In Quest of a Shared Planet

Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She sits on the board of the JHU Center for Islamic Studies, and serves as affiliate faculty for the JHU Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke, 2012) and River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke, 2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (Routledge, 2010).Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She sits on the board of the JHU Center for Islamic Studies, and serves as affiliate faculty for the JHU Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke, 2012) and River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke, 2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (Routledge, 2010).

This is a fascinating and unique book. So much has been written about the success and failures of the international climate negotiations by political scientists and by Northern analysts. Khan comes at the question entirely differently. As an anthropologist, she follows Bangladeshi diplomats, analysts, academics and activists to understand what draws and keeps people within the tortuous negotiating process. Her answer will surprise you.---Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge

In Quest of a Shared Planet is a highly original account of the climate negotiation process, written in a refreshingly personal style. Khan’s book works through the difficult issues at the center of why humanity has not successfully dealt with climate change through UN-led negotiations. Khan hammers home the importance for developing countries of issues like payments for damages they’ll experience from climate change they didn’t cause.---J. Timmons Roberts, Brown University

An outstanding book, by an excellent scholar writing in a popular voice. The book is a crucial resource for those seeking to understand the COP process, particularly those who are planning to attend as delegates.---Jessica O’Reilly, Indiana University

Khan shows us the game of global climate negotiations, in which the world’s nations play for the immensely high stakes of reshaping economies to avoid existential disaster. From her close-in position as an embedded ethnographer, she articulates the brilliant strategies by which one small poor country, Bangladesh, succeeded in advancing the needs of the world’s most vulnerable people.---Ben Orlove, Columbia University

With vivid ethnography we are transported to the central hub of climate politics and invited to share in the aspirations of youth activists and the enduring labors of COP negotiators and to view the climate crisis from the perspective of the Global South. Analytically sophisticated, with stories that bring us to the heart of the conversations shaping our socioenvironmental futures, In Quest of a Shared Planet is precisely the kind of dialog we need to be having now.---Cymene Howe, Rice University

If there's one country on earth that has the most at stake in slowing climate change, it might be Bangladesh. So it makes great sense to hear the story of the global climate negotiations from this perspective—it will be of interest to anyone who has followed these talks, or who wants to understand how the world looks different depending on where on it you were born.---Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature