Implosion: A New Climate Imaginary

This paper engages a kinetic thought experiment of reconceiving climate migration from explosion to implosion. Kinopolitics considers the ontological movement of human and nonhuman agents as foundational in shaping social structures (Nail 2015). Contemporary debates about climate migration in Western media and policy, however, are dominated by a discourse of externality in which biopolitical fixation on stasis and borders contributes to pathologizing, racializing, and securitising climate migration as a crisis to be solved and stabilised. From this vantage, the dynamics of climate change are made visible—not merely as its dramatic manifestations but as pivotal actors in a decolonial and integrated understanding of the root causes of displacement and environmental degradation.

With implosion, I invoke a new imaginary that recasts environmental challenges not as “natural” and sudden disasters, but as intensified and cumulative symptoms of our ecosocial environments that are collapsing inwardly—due to unsustainable practices of fossil fuel capitalism, extraction, and colonial racial inequality. The primary failure in the dominant climate migration discourse lies in its inability to present climate impacts as implosive buildups—rather than explosive externalities—of colonial geo-logics of racial subjection and capitalist extraction. The kinopolitics and kinoeptics of implosion consider the mutual worlding between humanity and Earth, calling for systemic changes that cannot be enacted by a modern biopolitics of control and containment. Instead, more just and collective planetary futures-to-come must be rebuilt from within, by recuperating the excess of mobility and restoring humans as ecologically response-able subjects.