Manufacturing Crisis, Governing Instability: The Political Ecology of Migration, Power, and Ecocide

Abstract

Human mobility is not an anomaly but a historical constant that has been systematically governed, stratified and racialised. This article reconceptualises the “migration crisis” not as an exceptional event but as a political-ecological crisis regime that manufactures crisis, organises instability and legitimises violence at and beyond borders. Bringing together political ecology, world-ecology, governmentality and debates on racial capitalism, it develops a framework for analysing how war, extractivism, ecocide and climate apartheid produce unliveable environments and stratified regimes of (im)mobility. The argument is operationalised through paradigmatic cases from the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Niger Delta, Gaza, the Kafue basin and architectures of climate apartheid, showing how legal, economic and humanitarian infrastructures manufacture dispossession, immobilisation and selective mobility. By treating crisis as a durable regime rather than an episode, the article links border spectacles to slower forms of environmental and colonial violence and clarifies how migrants’ lives are governed as a managed instability.