Wednesday, 28 January 2014
9.30am
– 2pm
Room 1, Wolfson Research Exchange, 3rd Floor, Library
Concept Note
How we understand disaster and post-conflict is an important starting point. We might begin by contrasting classic disaster situations (post-tsunami, post-flood, postwar, post-conflict) with atypical ones (economic crisis and collapse, revolution, invasion). The traditional response would be to home in on the former to the exclusion of the latter. The argument is often made that the natural disaster or armed conflict are legally and metaphysically different from an economic crisis, for instance.
Of course, we could come up with a variety of reasons for maintaining this distinction. But perhaps it is also useful to consider them together, to consider the role and function of law and governance in the ‘unsettled state’.
‘Law and governance in an unsettled state’ would signify the moments when the state function itself is exhausted by the event, when the st ate is ‘over-stretched’ and pushed to breaking point. In these unsettled states we might ask a number of further questions, in order to establish if and how the narratives that attach themselves to post-conflict and post-disaster governance feed into how the global community perceives its duty – moral, philosophical, legal – to intervene and to resolve areas and issues of ‘unsettledness’.
The first is generic theme might be memory . Starting after the crisis or disaster, it is useful to think about how the crisis or disaster, as an event, is present within law and politics. This question is not simply that of memorialising the victims of the event.
Rather, it is of the nature of the post-conflict or post-disaster political settlement itself. Thus, the politics of post-dictatorship political settlements often circle around truth commissions, prosecutions and amnesties. After ‘natural’ disasters, the questions of culpability and recrimination are often politically crucial. In certain examples, planners and legislators seek to use the disaster or conflict to effectuate
‘cleansings’, where the society that existed prior to the event is effaced from the new political settlement. The ‘urban renewal’ after Hurricane Katrina is apposite here, but so too is the example of Colombia, where after the ‘demobilisation’ of the paramilitaries, the country was said to have reached a state of ‘post-conflict’ which delegitimized certain political claims of the victims of the conflict.
A second generic theme might be the spaces or immediacy of the event. Here we are in the realm of the emergency. The disaster takes place in cities, settlements, or spread across a territory. It is a spatial event, and the emergency response is generally to restructure the terrain in order to accommodate it. Once people are displaced, camps will abound. But the camp is not a simple phenomenon, it has a series of dynamics which produce forms of power as well as protection. On a metalevel there are questions of the politics of humanitarianism, and on the micro-level there are the politics of camps: violence, organisation and control. In terms of
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economic crises, we may also think of the financial rescue packages as emergency buffers – temporary lifeboats to contain contagion. Because of course disasters, crises and conflicts are contagious, unsettled states reopen desires and drives to reorder the political, economic and social terrain. This too can be viewed in terms of spaces of containment, as metaphysical camps. Emergency should not be understood simply as the immediacy of the event - the initial crisis is always becoming-permanent.
The final question might be of unsettled futures – of the politics of disaster planning and risk. In an era of global warming, climate change, and continued human population growth, the notion of the inevitability of disaster is gaining credence
– disasters are no longer the exception, but the norm. Thus, questions of global policy and governance come to the fore, as well as the necessity of an international legal framework for disaster prevention, mitigation, and response. In this, resilience and future response to the disaster to-come are in question. The future disaster is a tool of governance.
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