. This case mirrors the production of other tropical crops in South America and Asia, underlining the link to capitalist violence and national conflict in the Global South more broadly.

Elsewhere in this special issue, Deepthi Bathala contributes an in-depth reading of the power of tropical plants in shaping India, and the ways in which British capitalists situated Bengal as part of the tropical world, portending the colonial transformation of the local environment through the resettlement of plants. Such transformations were spatially and architecturally materialised in the botanical gardens as another form of sustenance infrastructure. Following devastating famines in several districts of India throughout the 1790s, British colonial botanists introduced various plants from the tropics to replace the local, water-intensive rice crop, altering the subsistence landscape with cash crops. This pan-tropicality—a colonial cultural imagination that saw great promise in planting and transplanting tropical species from different geographies—positioned botanical gardens as idealised tropical climatic spaces. In practice, the botanical gardens worsened climatic conditions through two interconnected processes: first, by physically transforming environments through the resettlement of plants, which violently disrupted existing micro-climatic relationships; and second, by operating as knowledge infrastructures that appropriated local expertise and redistributed cultivation knowledge to facilitate large-scale production of resettled crops. Together, these studies demonstrate the ways in which micro-climatic knowledge—i.e., the place-specific understanding of the ecology and its environmental, economic and socio-cultural conditions—are constitutive in shaping the macro-histories of (re)settlement.

The histories of climate resettlement, these authors argue, shed new light on the enforcement of law and order through cultural and spatial means, changing local modes of inhabiting the planet. Climate change, whether it necessitates resettlement following displacement or forms of mitigation that enable communities to stay within transforming environments, is therefore also a question of inhabitation.

Climate change inhabitation of care and repair

The inhabitability of a specific environment depends on its ability to sustain life (Rhodes, 2012). With respect to climate change, current human forms of living are rendering spaces uninhabitable and/or requiring radical transformation in the ways they may be inhabited (Wallace-Wells, 2019; Verlie, 2022). Our climate crisis, as anthropologist Arturo Escobar describes, is a “crisis of habitability” (2019: 132) and of finding environments that are suitable to lives of social and environmental flourishing. These are not only environmental questions, but also political ones, in the broadest sense, extending beyond the human condition. As Chakrabarty argues, inhabitation is related to the “planet,” which denotes the Earth system with deep geo-biological histories that de-centre people and engage the issue of habitability for all life and species. For Chakrabarty, the planetary challenges conventional politics, which emerge from the global differentiation of humanity; as habitability reaches crisis point at which other-than-human life cannot constitute itself as a political subject, humans must “act as advocates (within human institutions) for […] animals, plants, or even non-living entities like mountains or rivers” (2023, 17).

Climate change inhabitation and its histories, this special issue argues, are globally relevant political questions grounded in the colonial past. These questions persist in how we govern ourselves and the planet at national and international scales. This is not only a question of climate adaptation in which marginalised societies and communities must adapt to climate change in order to continue to inhabit impacted spaces. It is also about the colonial cultures of those who have moved—including Europeans settling in the Global South, from the tropics to the Middle East—and how these peoples have manipulated their new environments to suit them. This includes the use of technologies—from the engineering of rivers to mass-agriculture and air-conditioning—that radically alter these environments together with the global climate. These naturalised forms of inhabitation, embedded in imperial and colonial pasts, must be “unlearned” (Azoulay, 2019: 16) as both an ontological and ethical-political response to the “company of significant others” (Haraway, 2008: 89). This is what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) invites us to consider as care—part of the world-making of maintenance—that “evokes the work of recuperating previously neglected ground” (11). Care, as Fisher and Tronto (1991: 40) argue, is an “activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.”

Inhabitation, therefore, is also an epistemological notion that cultivates an etho-ecological (world-making ethos is intra-actively entangled with ecology) and experimental practice of world-making based on stewardship and care (Baan Hofman, 2025: 3). As Bruno Latour argues in Facing Gaia (Latour, 2017: 291), “geohistory requires a change in the very definition of what it means to have, hold, or occupy a space, of what it means to be appropriated by an earth,” in effect reversing the colonial relationship of appropriation between people and their environment. Inhabiting a climatically damaged earth through an approach of care and repair means paying attention to areas that are particularly vulnerable to injustice. If inhabitation is, as Boano and Astolfo argue, a “relational practice occurring in marginal and fragile environments and constituted by multiple incremental and transformative acts with the ultimate purpose to hold and resist marginalisation” (2020: 569), then inhabiting a climatically fragile environment requires the adoption of new approaches to overcome the intersectional discrimination scripted to produce environmental change. Inhabitation is a site of activism, a form of care that is practiced in common and is always relational.

The imagination of relational and pluralistic modes of living should not be detached from past and current formations, but rather be seen as what Van Dijk and Rietveld (2020: 2) call “situated imagination,” that is, an imagination “engaging a wide practical context, and anticipating its way into the future.” As such, forms of careful inhabitation are intrinsically temporal, grounded in unlearning the past and situating the present in order to imagine a sustainable, inclusive and just future in a world inhabited by all. Within the realm of climate change, a plurally and inclusively inhabited world is a collective vision created through activism, debate, conflict, struggle and transformation (Haiven, 2020: 7)—an inclusive and sustainable world based on our ability to imagine a plenum (Ingold, 2024: 7), the intermingling polyphony of voices in conversation with one another as ever-emerging, heterogeneous folds in which humans are also entangled.

With this in mind, the authors of this special issue urge a spatial-cultural consideration of the activist aspects of inhabitation that challenges the prevailing disconnect between theoretical and empirical accounts of climate change, and the cultural production of colonising and colonised powers. Resistance, as Rafael Núñez and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury (2025) and Norma Musih (2025) argue separately in their papers, could be the core of ongoing forms of inhabitation. Nunez and Merwood-Salisbury analyse the battle fought by residents of Domingo Savio, a flood-prone barrio marginado (marginal informal settlement) in the Dominican Republic's Santo Domingo. They show how history creates a form of ‘colonial nostalgia,’ which supports conservative ideologies in reshaping the urban landscape and displacing many living in the barrio, while also justifying these actions as a form of flood risk mitigation. On the other hand, they reveal how history and memory serve the local inhabitants as an instrument to resist regeneration and displacement, highlighting the links between past injustices and current displacement and dispossession, while suggesting plans for in-situ relocation. These residents can thus move from flood-prone lands while maintaining the crucial economic and social ties of the most vulnerable.

Throughout her paper on the 2019 film In Vitro, by UK-based Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, Norma Musih reflects on how speculative fiction can assist the development of alternative cultural imaginaries and related political realities to contemplate the biophysical manifestations of the climate emergency. Between memories of the city of Bethlehem before the imagined apocalypse and a concrete bunker situated in the present, the film envisions an alternative inhabitation in the form of a subterranean grove created from native heirloom seeds by clones of children lost to the disaster who have been engineered to embody lost memories. Here, inhabitation is a form of Arendtian world-making, rooted in histories of colonial violence—a world that, similar to many post/neo-colonial climate-changed human and other-than-human landscapes today, attempts to escape the dispossession and extinction of Indigenous worlds and lifeforms.

The examinations of climate change and its mobilities introduced in this thematic issue highlight new socio-cultural perceptions of environmental transformation. The authors urge spatial-cultural consideration of verifiable structures for dealing with environmental harm, while imagining and practising tools of care and healing. While the arguments raised in this issue are global in scope, with specific attention to the Global South-East, three out of the six papers are concerned with Palestine and Israel. Together, these form an examination of the past, present and imagined dystopian future of this contested territory, where settler-colonial and genocidal violence is still unfolding at the time these very lines are being written. Yet all the papers in this special issue also critically incorporate Indigenous knowledge and practice, offering new approaches to discover and test new possibilities to live within and beyond the burdens of late capitalism's coloniality and resettlement. Expanding cultural epistemologies of climate change across different environments presents a historic opportunity for planetary socio-spatial contracts and action. With this issue, we hope to rise to this challenge by contributing novel cultural analyses of the Global South's colonial past and present, in order to imagine alternative inhabitable futures.

Highlights

Climate change is an inherently human-made phenomenon rooted in colonial and capitalist histories, with a legacy of disproportionate impacts, including displacements and resettlements, particularly in the Global South.

The history of anthropogenic climate change is intertwined with the cultural power, architectural, and biopolitical dimensions of inhabitation and resettlement is essential for understanding and responding to climate change. By uncovering the material, spatial, and cultural dynamics of these aspects, we can challenge existing power structures and foster innovative approaches to environmental adaptation, shaping a more resilient and equitable future.

This special issue reveals how climate resettlement targets both human and other-than-human life, exposing its roots in spatial mechanisims and temporal violence across diverse contexts– from drought refugees in Brazil, to urban displacement in the Dominican Republic, colonial plantation resettlement in India, and even to the scientific acclimatization and eco-nationalisim to racially settle and dispossess the land in Palestine. The interconnected histories of climate change and resettlement are culturally constructed, representing strategies to enforce order and reshape ways of inhabiting the Earth.

The special issue emphasizes the importance of a “situated imagination” in addressing climate inhabitation against the ongoing practices of nature extractivism, environmental ruination and forced migration.