Tracing the spectre that haunts Europe: the visual construction of climate-induced migration in the MENA region

Climate-induced migration (CIM) has become a symbol for the dangers to be expected in warming world. Yet at the same time, this human face of global warming is symbolized through news, magazines reports and maps. Focusing on Western projections of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this article investigates the political implications of the little visual security nothings that construct CIM in that region. We show that the ingrained European idea of MENA as buffer zone against external dangers is challenged by imaginations of an increasingly complex and uncertainty Mediterranean region. MENA is cast as hotspot of mixing social, political and ecological problems, populated by racialized, helpless and passive victims, exposed to an erratic and dangerous climate change. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, the nomadic figure of the climate migrant/refugee transforms MENA into smooth space that threatens the striated space of the EU.