ABSTRACT
Recent work on disasters, in postcolonial, communities dealing with conflict and underlying insecurity is providing robust evidence to re-work and re-imagine a postcolonial disaster study. From insurgency-affected Southern Philippines living with typhoons, to post-accord Colombia suffering from floods – these disasters are only the most recent manifestation of the long-standing violence inflicted on these communities by Imperial state and/or market forces. In the peripheries of the postcolonial state these typhoons, drought, or floods cannot be seen as isolated processes: climate disasters caused by natural hazards that intersected with contexts of local vulnerability. Rather they must be seen as part of a much broader system of denial of rights and a history of Imperial domination and control. Here, natural hazards are not separate or apart from the conflict, nor is the conflict contributing in unique and distinct ways to local vulnerability, rather it is spanning both, dissolving the line between global natural hazard and local social vulnerability.
For the postcolonial subject the ‘lived experience’ of hazard-based disasters, is not a neat interplay between natural and social phenomenon but a messy continuum of marginalisation and brutalisation of dominant state and market forces that define the state–citizen relationship in the postcolony.
