Paper details
| Paper authors | Katie Peters |
| In panel on | Disaster Risk Reduction in Fragile, Conflict-Affected, and Vulnerable (FCV) Contexts: Strategies for Protracted Crises |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
Situated within the subfield of disaster-conflict research (e.g., Peters & Peters) and informed by critical geography’s decolonial turn (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018; Chapman, 2023), as well as anthropologically informed approaches to deconstructing the ‘black box’ of the state (Hendriks), this paper examines disaster risk governance (DRG) in Somalia and South Sudan as a lens through which broader dynamics of state formation and international engagement are rendered visible. In these contexts, DRG is deeply entangled with external actors—particularly UN agencies, international financial institutions, and regional governments—who significantly shape both the imaginaries and material practices of governance.
The paper argues that DRG operates as a critical site where notions of the ‘capable state’ and the ‘capable civil servant’ are imagined, constructed, and contested. Drawing on empirical evidence from Somalia and South Sudan, it demonstrates how DRG simultaneously enables and constrains civil servant agency, embedding practitioners in cycles of dependency, performative governance, and externally validated accountability.
Rejecting dominant narratives of institutional failure—particularly those grounded in the discourse of the ‘failed state’—the paper foregrounds how state capacity is co-constructed through everyday practices shaped by competing expectations, technocratic norms, and uneven power relations. Within these complex governance assemblages, civil servants navigate ongoing tensions between agency and dependency, and between complicity and resistance.
