Disaster capitalism

Abstract

The term “disaster capitalism,” launched in 2005 by activist journalist Naomi Klein, still has resonance within social movement circles. Yet its proliferation in media and social movements risks a confusion and weakening of the core concept and critiques. As anthropologists who value local communities' understanding of their own social world, how do we confront such a concept? What are our roles, both in clarifying and understanding the concept? More importantly, what is and should be our praxis, our responses to stemming the worst abuses of disaster capitalism? This chapter presents a sketch of a definition and model for disaster capitalism, followed by examples from ethnographic work on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to illustrate the phenomenon of disaster capitalism in practice. We follow this with discussions of the limitations of the disaster capitalism concept and the roles of anthropologists in confronting the issue.

“Down Here We Rely on Fishing and Oil”: Work Identity and Fishers’ Responses to the BP Oil Spill Disaster

“…Because the oil remained out of sight, BP sought to ensure that it also stayed out-of-mind. Between April and July of 2010, BP spent $93.5 million on advertising designed to minimize the oil’s impact on affected communities, a figure that was three times more than what they spent the previous year during that time (Schuller and Maldonado 2016).…”

Petit capitalisms in disaster, or the limits of neoliberal imagination: Displacement, recovery, and opportunism in highland Ecuador

“…Disaster capitalism is generally defined as a systematic and opportunistic reconfiguration of economies and economic regulations in service of capitalist interests under the cover of environmental crisis (Klein ; Schuller ; Schuller and Maldonado ). This article offers a complementary variety of capitalism in disaster—the production of capitalist subjects, new petit capitalists “empowered” by the state and NGOs via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of small enterprise.…”

The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA

“…Additionally, Maria reveals the insufficiencies of certain theories of "disaster capitalism" that fail to show how it is the "slow violence" of colonial and racial governance which sets the stage for the accelerated dispossession made evident in a state of emergency (Schuller & Maldonado, 2016). That is, the accelerated forms of extraction and dispossession evident in the wake of modern disasters are conditioned by the subjectivities and technologies of the colonial encounter.…”