ABSTRACT
Climate change is often figured in academic and popular discourse alike as a “global” challenge, a threat “beyond borders.” This “global” character, often taken as a defining feature of climate politics, makes climate change the paradigmatic global environmental problem. Its presumed globality links the climate issue to a broader discussion within International Relations (IR) about the contemporary role of territory and political boundaries. The flows of people, pollution and money across boundaries are read as indicators of a post-Westphalian world, stipulated and stereotyped as a deterritorialized and borderless political space. Climate change is thus contrasted in this discourse with a spatiality of global politics which is constructed as territorial, the parceling up of the world into discrete political units.
