ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical lineage of today's concerns over climate migration (CM), a topic of increasing salience in international policy arenas. By producing a lineage of contemporary debates, it highlights their ideal continuity with 'ancient' debates on populations and resources in classical political economy, as well as with the spectre of the unruly and swelling population in the 'global South' that has haunted Northern environmental discourses since the late 1960s. The historical vista offered by the chapter also contributes to clearly detecting the emergence of new articulations of the link migration-environment-development, with aspects of radical discontinuity from the past. The narratives on migration as adaptation, behind a palatable facade, appear as a mechanism for disciplining populations through the imposition of neoliberal subjectivities – the figure at the centre stage is a docile temporary labour migrant, mobilizing her skills and human capital to become resilient.
