Thinking the Zone

Abstract

This chapter interrogates an emergent genre of development zone in the India-Bangladesh borderlands that seek to instil resilience in climatevulnerable populations. Unlike development zones framed in relation to development as economic growth, these zones venture a darker vision of life in a warming world – one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis that are at once, stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. Heterodystopia provides an analytic for diagnosing the visions of time, space, and development embedded in these and other securitised framings of the future.