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Abstract
This paper draws on assemblage theory and post-colonial theories to analyse the politics of community-based disaster resilience. Through a case study of community-based disaster resilience programming in Jamaica, I unpack the biopolitical strategies practitioners deploy in assembling cultures of safety and fashioning resilient subjects. My analysis draws out two juxtaposed forms of resilience that circulate within Jamaican disaster management and are not reducible to the interests of specific social actors: neoliberal and subversive resilience. While both rely on the same categories of self-sufficiency, responsibility and freedom, the latter operates through qualitatively distinct state–society relations that facilitate rather than problematise local populations' adaptive capacity. Assemblage theory introduces a new ethos into resilience thinking that is sensitive to the contemporaneous multiplicity and indeterminacy of resilience, and the possible ‘hidden transcripts’ of resilience that subversively resist neoliberal disaster resilience.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mathew Coleman and audiences at Aberystwyth University for comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as the reviewers of the journal for their helpful feedback. Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University.
Notes
1 Field notes, September 8, 2009.
2 On culture and everyday state practice, see Joe Painter, “Prosaic Geographies of Stateness,” Political Geography 25, no. 7 (2006): 752–74. This definition of ‘turning hand’ comes from an informal conversation I had with a Rastafarian community leader in the Trinityville region (field notes, September 18, 2009).
3 Interview with ODPEM Director-General, October 5, 2009.
4 Adrian Smith and Andy Stirling, “The Politics of Social-Ecological Resilience and Sustainable Socio-technical Transitions,” Ecology and Society 15, no. 1 (2010): 11.
5 Arturo Escobar, “After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology,” Current Anthropology 40 (1999): 1–30.
6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
7 Peter Adey, “How to Engage? Assemblage as Ethos/Ethos as Assemblage,” Dialogues in Human Geography 2 (2012): 198–201.
8 Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane, “Assemblage and Geography,” Area 43 (2011): 124–27.
9 Ben Anderson and Peter Adey, “Governing Events and Life: ‘Emergency’ in UK Civil Contingencies,” Political Geography 31 (2012): 24–33.
10 Susan Ruddick, “The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze,” Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2010): 21–45. By affect, I mean a relational capacity to affect and be affected. While I do not explicitly focus on the affects of resilience here, attention to affect as the intensive force of change within an assemblage is a key difference from complex systems theory, which understands change as driven by extensive and exogenous forces.
11 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 2004).
12 Anthony Bogues, “Politics, Nation, and Postcolony: Caribbean Inflections,” Small Axe 11 (2002): 1–30.
13 James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
14 Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011): 143–60.
15 Carl Folke et al., “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability, and Transformability,” Ecology and Society 15, no. 4 (2010): 20.
16 Adrian Smith, Andy Stirling, and Frans Berkhout, “The Governance of Sustainable Socio-Technical Transitions,” Research Policy 34 (2005): 1491–510; Jan Rotmans, Rene Kemp, and Marjolein van Asselt, “More Evolution than Revolution: Transition Management in Public Policy,” Foresight 3 (2001): 15–31.
17 Mark Pelling, Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (London: Routledge, 2010); Smith et al., “Governance” Smith and Stirling, “Politics of Social-Ecological Resilience.”
18 Jan-Peter Voß and Basil Bornemann, “The Politics of Reflexive Governance: Challenges for Designing Adaptive Management and Transition Management,” Ecology and Society 16, no. 2 (2011): 9.
19 Erik Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, nos. 2–3 (2009): 213–32.
20 Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
21 Smith and Stirling, “Politics of Social-Ecological Resilience,” 1.
22 Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society (New York: Continuum, 2006).
23 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
24 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995).
25 Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Insecurity: Contingency Planning, Protection, Resilience,” Economy and Society 38 (2009): 230–54.
26 Kevin Grove, “From Emergency Management to Managing Emergence: A Genealogy of Disaster Management in Jamaica,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (2013): 570–88
27 Pelling, Adaptation to Climate Change.
28 Grove, “From Emergency Management.”
29 Interview with ODPEM staff member, October 8, 2009.
30 Interview with programme officer, Jamaica Red Cross, October 13, 2009.
31 Dean, Governmentality.
32 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009).
33 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
34 Vanessa Pupavac, “Human Security and the Rise of Global Therapeutic Governance,” Conflict, Development and Security 5 (2005): 161–82.
35 Julian Reid, “The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience,” Development Dialogue 58 (2012): 67–79.
36 Interview with Ministry of Local Government officer, October 14, 2009
37 Carl Stone, Democracy and Clientelism in Jamaica (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983).
38 George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment and Plantation Economies of the Third World (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1972).
39 David Scott, “Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern,” Small Axe 14 (2003): 1–22.
40 Brian Meeks, Envisioning Caribbean Futures: Jamaican Perspectives (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2007).
41 Interview with Ministry of Local Government officer, October 14, 2009.
42 Interview with programme officer, Jamaica Red Cross, October 13, 2009.
43 Interview with fieldworker, Social Development Commission, September 30, 2009.
44 Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1987).
45 Interview with Ministry of Local Government officer, October 14, 2009.
46 Interview with fieldworker, Social Development Commission, September 30, 2009.
47 Pelling, Adaptation to Climate Change.
48 Ibid., 63.
49 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
50 Beverly Mullings, “Neoliberalization, Social Reproduction and the Limits to Labour in Jamaica,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30 (2009): 174–83; Brian Meeks, Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2000).
51 Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004).
52 Meeks, Narratives of Resistance.
53 Ibid.; Scott, Domination and the Arts.
54 Holger Henke, “Towards an Ontology of Caribbean Existence,” Social Epistemology 11 (1997): 39–71.
55 Mullings, “Neoliberalization.”
56 Grove, “Emergency Management.”
57 ODPEM, National Hazard Mitigation Policy: Draft Policy (Kingston: ODPEM, 1999): 5.
58 UN, Disaster Risk Reduction: 2007 Global Review (Geneva: UNISDR, 2007): 54.
59 Grove, “Emergency Management.”
60 Philip Osei, “A Critical Assessment of Jamaica's National Poverty Eradication Programme,” Journal of International Development 14 (2002): 773–88.
61 Interview with executive officer, Social Development Commission, September 30, 2009.
62 In Jamaica, the Food and Agriculture Organisation's Telefood Special Fund financed 31 small scale projects, at a total cost of US$310,000, from 2001 to 2012. JIS, “Jamaica Benefits from Telefood Special Fund,” Jamaica Information Service, jis.gove.jm/news/list/30033 (accessed June 17, 2013).
63 Interview with fieldworker, Social Development Commission, September 30, 2009.
64 Ibid.
65 Field notes from Jamaica Information Services ‘Think Tank’ session with BDRC staff and Annotto Bay community leaders, September 16, 2009.
66 Natasha Drummond, “Check out Beachwood's Gourmet Guava Sauce,” Jamaica Gleaner, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110901/cook/cook1.html (accessed June 17, 2013).
67 Interview with fieldworker, Social Development Commission, September 30, 2009.
68 Ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kevin Grove
Kevin Grove is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Institute for Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University. His research focuses on the biopolitics of disaster management, with a special focus on catastrophe insurance and community-based resilience programming in the Caribbean.