Geopolitics

Abstract

This chapter focuses on American Climate Emergency Narratives that describe how climate breakdown has created international geopolitical tension and conflict. These are narratives that show the US and other major powers such as China, India, and Russia leveraging their considerable military resources to compete over and secure vital natural resources, in the process of which they establish new command over, or lose, hegemony over the world-system. These texts thus register the fact that continued socio-ecological erosion may produce world wars in the future, but they see no alternative to such development. The questions these texts pose are ultimately how such future wars can be won by the American security apparatus or the nightmare that follows if other actors in the world-system take advantage of American failure.

Geopolitics in the Capitalocene

The history explored so far in this book reveals that war has been a way for actors within the capitalist world-system to manage the needs and the emergencies that are endemic to capitalism. War has thus been used to ensure access to commodity frontiers located on Indigenous lands, to control labour, and to gain or maintain hegemonic positions within the world-system. A point here is that this essentially violent relationality has contributed greatly to the erosion of profoundly nestled human social and ecological worlds. As discussed in Chapter 3, it is this development that prompts Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) to name the current climate period the Thanatocene.¹ Considering the immanent need for collaboration across state, national, and continental borders to address the interrelated biospheric and socioeconomic crisis, it is vital to put an end to the ‘natural history of destruction’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, p. 124) that has characterized the Thanatocene, yet war remains a crucial geopolitical mechanism within the capitalist world-ecology. Although employing a Foucauldian (rather than a materialist) register, this is Robert P. Marzec’s important point in Militarizing the Environment (2015). As he describes, the current socio-ecological crisis is frequently approached and acted upon via ‘a militarized mentality, one that commandeers a consciousness to wholly rethink and replace a rich, complex, multinarrative environmental history with a single ecosecurity imaginary for the post–Cold War, post-9/11 occasion’ (p. 4). Steered by this mentality, the proposed solution to what biologists refer to as the sixth mass extinction (Kolbert 2014) is more of the violence through which this extinction has been made. In other words, while war may grant states and corporations access to land, it, and the enormous organization that constant war readiness demands, also contributes to the erosion of land. Yet, such resource shortage is also managed through martial means: through war or the threat of war.

Approaching this history and present development from an International Relations perspective, it can be argued that the need to secure access to Cheap Nature and the willingness to use violence to do so have been central to state and interstate relations since the early emergence of the capitalist world-ecology. The geopolitics of the capitalist world-system has thus been characterized by competition, conflict, and war since its inception. Discussing this precise history, political philosopher Jairus Grove (2019) has influentially claimed that contemporary extractive geopolitics has emerged out of ‘an ecological principle of world making that renders some forms of life principle and other forms of life useful or inconsequential’ (p. 3). The driver of this development, Grove notes, has been the capitalist project launched by a number of European nations and developed further by the US so that ‘[n]o anthropogenic, planetary-scale threat faced today—be it nuclear weapons, plastic, climate change, or global war—originated outside the Euro-American circuit of expansion, extractivism, and settlement’ (p. 11). In this way, Grove identifies the emergence of a martial and extractive geopolitics as a main driver of what he calls extinction.

Another way of phrasing this is to say that an extractive geopolitics has steered the planet towards an epochal world-ecological crisis. So far, the US, as the hegemon of the world-system, has been spared much of the most appalling violence. However, now that the world-system’s access to Cheap Nature is diminishing, this extractive geopolitics may accelerate and deepen international and national armed conflict to such an extent that the US may be drawn into very extensive armed conflict. Marzec is describing this possible development when he names the desperate attempt to manage the depletion of Cheap Nature a ‘new geopolitics of diminishing resources’ (Marzec 2015, p. 107). Similarly, if from a very different intellectual vantage point, International Relations scholar James E. Lee assumes in his book Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars (2009) that the arrival of the ‘Anthropogene Warming Period’ (p. 25) will produce significant interstate and intrastate conflict:

The Climate Change War will be a global period of instability that will last centuries. The period of greatest instability will be the twenty-first century. As in the Cold War, it will be a long struggle over core issues regarding rights and responsibilities in society. Throughout this period, there will be a new Cold War, and an existing Hot War that will intensify. Changes in climate will produce unique types and modes of conflict, redefine the value of important resources, and create new challenges to maintaining social order and stability. (p. 2)

While Lee’s analysis builds on the idea that (a universalised) humanity has produced global warming, his prediction that biospheric erosion will cause tension and military conflict collates well with Grove’s and Marzec’s analyses. Of course, this development is already underway. International relations and peace and development research that examines the relationship between global warming and state or intrastate relations has revealed ‘close links between climate drivers and armed conflict’ in Africa (Regan and Kim 2020, p. 128) and Syria (Kelley et al. 2015). This work also tends to agree that ‘it is increasingly becoming clear that climate change has already become a major factor in conflicts, and its influence is only going to increase over time’ (Berhe 2022, p. 2). This can be perceived as the arrival of the ‘new geopolitics of diminishing resources’ mentioned by Marzec, but this geopolitics is ‘new’ only in the sense that it is practised at a time when the capitalist world-ecology has depleted Cheap Nature to such an extent that it is difficult to come by. As Grove and Marzec both contend, as Moore stresses, and as this book has repeatedly argued, the use of violence to establish commodity frontiers and to secure extraction has long been a part of the Euro-American hegemonic project.

Building on this understanding of what produces violence within the world-system, this chapter focuses on post-millennial American Climate Emergency Narratives that speculate on how the geopolitics of the existing world-system will seek to manage the ongoing socio-ecological breakdown and the depletion of Cheap Nature. The texts studied in the chapter thus take place in futures where unfolding world-ecological crisis has provoked the dominant nation-states of the world-system to go to war to ensure access to the energy, food sources, and labour relations that sustain them. The primary example is Battlefield 2042 (ElectronicArts 2021)—a big-budget video game that involves the gamer in an ongoing global military conflict over dwindling resources and (thus) over world-system hegemony. This game thus speculates that the resource shortages and migration movement that biospheric erosion causes will produce an extensive ‘climate change war’ and the point of the game is to involve the gamer in such a war. This chapter moves on to consider American Climate Emergency Narratives where existing geopolitical relations have changed drastically and a new nation-state has risen to power to replace the US as the world hegemon. To this effect, the chapter discusses Ship Breaker (2011) and The Drowning Cities (2012), the first two novels of Paulo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy. These novels play out in futures where global war has resulted in a profound transformation of the world-system. The capitalist world-system is still in place, but the US has become peripheral to its function in the sense that much of it is now a precarious and violent commodity frontier.

Ecological Erosion and the Future Battlefields of the World-System

That geopolitical conflict and war are central to much fiction set in futures transformed by biospheric erosion has been noted by scholarship. In particular, Ben De Bruyn’s article ‘The Hot War: Climate, Security, Fiction’ (2018) describes how novels set in futures transformed by climate change can be seen as ‘forecasting’ climate war. De Bruyn’s primary example is Tobias Buckell’s techno-thriller Arctic Rising (2013) a novel that considers how global warming and an Artic free of ice open up new venues for exploitation and extraction, but also how this development creates significant geopolitical tension in the northern hemisphere and beyond. Other texts that predict the possibility of what Lee (2009) calls Climate Change War are Clive Cussler’s Artic Drift (2009) and Matthew Glass’s Ultimatum (2009). These novels describe ‘global warming’ as an important ‘threat multiplier’ (Gilbert 2012), but the wars that loom in the novels’ background never break out. The skilled machinations of US science and military intelligence (Cussler) or US political diplomacy (Glass) are able to both cool down international relations and avert climate change. Thus, in these texts, a combination of traditional Cold War practices and a collaborative geopolitics ushers the world into another revolution of now ecologically sustainable American world-system hegemony.

In other texts, Lee’s (2009) ‘Hot War’ has become a reality. This war is either the explicit focus of the text or it is a historical fact that has drastically transformed the organization of the world-system. An especially relevant example is the video game Battlefield 2042 (2021). This is a fiction from the core in much the same way as the major Hollywood films discussed in previous chapters. With a budget similar to that of a major Hollywood movie, the production process of Battlefield 2042 involved a great number of game designers, coders, game testers, voice actors, and marketing firms located in the US but also in other parts of the world. The actual game was coded by the Stockholm studio DICE which launched the Battlefield franchise in 2002 with the release of the Battlefield 1942. Like all subsequent Battlefield games, this contained a multiplayer component where gamers collaborate as part of teams, fighting other teams to seize control of a virtual territory. To date, the franchise contains 12 major releases and several expansions for each release. The publisher of the Battlefield games is US-based Electronic Arts, one of the biggest digital game companies in the world.

Unlike many other electronic war games such as Full Spectrum Warrior (2004), or Americas Army (2002–2022), Battlefield 2042 was not developed by the US DoD, and it did not receive funding from the US DoD or from any major manufacturer of hand-held weapons. That noted, like most war games, Battlefield 2042 functions very much like the war games that have received such funding. Made primarily to cater to boys and young men who spend money and time performing virtual war on video consoles and PCs, the game puts the gamer into the body of a proficient soldier equipped with multiple weapons and then inserts this virtual body into intense military battles. The gamer views the world through the eyes of this soldier and can shoot at other soldiers with various guns held in the soldier’s hands. Thus, this type of game is typically referred to as a (military) first-person shooter (FPS). The soldier avatar can (and will be) shot and blown up on several occasions during a gaming session, upon which it will respawn in a sheltered location so that the gamer can rejoin the battle.

Battlefield 2042 is one of many first-person shooters that take place in a future transformed by anthropogenic/capitalogenic violence. Other game franchises such as Fallout (1997–2018), Stalker (2007–2009), and Metro (2010–2019) also explore worlds drastically transformed by atomic war or other violence done to the planet because of major military interstate conflict. In these series, the gamer takes on the role of a lone survivor who battles through the wasteland that such conflict has left in its wake. Battlefield 2042 is different, firstly, because it takes place in a world where ‘climate change’, rather than atomic war, is the clearly stated reason for global conflict; and secondly because it inserts the subject into the conflict as such, rather than into its aftermath. An additional and crucial difference is that Battlefield 2042 does not contain the story-driven, single-player campaign that is the centre of most other FPS games. Instead, the game tells its story through a set of game maps where a large number of players fight alongside each other, against other players or avatars (bots) operated by the game engine. Unlike most other first-person shooter games, this means that Battlefield 2042 does not have a narrative ending where all objectives of a particular storyline have been reached. Instead, the gamer replays the same game maps, allowing individual gamers and teams to climb rankings much like athletes and sports teams do during a season in real life.²

The lack of a single-player campaign does not mean that there is no narrative context, however. Such context is provided by computer-animated ‘cut-scenes’: short video sequences that both set the mood of the game and describe the background of the military conflict that the gamer becomes part of during gameplay. The first such cut scene opens the first stage of the game. In this scene, the gamer is shown images of a cloud-covered planet and hears a gravelly voice saying: ‘Fire, flint, language, machines - in the face of crises, humanity adapted. We became warriors, explorers, builders, dreamers flying forward. Take control of a changing world’. This very concise history describes the rise and evolution of humankind as a series of crises where humans have battled nature and other (less-than-human?) antagonists. According to this history, humanity was born out of its ability to control fire. This led to the construction of the first tools, then to language, then to complex machines. The same history also centres certain subjectivities very closely tied to the development of colonial capitalism: the soldier, the explorer, and the construction worker. As such, this opening is in fundamental agreement with Will Steffen’s et al. (2016) claim that the human species has been programmed to engineer the Anthropocene since the homo erectus figured out how to control fire a couple of million years ago.

This introductory statement is followed with a series of short and distorted news snippets that describe how extreme weather events (including ‘the world’s first category 6 storm’), rising sea levels, and uncontrollable forest fires destroy ecologies vital to human existence (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1

Screenshots from the opening cutscene of Battlefield 2042

Other short news items outline the arrival of mass migration, a new global Great Depression, and violent social unrest across the world. Most African, but also many European nations are described as breaking down almost entirely. In the wake of this development, two major powers are said to remain: the US and Russia. These are challenged by a disorganized 1 billion large refugee community that refers to itself as the Non-Patriated or No-Pats. This sets the stage for the global war for resource control that is the core of the game. When the cutscene ends, the gamer is invited to perform precisely such a war.

Russia has been part of several Battlefield games and other military multiplayer franchises. Since the Cold War, this nation has often been cast as a major international player and a constant looming threat to continued US world-system hegemony. It is thus not surprising that Russia features in the game as the (playable) extractive thug who refuses to let go of the fossil-fuel economy. What is surprising, however, is the complete absence of China. When the opening cut scene narrates the history of biospheric collapse and world-system transformation, there is virtually no mention of China. The reason for this is most likely the fact that China has objected to being depicted as a belligerent nation and a participant in future wars for world-system hegemony. In 2010, director Dan Bradley completed his film Red Dawn (2012), a remake of the Hollywood blockbuster from 1984 by the same name. Like the original film, Bradley’s updated version described a massive military invasion of US soil, but he replaced the Soviet forces of the original with a Chinese enemy. In view of the growing importance of the Chinese box office, and because Chinese officials protested, the film was reshot and digitally altered to instead show a (now united and capitalist) Korea as the invader. Also, a year after Red Dawn had premiered, Battlefield 4 (2013) was banned from the Chinese market because it portrayed China as one of the playable superpowers in the future world war it portrays (Valeriano and Habel 2016). It is thus not surprising that China does not feature in Battlefield 2042. At the same time, it is possible to think of the Russian forces in Battlefield 2042 as a kind of ersatz China; a stand-in for this nation similar to North Korea in Red Dawn.³

The background story of ecological emergency and social unrest clearly builds on the vision of the future that Lee (2009) and Grove (2019) predict in different ways and from different perspectives. In Battlefield 2042, an eroding biosphere, resource shortage, and consequent capitalist crisis are what have caused the war that the gamer participates in. War is thus portrayed as a kind of inevitable geopolitical adaptation to the resource scarcity experienced by capitalism in a time of socio-ecological breakdown. In fact, the heroic, underdog No-Pats describe themselves as people who are precisely adapting through war. In the introductory cut scene, the narrator exclaims, to building, triumphant music, that: ‘We are the warriors, we are the adaptation, and this fight…is ours’. As the actual gameplay makes clear, adaptation means adjusting to both the pressures of a changing geopolitical landscape where the two remaining superpowers vie for control, and to the fast violence produced by a damaged biospheric system. Thus, the gamer must overcome a hostile military force, but also negotiate and overcome the various extreme weather events that are apparently a regular occurrence in this transformed socio-ecological future.

This becomes evident when the gamer enters the opening game map set in Doha, the capital city of Qatar. When first joining the unfolding battle, the sun is shining, making it easy to locate and fire on enemies using one of the many weapons at the gamer’s disposal. However, before long the wind picks up and a gigantic sandstorm enters the city, reducing visibility and enveloping the entire city in a red haze (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2

Sandstorm on its way towards the city of Doha in Battlefield 2042

Similar extreme weather events occur on many other game maps. In ‘Orbital’, set at a satellite launching facility in French Guiana, the gamer is faced not only by opposing US or Russian forces (depending on which of these nations states the gamer has decided to join before the battle begins), but also by an enormous tornado that sucks people, vehicles, and other moveable objects up into a dark sky (Fig. 5.3). The game map ‘Kaleidoscope’ which takes place in Songdo, South Korea, also features a tornado, accompanied by thunder, lightning, and torrential rain.

Fig. 5.3

A tornado complicates the military battle on the game map ‘Orbital’ in Battlefield 2042

In addition to featuring extreme weather, the maps narrate future socio-ecological breakdown through the design of the virtual worlds the gamer’s avatar traverses. What this means is that the maps make the effects that continued socio-ecological breakdown is likely to have on natural and urban environments and capitalist infrastructure visible. The game map ‘Breakaway’ takes place on a ‘partially thawed plateau in Antarctica, the site of [Russian] illegal oil drilling and a petroleum refinery’. ‘Renewal’ is set in Egypt where half the map is reclaimed desert turned to lush, green plantations and the other half consists of solar farms, and in ‘Stranded’, the gamer fights around a supertanker stranded in a now dried-out Panama Canal (Fig. 5.4).

Fig. 5.4

The game map ‘Stranded’ showing a beached supertanker and a dried-out Panama Canal in Battlefield 2042

To return to the game’s introductory cutscene, Battlefield 2042 proposes that biospheric erosion is anthropogenic. There are frequent references to a universal ‘us’ and the general idea is that the ecological disaster that forms the game’s backstory and rationale, and that also informs both the geography and the gameplay of the various maps, has been caused by ‘humanity’. That said, the game maps still tacitly register extractive capitalism as an engine of socio-ecological breakdown. The stranded tanker in the Panama Canal, a ship-breaking yard on the Indian west coast, and the Russian oil wells and petroleum refineries in Antarctica are not simply in the game as colourful milieus within which war is fought, they also register the reasons why the biosphere has collapsed. These game maps insert the gamer into the debris of a transformed, combative—yet still functional—capitalist world-system, and by doing so, they gesture to this system’s culpability in the collapse of the biosphere. The stranded supercarrier, the enormous ship-breaking yard, and the still-operational oil extraction facilities in what used to be a protected Antarctic ecology are most usefully read as physical/virtual manifestations of the extractive processes that have brought on the war that the gamer participates in. In addition to this, the No-Pats into whose shoes the gamer frequently steps are described by Battlefield 2042 as a rebellious, anti-state, and anti-extractive group. Thus, the No-Pats are defined as ‘the once privileged and the impoverished with backgrounds that are worlds apart, forced together, determined to survive’. They are furthermore ‘distrustful of the governments that exiled them’ and they ‘refuse calls to reassimilate’. This also suggests a radical stance; a willingness to transform the violent and extractive system that is causing the Earth System to erode in the present.

But as the game progresses, it becomes clear that Battlefield 2042 is not a game that encourages revolution and system change in any sense of the word. Although the background story, the game maps and the avatars at the gamer’s disposal register a certain awareness of the role that extractive capitalism has played for climate change, the actual gameplay forces the gamer to take part in a fundamentally adaptive and enormously violent Climate Change War. As described, at the start of each multiplayer game, the gamer takes on the role of one of two sides, both of which are tasked with securing a particular objective. Before entering the multiplayer map ‘Breakaway’, set in Antarctica, the gamer is briefed either as a member of the offensive, US contingent or as the defending Russian side. If on the side of the American force, the gamer is told that ‘This is it, people. It’s time to put a stop to the Russians’ illegal Antarctic oil drilling. The first step will be removing any Russian military presence from the region’. If the gamer plays as part of the Russian defenders, the briefing instead reads: ‘We have an emergency: The US has deployed forces against our Antarctic oil drilling operation. That facility is critical to our energy infrastructure, and we must defend it at all costs. Stop the Americans from securing the sectors’ (my italics). In both cases, as Marzec (2015) puts it, the ‘environment is made visible in terms of its ability to yield energy’ (p. 106). When the environment is perceived through this perspective, it becomes, as Marzec has observed, a military concern. Each campaign revolves around the imminent need to secure a particular area within the game space, of adapting to the challenges that enemy soldiers and the hyper-charged weather present the gamer with, and to thus play an active, if imaginary and virtual, military geopolitical role at a time of world-system confrontation caused by socio-ecological breakdown.

This fundamentally conservative, core understanding of the biosphere as a repository of (cheap) extractable energy is further brought out by the gameplay. Game theorist Ian Bogost (2007) has influentially suggested that games produce ideology not simply via their visuals and (written) textual content, but also through the process of gameplay itself. Bogost terms this ludic quality procedural rhetoric and argues that games persuade primarily through ‘rule-based representations and interactions’ (p. ix). Thus, electronic games are not just visual and textual objects, but, importantly ‘computational artifacts that have cultural meaning as artifacts’ (p. ix, italics in the original). The procedural rhetoric unfolding in games can work to ‘support existing social and cultural positions’, but it can also ‘disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world’ (p. ix). In the case of Battlefield 2042, the visual and textual surface layer of the game can be said to include elements that critique the socio-ecological violence performed by extractive capitalism. However, on the procedural level, the game imagines world-system geopolitics as the only viable paradigm. Once the gamer’s heavily armed avatar runs through the streets of Doha, or negotiates a barren Antarctica, resolving a clearly defined battle objective, the ongoing socio-ecological breakdown is effectively reduced to a geopolitical resource crisis and thus, it is accessible and comprehensible only in the form of an engagement opportunity.

In other words, Battlefield 2042 can be defined as a procedural Climate Emergency Narrative from the core that inserts the gamer into a ‘new geopolitics of diminishing resources’ (p. 107). As with most of the previously discussed narratives of this book, the violent world-system geopolitics that informs the game—the type of capitalist, life-making it envisions—understands the environment not as a multispecies, planetary habitat into which humans are folded, but as a landscape of dissipating yet vital energy resources. As an effect of this understanding, the environment is produced as a stage for a series of endlessly repeated global, military campaigns the object of which is to secure territory. While the game caters to an international audience and predicts that the existing social and economic order will produce catastrophic biospheric erosion, it never suggests that there is an alternative to the world-system that brought it on, or to the military violence it involves the gamer in. Also, while it imagines an uneven conflict between three contenders: America, Russia, and the No-Pats, and forges an allegiance with the No-Pats who have been deprived of national belonging, the game never moves to strip America of its status as hegemon of the world-system. Once the action begins, the game’s procedural rhetoric is solely focused on the rehearsal of spectacular violence that ultimately aims to preserve the world-system as such.

At the same time, the game’s procedural rhetoric also connects with Grove’s contention that a geopolitics of war is not simply a way for nation-states to secure access to land and resources, but a ‘form of life’ (p. 3). As such, this geopolitics is an ‘embodied becoming […] written into the very musculature of our bodies, practices, and communities’ (p. 6). The military war game involves its (predominantly male) audience in a virtual version of such becoming. By definition, a war game does not allow for any solution to the geopolitical challenges they envision except war. This is the point of the war game. If war is one of several possible geopolitical strategies in the real world, it is, in such games, the only strategy. This, in turn, makes war the only form of life that can be imagined and enacted while playing the game. In addition to this, the physical, muscular commitment of the gamer—the act of moving certain muscles and engaging the brain to beat opposing gamers in battle—is also noteworthy. While it is no surprise that war is written into the bodies of professional soldiers, it is striking that this occurs, if in a slightly different way, also for the millions of civilians who practice FPS war gaming. Becoming competitive in Battlefield 2049 or any other military multiplayer game demands constant practice and the development of certain muscles and muscle memories that enable very fast reactions. In this way, the military shooter can be described as a performative text where a geopolitics of war is written into minds, bodies, practices, and communities.

New World-System Hegemons

If Battlefield 2042 takes place in the midst of a future Climate Change War, much of the fiction produced by trend-setting ‘climate fiction’ author Paolo Bacigalupi is located in more distant futures where socio-ecological breakdown has run its course. In these futures, the world-system is still very present and keeps organizing the social, economic, military, and extractive order, but the nation-state of America has become peripheral to a new core. The notion that socio-ecological breakdown may lead to a reshuffling of the world-system itself rather than, or as a preliminary to, the demise of the world-system as such, has been an important topic to Political Science/Philosophy, International Relations, and world-system scholarship. In Savage Ecology, Grove raises the question if America will remain the hegemon ‘long enough for China to put its stamp on the human apocalypse’ (p. 23). Grove thus argues that while ‘we’ currently ‘live in the death rattle of Pax Americana’ (p. 23, italics in the original), he also speculates that the next stage of terminal world-system crisis may not be the demise of capitalism as a world order, but rather ‘the self-destruction of the United States’ (p. 23) to the benefit of China, a nation that would then ascend to the position of core hegemon. Such a transformation of the organization of the world-system would not change the nature of extractive, militant geopolitics—people would still be living in what Grove describes as ‘the shadow of an annihilating repetition’ (p. 278)—but this process would be steered by China rather than by the Euro-American military-industrial complex. Again, in the wake of such a transformation, America might well be transformed into a commodity periphery servicing a reorganized world-system: the target of the same extractive and violent geopolitics the nation once established.

The possibility that the American era might be over and that China will become the new hegemon of the world-system is also considered by influential International Relations scholar John Ikenberry, a firm believer in the Euro-American ‘liberal project’. To Ikenberry, the questions are whether an increasingly powerful China will ‘overthrow the existing [liberal and democratic] order or become a part of it’ (2008, p. 23), and if the US can do anything to maintain its dominant position as China’s influence grows. In Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (2009), Giovanni Arrighi discusses the same development from a world-systems perspective that does not assume that US liberal capitalism is the ultimate global social order. To Arrighi, the rise of China is not so much a question of what type of politics (democratic, autocratic, liberal) will structure the future capitalist world-system, as evidence that the US is losing its hegemonic position. As Arrighi shows, and as other world-system research also reveals, the US economy has been faltering since the 1970s and it seems likely that the nation ‘will continue to decline’ (Chase-Dunn et al. 2005, p. 233), a development that may open the door for Chinese hegemony. Again, such a transition does not change the fact that the world-ecology is moving towards an epochal crisis. Rather, as Moore (2015) has argued, ‘the rise of China’ (p. 86) is a direct consequence of extractive capitalism’s pursuit of the Four Cheaps (labour power, food, energy, and raw material). In this way, China’s rise can be considered as a stage of the wider epochal crisis, as well as an acceleration of this crisis.

Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy takes place in a future where the composition of the world-system has been fundamentally altered, but where capitalism has transitioned away from the ecocidal fossil-fuel economy. Ship Breaker (2010), the first novel of the trilogy, opens on a stretch of coast close to what used to be New Orleans. The protagonist is the teenage boy Nailer who makes a precarious day-by-day living by stripping now antiquated and stranded ships of their electronics and cables. Importantly, and as I have discussed elsewhere (Höglund 2020), this is a setting borrowed from the Global South and existing ship-breaking yards such as Chittagong in Bangladesh.⁴ The material that Nailer and the other members of his crew scavenge is then sold on to the militarized mega corporations that have become central to how the new geopolitical order that looms in the background operates. While this refashioned world-system has turned to more sustainable energy forms (this is a world-system accelerated by Green capitalism), it remains fundamentally unequal and unjust. Thus, the life that Nailer leads is profoundly precarious and unsustainable. The damage already done to the biosphere produces enormous hurricanes that regularly pommel the shanty town that he and other workers live in. Also, Nailer knows that he is growing too big for the light crew he is on, and even if he survives the dangerous work of mining asbestos-lined ducts of copper wire to move on to some other job, his criminal, sadistic, and drug-addicted father is likely to either kill him or force him to join his gang. He must exit this dangerous place and find another and less precarious place to call home.

The second novel of the trilogy, The Drowned Cities (2012), focuses on the ‘war maggot’ Mahlia. In her early teens, she lives a miserable life in a poor and exposed village in what used to be the US Southeast, a few days’ journey from the Washington urban sprawl that has now become the titular drowned cities. As in Ship Breaker, it is clear from the context that global warming has inundated most major American coastal cities and turned much of the Southeast into a tropical swampland. The reader also surmises that the lack of resources and the turmoil produced by war and global socio-ecological breakdown must have eroded the US politically, financially, and militarily to such an extent that the nation-state has become defunct. Indeed, the world that Mahlia inhabits also looks strikingly like some of the most poor and war-ravaged parts of the Global South today. Warlords rule the land with the help of gangs consisting of drug-addled and traumatized child soldiers. The few survivors that remain have to endure the roaming gang’s senseless violence, the fierce climate, and the pandemics that regularly visit the exposed communities.

Malia is especially vulnerable because she is the castoff daughter of an officer who was part of a now-abandoned Chinese peacekeeping effort designed to maintain order in this forlorn corner of the world-system. In this way, the Ship Breaker trilogy clearly registers the prevalent fear that China might replace the US as the hegemon of the world-system. The fact that China has entered former US territory not as a military invader, but as a peacekeeper is telling. The former hegemon of the world-system has fallen so far from its former glory that it has become a new and tortured Global South and, as such, it is also the reluctant recipient of international (military) aid work. Mahlia’s blood connection with the Chinese does not do her any favours. The roaming gangs of child soldiers view her as a traitor and collaborator. She has already lost one hand to mindless violence and survives in the present only because she assists the village doctor. Her luck will not hold. Like Nailer, she must move on.

Fortunately, both youngsters have something to barter. Mahlia remembers the life she had in what was once Washington before the Chinese peacekeepers left, leaving Mahlia and her mother to fend for themselves. She recalls the violence, the ‘mobs and soldiers’, and ‘dripping machetes’ (Bacigalupi 2012 p. 259), but she also remembers that her mother had acquired and hidden the ‘treasure trove of a dead nation’ (Bacigalupi 2012 p. 427) in their old rooms in the city. In his part of the defunct nation, Nailer has come across the young and beautiful Nita Patel. She has been shipwrecked close to the shipyard during a hurricane and, because she is a member of one of the most affluent entrepreneurial families in this new world, she can be his ticket out of his miserable existence. Encouraged by these resources, Nailer and Mahlia begin arduous treks through a landscape made hostile by both biospheric transformation and utter social collapse, towards the fortified borders that separate them from the new hegemons of the transformed world-system.

Nailer and Mahlia know very little about the ‘dead nation’ that used to rule the dangerous world they traverse. What used to be the US exists for them only in the shape of inundated ruins. That noted, Nailer and Mahlia also know the US through the still ongoing violent and extractive geopolitics that once propelled the US to the position of world hegemon. Indeed, the world-system and the geopolitical paradigm that the nation forged on top of the efforts of European imperialism are very much alive. It is this very paradigm that is turning people close to Nailer and Mahlia into addicts, into cheap, enslaved labour, or into child soldiers who eke out an enormously precarious existence in what has become a poorly maintained and war-ravaged commodity periphery. The only difference between this new world-ecology and the anglophone empire that came before it is that the new powerhouses of the system are far less reliant on fossil fuel and, of course, that the seats of power are not in Washington, D.C. or New York, but in Delhi, Beijing, and Tokyo.

It is into these new cores that Nailer and Mahlia hope to escape. They know such privileged worlds exist. They have seen the arrival and departure of white, wind- and solar-powered ‘clipper ships’ (Bacigalupi 2011, p. 7) that pick up the material extracted from the shipyard or an increasingly dismantled Washington Capitol. Again, the cores and privileged semiperipheries of this reorganized world-system are now located in Asia and governed by nation-states such as India, Japan (referred to as Nippon), and China, and run by international, militarized mega corporations such as the one operated by Nita’s family. These control the still fully functional world-system alongside what remains of the world’s semiperipheral nation-states.

In this way, Bacigalupi’s trilogy casts the socio-ecological crisis as the end of American hegemony, but not of the capitalist world-system. The important point here is that this imaginary shift is meant to trouble the reader from the core. This is what your world will come to, novels such as these are telling their readers, if you continue down the petro-fuelled, ecocidal path you are currently on. Oceans will rise, cities will crumble, governments fall, new hegemons rise, and your sons and daughters will be scurrying in the ruins like the children in Asia and Africa whose unpaid labour you rely on in the present. This shift of power within the existing global social order is the emergency. This may gesture towards a critique of the ongoing militant and fundamentally extractive geopolitics that bind the current world order together and through which the periphery and semiperipheries are made to service the core. Yet, like many of the other texts discussed in this book, it is also a narrative that struggles to imagine worlds other than those that brought the crisis on. Mahlia and Nailer do not move on to forge new social worlds. Their exits from the peripheries into which they were born, across the border that separates them from the new geographies of power, merely serve to insert them into another location of the world-system. Again, the lesson learned is that borders must be fortified, crises prepared for, emergencies managed, and potential enemies pre-emptively combatted.

The transformation of the US into a dreadful commodity periphery is a common trope in the American Climate Emergency Narrative. Alongside Bacigalupi’s fiction, Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009), and Mindy McGinnis’ Not a Drop to Drink (2013) and In a Handful of Dust (2014) also move the story into futures where (white) protagonists live precarious lives outside of the protective embrace of US petromodernity. In Far North, the protagonist belongs to a now-defunct religious community that once escaped to Siberia, but, as in Bacigalupi’s story, the system that kept this community operational has now collapsed and the land and the people on it are forced into slavery and made to scavenge the irradiated and poisoned ruins of the cities left behind. McGinnis's two novels are set in an arid part of the US where isolated households protect precious water sources from violent and/or plague-ridden wanderers. The protagonists of these novels are proficient killers, shaped by the need to defend the scant resources that their worlds can supply, but the novels also suggest that the world-system that produced the ecological crisis that is at the heart of the story still exists. Life in the periphery is difficult not only because it is dry and depleted, but because it is precisely a periphery within the remit of the new world-system.

Imagining Future War

Battlefield 2042 realistically proposes that what it describes as the climate emergency will produce, and will thus be experienced as, war. In other words, while socio-ecological breakdown may be directly experienced by some as flooding, forest fires, accelerated storms, and a shortage of energy, drinkable water, and food crops that demand stable conditions to grow, and by collapsing labour relations, it will also be encountered in the form of armed international conflict. Again, if what this text imagines as a climate crisis is ultimately an epochal crisis for the capitalist world-ecology, the unravelling of this crisis is likely to manifest through the economic and military intrastate and interstate conflict that is designed to keep this world-ecology running, to maintain US core hegemony, or, in the case of other nation-state actors, to challenge American dominance. Between the coded lines, Battlefield 2042 registers that geopolitics is, as proposed by Grove, an instrument of petro-energized, capitalist world-making. In this way, the game tacitly observes that a long history of extractive geopolitics has eroded the Earth System. On a planet where resources are finite, the ‘geopolitics of diminishing resources’ (Marzec 2015, p. 107) is an inevitable successor both to neoliberal globalization and to the geopolitics of violent extractive expansion that preceded Earth-System erosion and the depletion of (cheap) resources. This geopolitics of diminishing resources is, in this game, ultimately a geopolitics of war.

In all the narratives discussed, the climate emergency is thus also a geopolitical security emergency that erupts into armed conflict. In Battlefield 2042 and the Ship Breaker trilogy, human worlds have collapsed more due to the (geo)political developments that follow in the wake of biospheric erosion, than because of this erosion as such. In addition to this, in Battlefield 2042, the gamer performs future socio-ecological breakdown as precisely a military geopolitical security emergency. Indeed, Battlefield 2042 inserts its audience, the gamer, into a world where such conflict is perpetual. Battlefield 2042 is, like other multiplayer first-person military shooters, a game without an ending. The gamer is stuck rehearsing a procedural rhetoric that may recognize that war is extractive, but that still insists that there is no other recourse. Ultimately, the only story Battlefield 2042 tells about socio-ecological breakdown is that war is inevitable. And also, a joy of sorts when it is experienced through a body in front of the computer or gaming console.

In this way, the American Climate Emergency Narrative represents socio-ecological breakdown as a geopolitical crisis that threatens to curb US access to easily extractable natural resources such as potable water, arable land, metals, and energies such as coal and oil. In the texts studied, this crisis has produced world-scale military conflict. While all texts discussed in this chapter can be said to register the possibility of epochal capitalist world-ecological crisis in this way, none of them envisions this crisis as terminal. Ship Breaker and The Drowning Cities locate the reader in worlds where the US has been unable to sustain its dominant position in the world-system. New powerhouses have risen to take the place once assumed by the US. In Bacigalupi’s writing, China appears to be the new hegemon of a still thriving, if less ecocidal, capitalist world-ecology. The people who now inhabit what used to be the US are thus effectively confined within one of the new commodity peripheries of the reorganized world-system.

By adding the precarious No-Pats community to its static narrative, Battlefield 2042 gestures vaguely towards the commodity periphery and the experience of being peripheralized and extracted. That said, as soon as the fighting starts, the gamer has all the agency in the world. Instead of being a pawn in the commodity periphery, the gamer becomes a soldier with a mission; not a subject who is secured but one who secures territory. The protagonists of Ship Breaker and The Drowning Cities have far less agency. Maimed and depleted, they suffer the precise hardships experienced in the most troubled parts of the world-system. They have no choice but to escape. In this way, these texts model the future of socio-ecological breakdown in the Global North on the inequalities that exist in the capitalist world-system today. When fiction from the core is made to enter futures beyond the current moment of pending epochal crisis, it seeks its dark mirror image within the worlds it has already depleted. Yet, when doing so, these texts rehearse the notion that no other world beyond the violent life-making capitalism engages in can take form when existing walls collapse.

Such possible futures exist, of course. Deeply aware of how geopolitics in the international system has been geared towards war and conflict, Simon Dalby (2007) has promoted the emergence of a new and radically different ‘Anthropocene geopolitics’. Dalby describes this as a collaborative geopolitics designed to alleviate the tensions and conflicts that are both generating human death and suffering and preventing powerful nation-states and nation-state alliances from reaching agreements on how to limit the release of greenhouse gases into the biosphere. The question is if the introduction of such an Anthropocene geopolitics ultimately serves to salvage the capitalist world-system, by making it more sustainable. Grove (2019) is far less optimistic. If the ‘geopolitical project of planet Earth is a violent pursuit of a form of life at the cost of others’ (p. 3), geopolitics can never function as a foundation for meaningful social and ecological change. Something very different is needed. Thus, Grove does not propose to alter geopolitics. Instead, he wishes for a future social and ecological order that emerges out of ‘a social sciences for Earthlings’ and that rely on ‘minor traditions, incipient practices, novel senses of belonging, and anachronistic forms of life, both futural and deeply old’ (pp. 278–279). Moore’s alternative is similar but much more clearly political and organized than that envisioned by Grove. If capitalism valued ‘labor productivity organized through the exploitation of labor-power and the appropriation of Cheap Nature’, a ‘sustainable and socialist law of value would privilege the healthy, equitable, and democratic relations of reproduction for all nature’ (2015, p. 294). If such a law of value were to inform international relations, a fundamentally different geopolitics—worthy of a different name—is perhaps possible. Some of the texts discussed in Chapter 8 investigate precisely such a prospect.