Slow Violence and Living Death: The Necropolitics of Climate Change in Zambia

Climate change has predominantly been framed in technical, environmental, and future-oriented terms. It becomes a matter of targets, thresholds, and emissions trajectories. This framing has its merits. Most importantly, when used appropriately, it allows us to identify and assign responsibility to those actors most responsible for the crisis. However, it falls short in a crucial way. This framing depoliticizes climate change and its impacts, obscuring the global power relations that shape everyday life in countries like Zambia. As a result of this depoliticization, the people who bear the brunt of the crisis are rendered invisible, and their suffering is ignored. Stories like those presented in this thesis, therefore, are important because they repopulate the problem with real people living the social, political, and economic realities of climate change. With the 2023-24 drought as a backdrop, this thesis uses conversations with everyday Zambians and my own positionality as a Zambian living in the West to challenge this framing. Drawing on ideas of slow violence and necropolitics, I argue that climate change is not simply an environmental problem to be solved through technical coordination, but a deeply political phenomenon structured by global inequality rooted in imperial capitalism.