RESILIENT EMPIRE: THE COLONIALITY OF U.S. CLIMATE SECURITIZATION AND ABOLITIONIST COUNTERTOPOGRAPHIES OF MILITARISM

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the United States Department of Defense (DoD)—the single largest institutional user of fossil fuels—has embraced climate security and positioned itself as a leader in climate action, investing billions of dollars in climate resilience. Previous research on U.S. climate securitization has worked to document the total carbon emissions of the U.S. military and its supply chains, as well as its (re)production of racialized and colonial discourses in its framing of climate threats. Looking to the emergence and dominance of climate resilience as an articulation of and strategy for climate risk management, I perform a close reading of official documents published and circulated by the U.S. national security complex, with a particular focus on the Department of Defense and its geographic Combatant Commands. Incorporating climate justice critiques and postcolonial and Indigenous studies into my analysis, I find that climate resiliency functions to ideologically and materially preserve U.S. empire and racialized global hierarchies. I demonstrate how resilience discourse motivates the protection and hardening of U.S. military infrastructure across the globe and invites neocolonial, anticipatory governance of climate risk to the neglect of community and justice-oriented climate investments. I close by documenting how activists, in the contested space of United Nations Climate Conferences, resist climate militarization and cultivate transnational solidarities amongst issue- based social movements to advocate for abolitionist climate futures and decolonial worldbuilding.