Biopolitical “othering” romanticizes an ideal type while dehumanizing or tolerating a differing identity as a sacrifice to benefit and empower a specific group.

In speaking of othering as a technology of government underpinning and reconciling two types of power—one promoting life or improvement, the other violence or sacrifice—we do not argue that these are the only ways that, historically, the West has represented “the rest”. In a broad sense, ways of knowing the other have much deeper and more complex histories: the practice of ethnographic writing, and attention to the knowledges and practices of other cultures, stretch back to ancient Greece (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Sullivan, 2017, p. 222); moreover, Western representations of non-European cultures and geographies, even when associated with colonialism, include positive depictions and even romanticising idealisations (e.g. Altmann, 2020). Here, however, we want to maintain our focus on these two ways of constructing the other—as an internal enemy or an object of improvement—because we find them especially salient to dominant ways of framing and governing the climate crisis.

In doing this, we also caution against exaggerating the difference or distance between these two logics of othering. These are in fact “idealtypes” that, in practical contexts, often overlap and conflate. First, before being (and in order to be) identified as an internal enemy, a certain group needs to be included within the governmental responsibility of the state (or development institution). Second, othering may serve not simply to exclude or include, but also to include differently. For instance, as Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015, p. 59) argue, drawing on Mbembe (2003), the necropolitical logic of colonialism and the plantation in Africa did not preclude “making live” native populations in the colony, yet it did so in ways that primarily advanced the interests and “improvement” of the ostensibly racially superior people in the metropole. Othering, therefore, underpins a wide array of interventions that go from the pure act of killing or sacrificing an internal or internalised enemy, to the ostensibly disinterested act of including, as a way of improving a group’s conditions, wealth and wellbeing.