Whiteness as Epistemological Orientation in International Climate Change Discourses

Abstract This article argues that in contingent and context-specific ways, international climate change discourses reproduce whiteness as a form of signifying power. Climate change has thrown many of our world’s political categories and institutions into crisis. But existing scholarship underplays the importance of race and whiteness in creating meaning around climate change as these institutions and categories attempt to adapt to the crisis. In this article, I argue that race and whiteness are crucial resources for representational practices that facilitate the process of how the political adapts to climate change. To this end, I harness critical insights from IR and cultural geography on how whiteness takes on the epistemological orientations of “immanence” and “innocence” to show how whiteness is instrumental to reproducing the Euro-American dominated liberal order, even as it buckles under the weight of multiple crises. Using the Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice as an illustrative example, this article allows us to see that whiteness, and representational practices associated with it, are vital to the production of political meaning around climate change. It also helps us grasp that a focus on race and whiteness can highlight the fundamental crisis of the liberal order in the “Anthropocene.”