The second part of this book gets down to the nitty gritty of deconstructing the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change in ‘an attempt to renew an acquaintance with the strangeness of the present against all the attempts to erase it under the necessary dialectic of reason in history’ (Dean, 2010: 56). It takes the ideas and concepts shown by the episodes documented in Part I of this book to be beyond question, and holds them up to the light to examine their component parts, their links to other discourses and some of their productive effects.

It is in these chapters of the book that the analysis moves away from the chronologically structured analysis of episodes of policy making to analyse the construction of the ‘phenomenon’ of the migration and climate change nexus and the people whose lives are being affected by it. This is closer to the classical domain of genealogy, which is concerned with identifying and deconstructing shifts, dislocations, contradictions and silences. This chapter therefore marks a shift in tone of the analysis, moving from the detailed documentation of episodes of policy making to deconstruction. The importance of the chapters in this part of the book is twofold. First, they highlight that it is not just particular events, decision documents or policy agreements that are relevant for the analysis of policy making on migration and climate change, but the ideas that are created and transported by them. Second, these chapters are a vital element of the critical approach that this book takes, distinguishing it from more instrumental approaches to policy making. The construction of migration in the context of climate change as a problem that requires policy solutions is not a given, but rather a process of construction to be interrogated.

On the surface, this chapter is concerned with language; what language is used to label the phenomenon of the migration and climate change nexus, and the quirks and discontinuities of this language use. However, this analysis also has a deeper level whereby, following one of the core ideas of discourse analysis, language is not a neutral tool by which to simply express pre-existing thoughts or ideas.