Geopolitics and Justice Cluster Seminar

ASEAN, disaster discourses and the construction of ‘risk’

Prof. Lorraine Elliott

ANU, Canberra, Australia

Abstract

This paper presents some (early) work in progress that examines how disaster discourses in Southeast Asia constitute a particular version of human (in)security and the human ‘insecure’ through the construction of ideas and assumptions about ‘risk’. It begins with a brief overview of the institutional density and interplay of regional disaster governance in the ASEAN context. The presentation then explores how discourses and techniques of disaster governance rely on a scientific model that privileges risk over vulnerability. Such a model informs conceptions of agency that run the risk of disempowering those who are most insecure in disaster contexts.

Bio

Lorraine Elliott is Professor Emerita in International Relations in the Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Her research and publications range across global and regional (Asia Pacific) governance, human security, global environmental politics and earth system governance, the UN system, and cosmopolitan ethics. She is a past Chair of the Board of the Academic Council on the UN System, a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Earth System Governance project, the international advisory committee for the Platform on Disaster Displacement, the international advisory board for the Varieties of Peace program based at the University of Umeå (Sweden) and the international network of experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She is currently working on the third edition of her Global Politics of the Environment book, trying hard to finalise a book on the political economy of black trade in transnational environmental crime, and thinking about what her next book – on human security, the ethics of solidarity and techniques of governance – might look like.