Abstract

Abstract - This essay examines how the governance of humanitarian crises is written into the colonially imbued logics of coloniality and racial capitalism. Instead of universal policy for natural disasters or human-induced disasters, disaster rule inscribes race hierarchies, power dynamics, and dependency whose foundations lay in the colonial project. Through analysing the dynamic interactions among aid, economy, and control, the study argues that new humanitarian intervention is a device of global government that promotes financialized modes of recovery and securitized protection regimes. Humanitarian emergency discourse conceals asymmetrical relations in which the Global South is reiterated as a vulnerable space, whereas the Global North is rearticulated as a site of expertise and salvation. Drawing on critical theory, political economy, and postcolonial theory, the article critiques racialized labour, extractive reconstruction policy, and surveillance humanitarianism as a new power of "disaster colonialism." The application of case studies of Haitian post-earthquake Haiti, Syrian refugee crisis, and Pacific climate displacement is utilized to describe how crisis is simultaneously a condition to be governed and a market to be tapped. The article concludes that decolonization of disaster governance can only be achieved by deconstructing the epistemic and economic order that renders other lives precariously vulnerable while other lives are secured through such precarity.