Insurance, climate change, and the creation of geographies of uncertainty in the Indian Ocean Region

This article is a geopolitical–biopolitical interrogation of the global insurance discourse in relation to climate change. Based on two general assumptions made by the insurance industry, namely that the ‘Global South’ remains uninsured, and that insurance is the technology for coping with environmental risk, it is argued that a risk management insurantial imaginary is effecting a globalisation of spaces of liberal security. As a result, the globalisation of a rationality of governing uncertainty through insurance aligns ‘other’ non-Western ways of being in the world with a Western financial capitalist rationality of governance. The argument is explored in relation to the Global South and is illustrated through the case of parametric rain insurance in Ethiopia.