Short Abstract

This panel explores disaster management as a field of political experimentation: Drawing on various disciplines and contexts, it examines how crises create opportunities to mobilize financial resources, test new technologies, and reorganize authority and everyday life.

Long Abstract

Across the Global South, disasters are increasingly described as recurrent, interconnected, overlapping and even cascading. On the African continent, too, droughts, floods, cyclones, epidemics, displacement and infrastructural failure rarely appear as isolated events. The tension between temporary interventions, recurring to persistent risks and their durable consequences allow for emergency arrangements to become experimental modes of government.

Shifting arrangements between governments, donors, humanitarian organizations, experts, private companies, and the affected communities do not necessarily lead to coherent or sustainable protection systems. In an ad-hoc manner they often turn particular places and populations into sites of experimentation where technical and institutional innovations interact uneasily with local histories, knowledge and political relations. Rather than assuming that experimentation is inherently innovative or progressive, the panel investigates; who defines the problem to be addressed and the solutions to be tested? Whose knowledge is authorised? Which territories become sites of intervention and who bears the consequences when the interventions fail?

In keeping with the ECAS theme of “African Prisms,” the panel approaches disaster through multiple disciplinary, methodological and situated perspectives. We welcome papers addressing hazards (such as floods, epidemics or vulnerable food systems), interventions to tackle those (such as climate adaptation, humanitarian response, urban and rural infrastructure), or policies to govern them (through anticipatory action, risk modelling and institutional frameworks) and their long term effects in affected places (such as the political afterlives of emergency interventions). Collectively, the panel will discuss what Africa’s recurrent crises reveal about changing forms of authority, expertise, citizenship and unequal futures.

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