This chapter differs from the two preceding chapters in that it does not focus on prominent elements of the discourse on migration and climate change. Instead, it interrogates a silence – an idea or framing that is conspicuous in the discourse due to its (relative) absence. This is both an important element of genealogy and of critical scholarship, with a holistic analysis in this tradition needing to analyse both ‘discursive tropes and silences’ as part of its ‘big picture analysis’ (Death, 2014: 5). An infinite number of silences could be examined here; the absence of migrant voices in the discourse itself suggests a number of fitting ideas or framings might also be missing. To venture into the more far-fetched, the idea of space travel and an intergalactic framing are (somewhat unsurprisingly) also absent. But this chapter focuses on a silence that is all the more surprising because it is well established in elite policy making of the United Nations (UN) and the international community broadly, backed up with legal documents, norms and accepted parlance, but which prior to and indeed during the Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) remained on the margins of the policy-making discourse: human rights.

Climate change and human rights are not unusual bedfellows, with academics drawing on the utility of human rights as an analytical approach to the societal effects of climate change (for example, see Barry and Woods, 2009), and the link also featuring frequently and prominently within UN fora (Human Rights Council, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015; Knox, 2009). Against this background, it is notable that human rights does not have a more prominent position in the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change. For this analysis it is important to stress that human rights is a relative silence in the policy-making discourse on the migration and climate change nexus. It is described as such because human rights do actually feature in the discourse and have been very much present in broader debates surrounding the nexus (for a prominent example, see McAdam, 2012).