Barriers to Securing Human Rights for Climate Refugees: Examining the Relationship Between Discourse, Deservingness, and Developmen

Abstract

Projections on climate migration show that under business-as-usual operations, hundreds of millions could internally migrate. The vast majority of these climate refugees will come from majority nations with limited adaptive capacity. Recent years have seen greater turns toward securitization against refugees accompanied by heightened nationalism and xenophobia. This phenomena rests on a history of maltreatment and negative rhetoric that have shaped the common imagination surrounding refugees. This paper seeks to examine how the relationship between discourse and deservingness impact the ability to secure human rights for climate refugees by drawing on literature of social psychology and critical discourse analysis. Further, this paper will examine how this relationship leads to the favored, proposed solution of development to aid climate refugees, exploring how this maintains dominant world systems with literature relating to fundamental cause theory.