I

t is a pleasure to think and engage with Kasia Paprocki’s excellent book, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh. The book is a rigorous political ecology of development and climate change that paves a way forward for studying the entanglements of warming, development, and place. It shows, in rigorous and often brilliant detail, how the reframing of the Bengal delta as a threatening dystopia of immanent climate disruption facilitates accumulation through “anticipatory ruination”—a form of accumulation predicated on showing the delta as inevitably doomed and thus logically opened the extraction of value (before it sinks!). The book charts this process by elaborating the interaction between the Bengal Delta and an emergent “adaptation regime.” This regime is best understood not as a radical break with forms of development that have come before it, but rather as a shift in development’s logic. Here, accumulation is articulated not through programs for growth and economic development at individual or national scales, but through the remaking of local, national, and global political economies predicated on adapting rural populations to a dystopic future of climate catastrophe. 

While the book makes many important interventions, what I wish to highlight in this brief review is its contribution to studies of the region: to explorations of Bangladesh and environmental change in South Asia more broadly. To that end, I will highlight three of the book’s key strengths.

First, the foundation of Paprocki’s work is that it subverts the logics through which many—both within and outside of the country—engage with Bangladesh and its climate-affected future. As countless explorations tracing climate change’s impact on Bangladesh have demonstrated, Bangladesh—and especially its Southwest delta region, which Threatening Dystopias focuses on—has emerged as a proverbial ground-zero of climate change in global consciousness. The invocation of Bangladesh has become a metonym for climate change at large. This has had the paradoxical effect of turning the country itself into an icon of climate change—the ur-example of immanent climate chaos. As I argue elsewhere, Bangladesh’s status as an icon of climate change has erased the particularities of the country’s delta region and the lived experiences of environmental change within it (Cons 2025). Paprocki’s text crucially turns this framing on its head. It takes Bangladesh not as an “example” that stands in for, explains, or prefigures other sites of climate catastrophe. Rather, it tells the story of Bangladesh’s encounter with climate adaptation. It does not subordinate the specificities of place to the examination of climate change at large but centers the Southwest Delta as a lived zone in which a set of debates over the future of climate change and the implementation of the adaptation regime unfolds. 

Second, it adopts a perspective informed by long and principled engagement with Bangladesh’s landless movement—an organization called Nijera Kori, one of a vanishingly small set of radical civil society organizations in Bangladesh (Lewis 2017). Nijera Kori, which translates as “we do it ourselves,” cultivates self-determination for landless groups (as opposed to offering service provision) through a radically decentralized and deliberative approach to political organizing. Threatening Dystopias does not distill Nijera Kori’s politics into an analytic for understanding agrarian change. However, Paprocki’s approach is profoundly shaped by the organization’s commitment to centering landlessness and landless people in Bangladesh’s agrarian politics. This perspective is most apparent in her explorations of the interface between development programs and village life (in a chapter tellingly titled “Autopsy of a Village”). Yet, it is equally crucial to the ways that Paprocki engages with the broader apparatus of the adaptation regime. Threatening Dystopias is, at its heart, an activist text that thinks about the adaptation regime broadly but from a very specific place and perspective—peasants in the delta struggling to determine their own futures. The book, as such, rails against a perspective that problematically sees climate change as the ultimate answer to the agrarian question (whither the peasant in an age of climate catastrophe). Here, depeasantization is revealed not as a fait accompli of global warming, but rather as a historically contingent project of reconfiguring agrarian relations in the delta.

Third, Paprocki’s book reveals climate change as a phenomenon in need of deep and specific historicization. For Paprocki, that historicization is not about locating climate change in the framework of deep-time or of capitalism writ large. Rather, it is about situating the adaptation regime in the specific colonial and postcolonial transformations that have shaped the Bengal Delta. Paprocki accomplishes this by rewriting the history of “climate change” in Bangladesh as a story of how agrarian populations were, on the one hand, made vulnerable to environmental change and, on the other, caught up in capitalist relations that heralded the very transformations characterized as climate vulnerability. (Paprocki is not alone in this project of unpacking climate presents in Bangladesh. Her approach, here, bears similarities to Dewan’s (2022) exploration of climate change as “misrecognizing” the Bengal Delta.)

Paprocki accomplishes this by tracing the colonial and postcolonial history of the construction of embankments in the delta landscape, the ways that these technologies enabled the adoption of Green Revolution crops, and subsequently, the ways embankments were reappropriated with the rise of the Blue Revolution and the boom in export-oriented shrimp aquaculture in the 1980s and 1990s. This allows her to illuminate a stark and troubling paradox—even as shrimp aquaculture is touted as a partial solution to the question of climate adaptation, many of the things described as climate change can be traced to the impacts of the delta’s long shrimp boom and the transformations that facilitated it. Situating the adaptation regime within this broader historical trajectory thus allows Paprocki to show not rupture but continuity between modernist projects of accumulation within the delta and new projects that see the delta as a wasteland foretold. As such, Threatening Dystopias reveals modernization and dystopia to drive development in South Asia in similar ways, albeit with different teloses. 

Threatening Dystopias joins a new and crucial literature that forces us to engage not just with the dystopian possibilities of climate change itself, but with the dispossessions that are increasingly normalized in responses to it. Here, dystopia is revealed not simply as a threat, but as a project of a specific historical conjuncture in the history of capital. More to the point, Paprocki’s work joins a conversation that demands that we move beyond the imagination of climate change as an elusive hyperobject (Morton 2013) and instead, approach it as profoundly embedded in place. In Threatening Dystopias, the work of turning Bangladesh into an abstract example of climate change is undone. What Paprocki offers in its place is a study that insists that we can only understand climate change’s impact on Bangladesh by taking its history, its agrarian politics, and its peasantry seriously.

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References

Cons, Jason. Forthcoming. Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier

Dewan, Camilia. 2022. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 

Lewis, David. 2017. “Organising and Representing the Poor in a Clientelistic Democracy: the Decline of Radical NGOs in Bangladesh.” The Journal of Development Studies. 53, 10: 1545-1567

Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Jason Cons is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He the author of Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier, an editor of South Asia, and a member of the Limn editorial collective. 

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