- Convenors:
-
Watfa Najdi
(Erasmus University of Rotterdam)
Zeynep Kasli (International Institute of Social Studies)
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- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Reimagining development: From global cooperation to local agency
Short Abstract
This panel examines how vulnerability operates as both a structure of domination and a strategy of survival in global development. It interrogates whether vulnerability can be mobilized toward justice and transformation, or whether it inevitably reproduces colonial hierarchies of dependency.
Description
In an era of overlapping crises, "vulnerability" has become central to how humanitarian and development interventions are programmed and prioritized. At the same time, states, local organizations, and communities have been increasingly mobilizing vulnerability not only as a condition to be addressed, but as a resource to be leveraged.
Drawing on recent scholarships on "vulnerability" (Turner, 2025) and "eco-humanitarian rentierism" (Tsourapas & El-Anis, 2025), this panel examines how vulnerability and crisis narratives are operationalized and instrumentalized by local and refugee-led organizing efforts. In doing so, the panel asks:
- How are vulnerabilities designated? And who decides which forms of suffering are visible or deserving within global aid regimes?
- How do communities mobilize vulnerability and crisis narratives to secure legitimacy and resources?
- Can vulnerability be reimagined as a site of agency and solidarity, rather than dependence and control?
We invite both academic and creative or practice-based submissions that aim to understand how different actors navigate the moral economies of crisis in unequal global systems. By focusing on community practices, the panel seeks to rethink vulnerability otherwise for more just and plural futures of development.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
We shows how Pacific Islands use their geopolitical importance to leverage agency and vulnerability amongst donors to secure legitimacy and resources. We find that using geopolitics for development constitutes the mechanism through which this vulnerability can be reimaged as a site of agency.
Paper long abstract
The Pacific Island Countries are considered the most aid-dependent countries in the world (World Bank, 2021) and are historically stereotyped as ‘small, weak, and fragile’, whilst being at the core of global ecological and political challenges. Pacific Island scholarship has long challenged the frame of vulnerability by highlighting the Pacific Island acts of agency (Waqavakatoga and Wallis, 2023; Fry and Tarte, 2015). However, we don’t stop at recognising vulnerability and the acts of agency challenging it, rather go one step further by interrogating the source and mechanisms that allow for this agency.
Our research is based on 32 original semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025 with diplomats, policy makers, politicians, civil society actors, and bureaucrats in Fiji, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands.
We find that PICs use their geopolitical importance to leverage their agency and position of vulnerability amongst donors to secure legitimacy and resources. We find this agency being enacted via obfuscation of geopolitics through the mechanisms of global development. It is this development space where vulnerability can be reimaged as a site of agency. The PICs reject geopolitical meddling whilst demanding development support from all donors. Paradoxically, this demand is only possible through the geopolitical interests of the outside actors. The geopolitical competition between OECD-DAC donors and China that plays out in development practice provides this site of resistance for PICs to negotiate within unequal global systems (Mawdsley, 2019). The paper combines insights from development scholarship and IR with our own data to provide a valuable interdisciplinary contribution.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how health crises among tribal communities in Jharkhand, shaped by state, health systems, and structural violence, show vulnerability as both a site of domination and a strategic resource for negotiating care, legitimacy, and agency within development regimes.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines vulnerability not as a condition to be mitigated within development frameworks, but as a politically produced and strategically negotiated relation between the state, health systems, and marginalised tribal communities in rural Jharkhand, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), it analyses how health crises, chronic illness, untreated pain, maternal complications, and therapeutic delay render certain bodies and populations legible to development and humanitarian regimes, while simultaneously exposing others to organised neglect. Rather than treating vulnerability as an ontological attribute of poverty, the paper conceptualises it as an outcome of state withdrawal, uneven public health infrastructure, and moral economies through which suffering is recognised, prioritised, or ignored.The paper intervenes in debates on the politics of vulnerability by showing how communities navigate health and crisis narratives to claim visibility, legitimacy, and access to welfare schemes, public hospitals, and non-governmental interventions. Vulnerability emerges as a double-edged register-while it enables recognition and access to care, it also risks fixing tribal populations within colonial grammars of dependency and biomedical deservingness. Through PRA encounters and everyday practices of care-seeking, including forced mobility for treatment, collective narration of illness, and strategic silences, marginalised actors both inhabit and contest the terms under which health vulnerability is governed. Situating this within political economy and structural violence, the paper argues that agency in crisis rarely takes the form of overt resistance. Instead, it appears as tactical negotiation and survival within constrained horizons of care, contributing to rethinking development beyond binaries of victimhood and empowerment.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how colonial categories of "primitive" evolve into the contemporary state classification of PVTGs in India, showing how development institutions reproduce vulnerability and how PVTGs negotiate and adapt to these state-produced vulnerabilities.
Paper long abstract
Development institutions have conveniently utilised "vulnerability" to categorise populations, justify development interventions, and assess program outcomes. For example, the contemporary state category of “Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups” (PVTGs) in India is a replica of the colonial classification of "primitive." In the context of development anthropology, such a state of vulnerability is not an inherent condition but a structural production of colonial governance, post-colonial development interventions and a bureaucratic system of labelling certain sections of the population for governance.
Using the case of the Baiga, a PVTG in central India, the paper traces how colonial administrators, by labelling them “primitive,” confined them to Baiga-chaks (Baiga reserves) to restrict their traditional shifting cultivation, and how postcolonial governance reproduced similar logics by classifying them as PVTG. It illustrates how political and administrative decisions were used to "fix" vulnerabilities and regularise dependency.
The question that the paper answers is whether these state-produced vulnerability criteria actually represent forms of vulnerability for the intended communities or whether the state renders their culturally preferred way of living as a deficit. The state categories, therefore, mask the deeper politico-historical causes of the vulnerability they claim to address. Echoing Escobar's view of development as inevitable, the paper highlights how the "vulnerable" indigenous communities actively negotiate, adapt, and use their indigenous knowledge systems to claim rights and build resilience.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores vulnerability as apartheid-rooted dominance and strategic resource. Through public employment, grants (e.g., Child Support, SRD) aiding 30% of population, it explores how communities mobilize it for agency, urging solidarity and participatory governance for justice.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines vulnerability in South Africa as a dual phenomenon: a structure of dominancy rooted in apartheid legacies and a strategic resource mobilized by communities for survival and agency. Drawing on social grants, aid regimes, and public works programs like the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), it analyzes how vulnerability is designated and rendered visible through selective eligibility criteria and donor priorities, which privilege "deserving" groups (e.g., HIV/AIDS-affected households, youth, and women) while marginalizing informal workers and the chronically unemployed. State social protection systems, supporting nearly 30% of the population through the grant system like the Child Support Grant and Social Relief of Distress (SRD), stabilize precarious livelihoods but reinforce hierarchies of suffering aligned with global humanitarian narratives. The analysis highlights state and community mobilization of vulnerability: governments expand grants to manage unemployment and inequality, while recipients actively leverage them for grassroots organizing, negotiation, and advocacy, transforming dependency into "strategic vulnerability." In rethinking vulnerability beyond victimhood, the paper advocates for a relational paradigm emphasizing solidarity, participatory governance, and active citizenship. Aid and grants should evolve from mere survival mechanisms into catalysts for justice, inclusion, and sustainable livelihoods, challenging exclusionary moral economies and fostering pluralistic responses to structural precarity.
Paper short abstract
How do communities convert crisis into consciousness? This paper analyses how UP's tribes, facing administrative erasure and faulty recognition, maintained cultural distinctiveness through resilience mechanisms.
Paper long abstract
How do communities transform conditions of extreme vulnerability into organized political agency? From 1950 to 2002, Uttar Pradesh’s tribal communities experienced systematic administrative erasure through misclassification as Scheduled Castes or Other Backward Classes despite documented tribal status in colonial ethnographies. This manufactured crisis denied approximately 2 million people their tribal identity and associated rights, creating structural vulnerability through exclusion from Scheduled Tribe educational reservations and employment quotas, alongside cultural delegitimation and political marginalization. Drawing on primary fieldwork, the paper documents how misclassification necessitated sophisticated resilience mechanisms: communities developed “dual consciousness”, strategically navigating imposed administrative categories while maintaining tribal self-understanding; preserved cultural practices including traditional Gondi marriage and death rituals despite Hindu assimilation processes; and transmitted collective memory of tribal heritage across generations, among other strategies. These survival mechanisms provided foundations for sustained political mobilization, culminating in a 52-year struggle that achieved partial Scheduled Tribe recognition in 2002. However, geographic fragmentation restricting recognition to 13 eastern districts generated new vulnerabilities and intra-community divisions. The findings reveal communities demonstrating remarkable cultural dynamism, selectively adopting certain Hindu practices while consciously maintaining tribal distinctiveness, neither assimilating completely nor remaining culturally static. Theoretically synthesizing cultural resilience and transculturation frameworks with indigenous rights discourse, the paper argues that vulnerability and agency are dialectically constituted, communities’ strategic navigation of constrained structures simultaneously reflects and challenges the power asymmetries generating vulnerability, with dual consciousness enabling survival even as partial recognition perpetuates exclusion.