Publication of journal article “Victims, Security Threats or Agents? – Framing Climate Change-related Mobility in International Human Rights Documents”

Monika Mayrhofer

Climate change-related human mobility is a contested issue. For over a decade, UN human rights bodies have contributed to international discussions on displacement, migration and other forms of mobility associated with climate change. The article Victims, Security Threats or Agents? – Framing Climate Change-related Mobility in International Human Rights Documents analyses how climate change-related mobility is framed by UN human rights institutions. The findings show that UN human rights bodies primarily rely on a victim/protection-frame, which understands mobile persons in the context of climate change first and foremost as victims in need of human rights protection. The concept of vulnerability is an important element of this frame. However, other frames are used as well. In particular, the framing of mobile persons as political and social agents, which focuses on active entitlement, participation and empowerment, is also a recurring frame. Frames, such as the conceptualization of environmental migration as a security-threat or an adaptation-frame, which understands human mobility in the context of climate change as a viable adaptive strategy and emphasizes the benefits of mobility, are infrequently used. This article will in particular introduce the frame-analytical approach, a variation of discourse analysis, which is also employed as the main research approach in the research project, in order to discuss to what extent and how these four different frames are invoked in documents published by UN human rights bodies and in what specific way these narratives are shaped and perpetuated by the international human rights discourse.

You can find the whole article here.