Abstract

‘Climate apartheid’ advocacy and scholarship critiques how the climate actions of privileged individuals and groups (re)produce injustice. Despite apartheid’s South African origins, climate apartheid debates are overwhelmingly led by global North scholarship, and the term is rarely used in South Africa, where attempts to reappropriate the apartheid lexicon beyond its historical context are politically and emotionally complex. ‘Apartheid’ is a term that cannot be applied lightly. This paper explores how climate apartheid discourse is emerging through a review of existing scholarship, critically reflecting on the epistemic violence of reappropriating southern linguistics in (largely western-led) knowledge production. Language matters. Apartheid is a provocative term with a specific history and meaning. It is particularly striking that new adaptations often place less emphasis on race, instead highlighting other axes of neoliberal exploitation, oppression and inequality. Furthermore, contemporary appropriations often overlook apartheid’s origins as a deliberate and planned political system that was explicitly justified through racist assumptions of superiority. While recognising that the language of apartheid has already been used in new ways, I argue that any re-appropriation requires sensitive recognition of apartheid’s historic origin and the distress generated by redeployment. I conclude by critically reflecting on how deploying the climate apartheid label in South Africa and beyond is simultaneously powerful, for raising attention to the injustices of the climate transition, and problematic, for diluting the racialised devastation that apartheid embedded in South Africa and misdirecting attention away from the contemporary specificities of climate injustices.