Cambridge Disaster Research Network seminar held on April 30th 2024.
Speakers: Prof Ksenia Chmutina (Loughborough University)
Prof Terry Cannon (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex)
Abstract: Narratives function as a moral compass and a repository of accumulated knowledge in a complex world. As the environmental historian William Cronon explains, stories are not passive accounts of events; rather, ‘because we use them to motivate and explain our actions, the stories we tell change the way we act in the world’ (Cronon, 1992). In the same way, the interpretation of a disaster’s causes and significance through storytelling fundamentally shapes people’s disaster responses and both collective and institutional memories. Stories can help as well as hinder disaster responses, depending in large part on whose narratives are being amplified and whose suppressed. In the context of policy and disaster relief, the narrative framings of disasters as either extraordinary ‘natural’ events or the symptoms of systemic injustice directly informs decision-making at the international, state, and community levels. These kinds of narratives frequently privilege powerful vested interests with little consideration for the lived experiences of the communities who suffer disproportionately from the effects of disasters. In an international context especially, such narratives also tend to privilege Western-centric and colonial conceptions of both disaster causation and the appropriate parameters of humanitarian responses. By contrast, the transmission of these disaster-affected communities’ oral histories and collective knowledge can help to communicate adaptive strategies for future crises. In this respect, narratives have a crucial heuristic role to play in helping people affected by disasters to make sense of their experiences and, increasingly, to shift broader mindsets towards the pursuit of transformative structural change. This Cambridge Disaster Research Network session aims to explore the importance of narratives and storytelling in understanding the nature of disasters and disaster responses in different contexts. In the process, we consider the relationship between narratives and power, thinking about the radical potential of disaster storytelling for social justice efforts more broadly.
Chair: Emma Wordsworth
is that we’ll be thank you um is that we’ll be having two speakers and each of them will take it in turns and we’ll have a question and answer session hopefully for about 20 minutes or so um at the end uh so please hold on to any questions that you have um right until cassor and Terry have finished uh so without further Ado uh I’d like to introduce our first speaker for today uh which is CA chimu who is a professor at lofra University um so thank you very much cassia thanks so much Emma let me just share my screen um hopefully yes we can see it right I think excellent all right and thank you so much for for inviting me to talk today this is this is very exciting and when I got an email from Emma asking me to kind of talk about narratives um I immediately thought um of the way that the story of disaster pretty much any disaster now has been shaped in recent years by the idea of resilience and through this Narrative of resilience um I’m not going to spend any time on the definitions you you’ll be happy to hear that and I’m sure you know all of you probably spend hours if not days of your life in different conferences and various academic settings kind of deba in the definition of resilience and whether we actually need one um but instead what I’d like to talk about is uh what the story of resilience actually mean for disaster risk reduction uh so so what do we see here you know perhaps resilience in its different guises yet very few people living in an informal settlement in the global South spontaneously claim that they are resilient and I use this word in quotation marks uh sure they often overcome multiple challenges yet their actions are increasingly examined through the framework of resilience and otion very much developed in the global nor um resilience and its ability to resolve again quotation mark all contemporary issues has become a very useful neoliberal narrative to explain anything from how individuals should act and cope with hazards risks and disasters to mainstreamed approaches to development and portrayed as something good as something positive resilience has become an important goal that needs to be achieved no matter what and under neoliberal conditions resilience therefore can be interpreted as the ability to survive under the conditions of destitution and such resilience is profitable because resilient people as sociologist Sarah BR points out and I quote absorbs absorb the impact of austerity measures and continue to be productive end of quote so as such the resilience message that we hear essentially tells the most oppressed that they should keep taking knock after knock and get better at coping and so with a few colleagues uh we’ve been really curious as to um what term terms like resilience um actually mean and how they’re actually used internationally because of course disaster related policy is usually of global reach and so with the help of quite a few friends and colleagues from all around the globe um thanks to former Twitter mainly we um asked our colleagues and friends to translate six most used disaster term so resilience vulnerability capacity Hazard risk and disaster um and we ended up getting these translations into 53 languages and then we kind of looked at how these translations um actually work with the support of our linguist um colleague Neil Sadler um what we asked people to do is to translate the term into their language and then translate the actual meaning the literal meaning of that word back into English so it wasn’t just kind of you know translating back and forth and so what we found wasn’t actually surprising the way that disaster terms are used and consequently the problems that they kind of trying to address and frame are very much grounded in English language hemony uh the use of anglophone terminology and the underlying meaning among uh non-governmental organizations research institutions intergovernmental actors um enforces Power by creating the language Norms by which you get published you know you win grants uh you kind of achieve policy maker buying uh but these meanings are very limited and resilience is a prime example of that we found that it is very hard to trans slate um this term and the word is is pretty much not used apart in the academic or policy Circle and we might use translation or we might see translation as a kind of as a mechanical um operation capable of producing precise equivalence of meanings between languages but I think for any of us who speaks more than one language we know that translation is um a much more ambiguous and creative process but because of long-standing power differentials translations out of English is usually foreignizing and this emulates the original meaning but we see the reverse Dynamic when translating disaster terminology back and so that is called the domesticating approach that masks the origin so therefore for those reading a translation say in African they might eventually see resilience but if we prioritize African if we PR prioritize The Source language we could yield something like bouncy bouncy right and at the meaning of that is of course very very different um but yet um kind of relying on angone Concepts and res resilience Frameworks a resilience framework therefore depoliticizes the analysis of risk and serves to mask and dilute the responsibility of political economic Elites in disaster risk creation um a very similar story is observed when we look at the Frameworks that encourage use that encourage us um and use resilience in order to measure um some process that are happening in urban area so with my colleague West CH and also with Gonzalo laral Jason B and Lee borcha we dissected five resilient City Frameworks uh which are popular around the world um although one of them 100 resilient cities got bust which is kind of ironic but you know never mind that and and is that current Advocates of uh resilient cities are operating on the Assumption of what cities and what resilience are or might be there are no definitions um the three prominent themes in this framework are governance society and planning and design um are all used as important elements of resilience but to what extent do they actually H reflect the notion over a resilient City ideally resilience framework should help understand where the city and its systems are now how precarious they are and what state but in reality when we look at these Frameworks they only measure what can be measured without considering some elements that are vital for a city but that are hard to measure what do we measure what we we do measure requires a consideration of who is doing the measurement and how um otherwise resilience become a kind of sort of mavan tool that can produce a lot of harm in the name of a supposedly good cause and so resilience Frameworks are not public policy instruments but yet they do impact how the way cities operate and what they prioritize yet they l a s they these Frameworks lack a sense of priorities although they describe different problems and solutions that can be addressed by resilience Frameworks turn into a list of individual goals without consensus on how to join them in together and so the framework’s view of a city and therefore of of of resilience of a city is very much territorialist they presuppose a world uh that is composed of distinct settlements which are occasionally impacted by unexpected disasters um and in order to do that space must become analytically Frozen but we of course know that City doesn’t work like that city is not analytically Frozen and so the idea of resilience is of course an attractive one because resilience has been presented for a number of years now as a FASA to all eels as a kind of Silver Bullet all you need to do is to achieve it and how do we do this we build back better the origins of build back back are very easy to pin down it it the phrase was coined by Bill Clinton following the 2005 ocean um Indian Ocean tsunami or you know Boxing Day tsunami as it’s known and since then um as you probably all know building back better has just kind of become a a name tag for a set of principles for international Frameworks for post- disaster recovery and no one really cared about it much and thought about it much until suddenly and strangely the the build back better penetrate ated into the year 2020 as a very much political slogan on June 30th 2020 the then UK prime minister Boris Johnson promised to undertake and I quote the most radical reforms to our planning system since the second world war as this will help to build back better build back Greener build back faster end of quote uh in order to boost um spending on infrastructure as a way for leveling up the country and avoid an economic recession um it was also used in the same Summer by Canadian Prime Mr Justin tror and then of course it became a sent piece for the Now American President Biden the emphasis of building back better is on continuity in other words on keep on going no matter what the goal is not to alleviate the original conditions that created the crisis but rather to quickly move past the crisis without actually un altering any underlying political economic and societal structures and this emphasizes this the core of neoliberalism not as a mode of economic management but as a mode of political rationality and governmental reasoning that constructs and regulates the realm within which a disaster and then the Reconstruction of a disaster occur the contradiction here is that the disaster exposes and is grounded in the underlying inequalities in society while neoliberal capitalism of course relies on the maintenance of those same uh inequalities in disaster people can lose their livelihood shelter family sense of dignity and the physical infrastructure that make their daily life possible but I don’t need to tell you that disasters do not affect everybody equally disasters don’t simply bring about suffering they expose it characterized as a way of people and societies to become more resilient building back better epistemes the problematic ideology of resilience disasters are often portrayed as unexpected external shocks and a frequently naturalized and framed as inevitable meaning that their root causes cannot be altered and thus it is we who must adopt and when the vulnerable and you know and then if you can’t adopt then you become a threat when the vulnerable are framed as victims this inspires pity uh which sometimes may help to actually build the ethics kind of of care and justice but more often than not however py as a fact enables charity Frameworks that foreground the spectacle of death and suffering but sometimes a shift occurs in which the state marks the vulnerable as posing a threat to the established order this transformation does not happen overnight it gradually becomes noticeable through both rhetoric and apparatus engaged for the management of the vulnerable and P cannot be felt or given to those who are deemed responsible for the ills that have befallen them or those um who are considered dangerous the vulnerable becomes the other they’re seen as being outside of the normative a problem that Li outside of the frame to use Judith Butler Words which can be interpreted as kind of as normal identity and I use normal initation Marks here uh be that a geographical boundary or any other social construct that supp supports The Narrative of us and them um and while the primary aim of Security is to protect often it is the status quo that the capitalist said that state that needs to be protected thus um when there is a risk of the others pushing the frames of normality the others become a threat that need to be removed or made invisible and whilst the vulnerable are not yet explicitly included in international and National policies as a threat we nevertheless can see how the process is unfolding especially in narratives around disasters in three uh simple steps and we show the steps very clearly um with our with our colleagues in recent paper that we published in disaster so the first step is identification of an existential threat to a valued reference object here the vulnerable portrayed as dangerous The Narrative is changed from unlucky and destitute to potential terrorists thugs or criminals and such language leads to objectification step two is the prescription of a plan of action in relation to a perceived threat a narrative that allows dehumanization and disidentification of the vulnerable they become seen as being less morally worthy and has hence less morally deserving and then there is a step three which when a threat becomes a part of political agenda so following dehumanization violence against the other is presented as a legitimate effort to impose security and Order once a threat becomes a part of security agenda it becomes isolated from any kind of alternative analysis projection of the other as a threat are closely linked to power access to resources and uncertainty and securitization of vulnerability allows for treating it as an emerging threat devoid of histor IAL soci and sociopolitical context race class and gender conscience understanding grounded in histories of coloniality imperialism structural poverty uh poverty hegemonic patriarchy are all ignored and instead substituted by near Liberal rhetoric about individual failures in this narrative the vulnerable simply become bad people this means that instead of addressing social preconditions the state talks about security and proposes solutions that are often to be delivered in a hyper masculine militarized way securitization provides a belief of protecting of protection of the public but the protection uh is the solution to the wrong problem as it misses the opportunity to address the original problem I.E the problem of inequality and Injustice instead reinforcing it it is important to move away from securitization um narrative and instead focus on carrying narratives and if we are to reduce vulnerability we need less security uh and perhaps more solidarity care and colle itive Disobedience but this is not the story that we hear when we talk about disaster so th we need very to be very very careful um with how we use resilience as an inspiration for disaster risk reduction current Narrative of disaster that they’re you know unexpected and natural and sudden um creates an illusion that seems real an effect referred by Yak as as as hyper normalization where it is the story and not that reality that matters and the story narrated through resilience then is the story of successful recovery of going back to normal and living living happily ever after it reflects Western neoliberal values and capitalist aspirations but such ending seems only real in fairy tale in reality disaster risk reduction ends up being the process of reconstructing the risks and recreating and sometimes enhancing inequalities that eventually lead to yet another disaster and even when we engage with communities there is a disconnect between vacular and techn academic narrative this disconnect makes it very difficult to respond to the real needs and expectations of ordinary citizens it contributes to distortions of agendas it masks significant realities of everyday life and so true Solutions should be grounded in narratives that reveal historic segregation colonialism marginalization and other deep rooted causes of risks that are now now being exacerbated by climate change furthermore they need to be grounded in a comprehensive understanding of local Str struggle for social justice thank you very much wellow thank you so much cassa that was absolutely amazing and so much to think about so many threads so um I’ll pass over to Professor Terry Cannon now from IDs to um have a complimentary perspective on role of narratives and disasters so thank you very much Terry good I think we’re there yes you can hear me and see my slides yeah excellent well thank you also very much for uh the chance to do this um I want to focus on two different narratives and argue that one of them is very wrong and construct the other narrative and ask everyone to persuade everyone that that’s the one we’ve got to all follow now I don’t have any hope whatsoever that it will change very much but let’s just see what kind of um um provocation to thinking I can uh achieve so basically I think the way in which and I’m going to focus on climate change but of course it is um very very closely related to disaster risk in this case both through how climate change will enhance the number and intensity of extreme events but also how it relates to how um especially the construction of funding um and transfers between countries both for adaptation uh which is supposed to be for adapting to extremes but also loss and damage which which as you know has no money in it at all so I’m going to focus on these two um just trying to make sure my CH my slides change these two narratives so the first one is the focus on relations between countries and I think the entire debate has been hijacked by those who are interested in looking at relations between countries rather than understanding who is really directing what is going on in relation to disasters in climate change and that is class and Elites so climate change is caused supposedly by Rich countries we all know this narrative around the carbon emissions over the past um Century or so caused by the so-called rich countries and if there’s time in the discussion I will want to come back to these fake binaries of rich countries poor countries which I find extremely inadequate um so the negative effects of this global warming are of course Global but they have their worst effects on poor countries and poor and vul vulnerable people in those places so this is very much a Justice narrative that climate change having been caused by the rich countries supposedly is actually suffered mostly by people in po or much more by people in poor countries who had no role in um creating the the problem and this Justice argument has two basic um components one is the need for a flow of funding from so-called rich countries to those that are experiencing climate change but also Justice requires allowing so-called poor countries to burn more fossil fuels to enable their people to enjoy development um and I think this is not development this is economic growth and we know that that does not automatically reduce poverty and it certainly doesn’t reduce inequality so this narrative has enabled some uh leaders in quite a few countries actually to justify opening up completely new extraction of oil and gas many countries in Africa Tanzania Kenya Ghana is already on stream mosambique doing more um and also U as many of you will know that Modi in India almost wrecked the cop two years ago by refusing to accept that they would de uh reduce coal use in India in fact indeed increasing its use um and insisted that the deadline for reducing it would be shifted I think it was another 10 years into the future and these are Justified on the basis that this will enable the their people their population to have um Co socalled development um and then the second aspect of it is the providing the finance to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change and for loss and damage well I find this a very unsatisfactory narrative and I refer this narrative where we focus instead on class Elites and the exploitation that goes on in all countries and if we look at it this way then we understand why Modi and leaders in other countries African countries want to extract their oil and gas because of course it’s very good for their income for their personal wealth um and this is the key point that climate change is not the cause of why people are already poor and vulnerable they’ve been poor and vulnerable for decades um the people in India are not poor because of climate change the people in Tanzania are not poor because of climate change but the focus on uh the poor people as if somehow or other dealing with climate change is now going to reduce their poverty is um a myth and it’s it’s supported by the first uh narrative so I’m proposing that we change the narrative um existing poverty makes people vulnerable to climate change and to um extreme events disasters and so on now of course climate change is increasing and will increase the number of poor people by hundreds of millions but that is because of the systems they live in the systems that generate their poverty and their vulnerability um and those systems are already making them poor are the cause for their existing poverty so these existing reasons for their poverty will not go away and to so and the focus on the cause of people’s poverty as if it’s climate change is very misleading and will continue to be misleading because it enables governments and Elites and businesses to escape from their responsibility in what they’ve done to cause poverty either directly or allowing processes to happen that um cause people to be poor um looking at this idea of So-Cal poor countries we know and this is a very you know this is history 101 um most poor so-called poor countries were colonized wealth extracted from them sometimes over centuries and Europe’s Empires involved movements around the world of millions of people as slaves and 10 times that many as indentured laborers and Colonial systems of exploitation especially um how land ownership systems were established since Independence were taken over by the New post-independent Elites for their benefit this is very clearly evident in in Bangladesh where I’ve work to B India and so on and I think one thing that’s quite interesting is that most anti-colonial Liberation movements anti pro-independence and colon anticolonial movements were also against Elite classes being established when those countries became independent and I think there was already a very strong awareness of how class was a problem not just um imperialism and I think we should come back to analyzing this um to understand what the problems were um of course if I give this talk people say well people are poor in India because it was colonized for Britain for 200 years or whatever um but I would argue that it’s extremely difficult to blame uh past Empires certainly for the poverty of people in India Bangladesh or many other countries there may be some way where there is still a significant um component of neocolonialism but in most countries as I’ll show with data I think it’s a very um difficult argument to make and of course some poverty current poverty is also due to International exploitation whether we call it neocolonialism or or not the behavior of multinational corporations which can control the value chain for um products which they extract from but again I would argue that this is probably not the majority of the reasons why people are poor in most of the so-called Global South I think it’s much more to do with governments and I think I I think their governments and their Elites find it convenient to blame climate change and rich countries rather than their own actions and inactions I want to tease this out a little bit by looking at the history of Britain’s colonization to show that it was a class issue and not about the relations simply between countries so so I’ll I’ll um show this in in a minute with some data um I think these categories um of these binaries are extremely problematic and misleading so for example if we just take the rich poor country um argument around Empire um and European Empires and so on I think we have to understand that colonization was a class-based exploitation of people and resources around the world it was not PE poor people in Britain or France whatever who benefited um very greatly from their Elite having colonized other parts of the world um poor people in the so-called rich countries had very little benefit um in terms of higher income wealth uh or welfare and I’m going to show the data on that in a minute we also know that the Empire as the cause of Po is is tricky because there are some very wealthy countries especially Sweden and Switzerland which appear to have become very wealthy without having colonies we also know that other European countries that had very large Empires especially Spain and Portugal did not become rich for many years they remained they were labeled as the poor men the poor men of Europe um and that’s because their colonization and the extraction of wealth mostly from Latin America um did not feed into an industrialized capitalist process in those countries we also know that some poor countries were never forly colonized Ethiopia Thailand Nepal so we have to explain their poverty not through colonization but through other processes and we also know that some so-called poor countries were and are themselves Empires for example India China Ethiopia and Indonesia so basically what I’m arguing is that these categories these binary categories are extremely difficult um what we need is much better class exploit class based explanation as differences between um wealth even if it means differences between countries so this is Britain at the peak of the British Empire in 1900 um where this was the very evident poverty on the streets on the bottom one it’s the toilets in the slums very evident malnutrition so this is at the height of the British Empire they’re not benefiting from Britain being a very powerful Imperial nation and in the workhouse which was the main principal source of Po poor relief in Britain until the 1930s um people could go into workhouses where their basic needs would be um food and and shelter families were broken up this is in central London in 1911 it’s only 100 years ago and this is just nearby also Central London in 1900 hundreds and hundreds of people desperate to live their poverty lives in in this way if we look at the data for Britain This Is wealth not income we see that at that time of the 1900 up to about 1930 the actual wealth owned by the bottom half of the entire population was zero so the Empire had brought zero wealth to half the population the top 10% um had 90% of the wealth that comes down again as um there is the beginnings of the welfare state you can see that their wealth goes up again with neoliberalism in the 1990s through to the present day um that is wealth that is owning property houses um um of course a car wouldn’t be relevant in that time a bicycle so half the people still today half the people have less than 5% of the wealth in Britain the this is the income share the bottom 50% you can see in 1900 had 50 less than 15% of the income in Britain it’s barely gone up since then it is now around 20% and you can see that the income of the top 10% has gone up significantly in the last 30 years with neoliberal policies which principally that has happened because tax rates on the rich have been reduced as we will see in a minute okay so empire did not benefit um uh the majority of the British people it’s a class-based Empire it is a an Empire fought for by the elite for their own benefit to become enriched themselves with no necessary idea that it was going to bring benefits to the um broader population This Is wealth distribution in India in the last um um recent decades you can see that the bottom um 50% of the population their share of the wealth has actually gone down in in recent years whereas the share of the top 10% has gone up from 55% to 65% again as a result of neoliberal policies uh uh fostered by the elite in in that Country and this is income distribution in India which goes back to 1900 half the population with a maximum of 20% of the income going down in the last 20 25 years whereas the top 10% there is some reduction in their income level uh down to the in the mid-30s this is as the policies of the congress party took um uh led to some wealth distribution after Independence but with neoliberalism it has gone back up and all of that loss has been recovered by the top 10% back up to uh nearly 60% of the income Nigeria I’m I’m using Nigeria as a little mini example because Nigeria is one of the countries that has exported oil for 50 years it has had tens of billions of dollars of oil wealth going into the country and yet still half the people live in extreme poverty um with um uh 17 million homes estimated to be needed and half the urban population living in slums ironically when some of these slums are demolished as they were two years ago in in um Lagos it was supposedly a disaster risk reduction policy um where they were forcibly um um evicted because the government said you’re in a flood zone we’re going to move you out so it was forcible removal um in order to deal with that the point I’m making here is that Nigeria which was of course a British colony um undoubtedly suffered greatly from being a British colony but the elite in Britain got that benefit and the elite in Nigeria get the benefit of the oil wealth now now this is the tax rates on the top um rate of tax in three countries UK US and Germany over the last um 20 years you can see that the tax rate so this is I’m going to use a notional figure let’s say that you earn £150,000 anything you earn over £150,000 would be taxed at a rate which in the 1930s to the 199 uh 1980s reached a peak in Britain of 97% % so you would pay 97 P of every pound that you earned over £150,000 intact to the government and you can see that those three countries had very high tax rates in that period a period which can Loosely be called welfare capitalism where that taxation was used to redistribute not income but um welfare in the form of free health care housing um pensions um unemploy employment benefit and so on uh compared with now where those rates have come down um to around 40 to 50% under neoliberalism which is why inequality has got so much greater and so we can see that the um Elite is benefiting from this redistribution of income towards themselves so this is my argument that actually instead of understanding um wealth between different countries what we have to understand is wealth between CL classes so you have poor and rich in Britain you have poor and rich in India and Bangladesh they are classes which Pride over systems which allocate income to the wealthy to the 10% whatever one you want to use um hardly distribute wealth or welfare to the bottom 50% and that is the way it is structured and that is how it has been structured for many years in those countries so we should not expect just because climate change comes along that there’s suddenly going to be a a redistribution of wealth so can we hope that money for adaptation and loss and damage will flow in significant amounts which re redistributes wealth and makes people not vulnerable to um climate change and disaster risk well amaren in 2015 argued he he wondered why does India not have sorry why does India not hang on why does India not have universal healthcare because their wealth is extraordinary in the last 30 40 Years of neoliberalization and somewhat surprising um he says that that kada manages it much better than the rest of India and even Bangladesh was better than uh most Indian States and Sri Lanka has had a free healthcare System since 1951 so what is going on with the distribution of wealth in those countries does does not enable these things to happen well I’m going to stop there uh because I’ve taken up oh hang [Laughter] on all things going in all directions now I’m going to stop there because I think that’s allowing enough time for discussion on the main points um the remaining slides if there’s time in the discussion show some examples from Bangladesh um which I’m very happy to talk about if you would like so I’m going to stop there and open um I’m sure we’ll open up to um discussion thank you fantastic thank you so much