Classical geopolitics was a science of Empire: it mapped the world in order to dominate it, naturalising the so-called "European expansion" as destiny. In the Antropocênica, geopolitics ceases to be merely the game of states and great powers, expanding to include the unequal distribution of environmental collapse. Rising sea levels, desertification, and extreme climate events do not affect everyone equally: historically subalternised populations, small islands, river deltas, and the coastlines of the Global South pay the price for the carbon emitted by the industrialised North. The geopolitics of the Antropocênica is, therefore, a geopolitics of sacrifice: who emits, who suffers, who migrates, who dies. Borders become technologies for managing surplus human beings — the so-called "climate refugees", still without a consolidated legal status. And the old imperial centres transform themselves into fortresses that regulate the entry of the very bodies the system itself displaced. Within this framework, geopolitics cannot ignore ecology, and ecology cannot ignore the colonial inheritance.
Odair Barros-Varela