Climate-conflict-displacement dynamics in asylum appeals to Australia from Sudan and South Sudan

There remains considerable debate about the exact relationships between climate, conflict, and migration. This article draws on appeal applications to the Administrative Review Tribunal in Australia from asylum seekers from Sudan and South Sudan to trace links between climate-related conflict and asylum migration to Australia. We concur with the wider literature that conflict and asylum migration cannot be directly attributed to climate change; instead, we argue that climate change formed part of the context of the conflict, persecution, and displacement that led to these asylum appeals in Australia. We identify five broad conflicts with a climate change context in Sudan and South Sudan, demonstrating how political actors have harnessed resource scarcity and abundance in ways that generated conflict. Taking a historical approach, we show how climate vulnerabilities in Sudan and South Sudan intersected with political inequalities and divisions, how vanishing resources have been harnessed and exploited by political elites at the expense of marginalised communities, who have been systematically persecuted for resisting such inequalities. By focussing on the individual applicants’ backgrounds, situating them in broader conflicts, and drawing on the literature to find connections to climate change within conflicts, we foreground the human experience of climate-conflict-displacement.