27 - Disasters and Recovery: Postcolonializing Economic Geography

Summary

Introduction

With the frequent occurrence of disasters in the world, research has greater understanding of disasters, including their cause and how to reduce their impacts and expedite recovery. When disasters first began to be studied in the 1950s, they were typically viewed as naturally occurring events that were the product of the magnitude of an earthquake, the ferocity of a hurricane, the infectiousness of a disease or the rise of the sea level, for example. However, understanding of hazards has expanded to include conflicts, price fluctuations and financial crises. Moreover, research across the social sciences has revealed that disasters are far from a naturally occurring phenomenon. Rather, disasters occur where a vulnerable population is exposed to a hazard (Hewitt, 1995). Thus, vulnerability is the link between the onset of a hazard and a disaster occurring. Vulnerability is highly contested, but it generally refers to ‘the capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a hazard’ (Wisner et al, 2004: 11).

Given the multidimensional nature of vulnerability, the study of disasters speaks across the social sciences. However, disasters are particularly relevant to economic geography given how the political economy of a country directly impacts the capacity of people to mitigate, prepare, respond and recover from disasters (Neumayer et al, 2014). In this chapter I set out to show how economic geographies can encompass a postcolonial approach to explore both the cause of disasters, that is, the production of vulnerability, and how disaster-affected people respond to disasters during their everyday lives. Postcolonial theory allows one to recognize how the causes of disasters have deep roots in the placation, exploitation and colonization of marginalized peoples (see Chapter 23 in this volume). This approach also shifts our gaze ‘down’ to shed light on the agency of disaster-affected people to intuitively engage in acts of resilience that can represent political anti-colonial acts of resistance that aim to rupture the status quo by providing different forms of societal and economic organization. Finally, by adopting a postcolonial approach, I argue one can observe how grassroots definitions and forms of resilience do not fit neatly with state-centric conceptualizations of resilience.

The chapter begins with a discussion of how economic geographers might draw on postcolonial theory to explore disasters.