Global uncertainties, geoengineering and the technopolitics of planetary crisis management

ABSTRACT

With rising sea levels and disappearing species as harbingers of a planet-wide existential crisis facing the Earth, this article considers the ways in which geoengineering proposals diverge from understandings of global uncertainties and threats within scholarship on the globalization of insecurity, instead identifying ‘the planetary’ as a distinctive space of insecurity. Working at that scale, geoengineering proposals in turn not only claim to offer technological fixes but also in the process fix – in the sense of hypostatising – the meaning of (planetary) crisis, usually circumscribed as a climate crisis. The technopolitics of planetary crisis management thus produces and sustains a wider political economy that can and should be opened up to critical reflection: given that it assumes particular understandings – and thus precludes possible alternative conceptions – of what crisis entails, and consequent sociotechnical imaginaries of how market forces, scientific knowledge, and technological infrastructures might be combined in response.

KEYWORDS:

• Globality
• planetary
• geoengineering
• crisis
• insecurity
• technopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The property of an astronomical body to reflect solar radiation, with a proportion of (sun)light diffusely reflected back into space.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Columba Peoples

Columba Peoples is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Justifying ballistic missile defence: Technology, security and culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and of journal articles in, among others, the Review of International Studies, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and Security Dialogue.