Climate Change as Spatial Change: Impetus to Rethink State Obligations and Embrace Supra-Sovereign Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Recent escalations in the severity of extreme weather events in Europe and Asia have set the stage for a rethink of international relations as a policy pathway towards dealing with climate change. A rethink of state obligations in international relations requires a refocus towards the social contract undergirding sovereignty and an acceptance that we are into the era of supra-sovereign consequences. Global warming attests to this expansive spatialisation of consequences. This article argues that the State can take two practical steps to cope with climate change: the spatialisation of obligations to citizens to protect them against extreme weather; and the need for officials and citizenry to accept that the sovereign state owes moral obligations to complex chains of culpability across geographical borders that transcend sovereignty itself.

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Italics mine.

2. For reasons of brevity and keeping the overall argument flowing with dispatch, Hobbes will be quoted in place of the other contractarian philosophers in this article. This of course does not disrespect the wider debates in political theory over the subtle differences between Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, the three most well-known contractarians.