Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building ?cultures of safety? among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-sufficient and manage their own vulnerabilities. This paper seeks to destabilize this political imaginary through a critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaica's national disaster management agency, I argue that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics. The object of this biopolitics is excess adaptive capacity that results from affective relations between participants and their socioecological milieu. Participatory techniques such as transect walks, focus groups, and education programs attempt to encode and manipulate these affective relations in order to construct an artificial and depoliticized form of adaptive capacity that does not threaten neoliberal order. Recognizing the immunological logic at the heart of disaster resilience opens up new ethical and political imperatives in disaster management that value adaptive capacity as the vital force of new socioecological futures, rather than as an object of governmental intervention and controlPeer reviewe

How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define ‘slow emergencies’ as situations marked by a) attritional lethality; b) imperceptibility; c) the foreclosure of the capacity to become otherwise; d) emergency claims. We conclude with a call to reclaim ‘emergency’.

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This paper brings together Foucauldian approaches to biopolitics and recent developments in climate change and disaster studies on vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience to develop a biopolitics of adaptation. I approach climate change impact assessments, vulnerability approaches, and resilience approaches as distinct systems of knowledge with biopolitical effects. This means that each renders life amenable to governmental intervention and control through specific sets of techniques and rationalities that produce “truths” about emergent life and how to secure this life. A biopolitical reading offers a critical alternative to conventional narratives of these fields' development, which suggest that the emergence of vulnerability and resilience approaches provide progressively more complex accounts of risk that shine new light on the “vulnerability puzzle.” In contrast, this review suggests that the emergence of vulnerability and resilience approaches allow researchers and practitioners to target increasingly intimate levels of socio‐ecological life, the affective relations between people and their environments. In drawing attention to the often under‐acknowledged politics of life at play in climate change and disaster studies, this review seeks to highlight possibilities for a subversive and affirmative biopolitics of adaptation that transgresses rather than sustains existing political ecological order.

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The concept of biopolitics has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it.'' Virno (2004, page 81)

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