Category: Talks and conference papers

On the definition and control of land and populations in the crisis century

I will be presenting this paper at Governing Complex Disasters in Southeast Asia on 7 October 2023.

The states which exercise control over regions deemed at highest risk from climate change are, with a few exceptions, ‘weak’. In contrast to the great powers that are seen to be embroiled in climate wars, climate coloniality, or climate engineering, they do not have well-developed military-industrial complexes. They cannot project power far beyond their borders, and they have neither the personnel nor materiel to reshape the climate. Instead, their security apparatuses have historically been oriented toward internal threats, with a political-economic role limited to securing territories for ‘development’. But as complex emergencies become more important threats to these states, and as their militaries become embroiled in disaster response, resiliency efforts, and other operations other than war: how might practices initially developed to pacify unruly populations and to exert control over resources translate into new battlespaces involving environmental, public health, and urban planning risks?

This paper is an attempt at stating this question through the Philippines’ experiences with disasters in the early 21st century. Beginning with Typhoon Ondoy in 2009, and leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, I consider how a ‘weak’ state exercised control over a ‘high-risk’ territory. I draw from Beck in framing 21st century complex disasters as embodying a shift from the first modernity of exploiting and distributing resources, to the second modernity of managing anthropogenic, catastrophic risks, and from Vandergeest and Peluso to conceptualize the state’s relationship with its land and people as a process of territorialization, a process which shapes the state’s practices of defining and controlling its territory. I propose that for the Philippine state, its reliance on militarized internal security operations to define and control the land and people within its territory, and on military personnel for staffing its civil works, environmental, and disaster management cabinet offices, had led it to rely on the personnel, rhetoric, and technologies of counterinsurgency to manage complex emergencies.