In a conference room at the Sendai International Center in Japan, a few hundred delegates from 187 countries have been sitting for three days, seated in alphabetical order by country. At the back of the room, tables have been set up for delegates who are identified by the group they represent (women, indigenous communities, private sector, non-governmental organization [NGO], etc.) rather than by nationality. Security staff sporting the blue shoulder patch with the United Nations insignia stand at the doors, but these open and close as people come and go. Empty chairs are available for external observers of the process so they can witness the goings-on in the negotiating room. A text scrolls over two screens on either side of the long table where the session chairperson and vice-chair are seated. Passages of text being discussed are highlighted in yellow, others are in brackets. These are the subject of the negotiation taking place in the room.
We are in March 2015, in the midst of a diplomatic negotiation process for the international framework for action that is supposed to regulate and organize worldwide âdisaster risk reductionâ for the fifteen years to come. The agreement that would be reached with great difficulty during these days and nights of haggling, the Sendai Framework for Risk Reduction (2015â2030), is the successor instrument for the Hyogo Framework for Action in place since 2005 and which had replaced the Yokohama Strategy and Plan of Action for a Safer World adopted in 1994 during the first UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.
In the room, delegates ask for the floor by raising a card with the name of their country or group, and it is granted by turns by the session chairperson or vice-chair. Objections or suggested amendments are inserted as topics for discussion directly into the text, highlighted in yellow or put in brackets with the annotation [ad ref].1 It is 3 p.m. and the text is still peppered with yellow highlighting and brackets, indicating the several remaining points of disagreement that must be resolved before midnight, when the conference will end. The delegates are exhausted. Their drawn faces are evidence of the long, sleepless hours spent in this neon-lit room. Each country asserts its reluctance, or instead its wish, to see the final agreement take on a more binding nature. Debates focus on the issue of âcommon but differentiated responsibilitiesâ as well as whether or not the final document should mention quantifiable targets. The tone remains perfectly calm, the language carefully diplomatic, but the subjects are heavily laden with political content. When no agreement can be reached about a term or a sentence, the chairperson suggests taking a break, during which time small teams of negotiators, sometimes aided by a mediator, meet separately in a smaller room to attempt to iron out certain points and thereby reduce the number of passages annotated [ad ref] in the document. During breaks, the delegates stand up but remain close to their table. A hubbub comes over the room. Negotiators circulate skillfully among the delegations that are unable to come to agreement, and it appears likely that agreements and alliances come together in the course of these informal discussions. During this time, behind the doors to the conference room, the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction is coming to a close. The stands of all the participantsâresearchers, members of NGOs, insurance sector representatives, and sellers of sophisticated GPS systemsâare packed up, and the hallways of what for five days has been a hive of activity, in which 6500 participants were able to meet, exchange calling cards and âgood practices,â gradually empty out.
Five days earlier, in the plenary hall of the same International Centre, a young North American woman representing the âMajor Groups,â2 gave her opening address. After describing the importance of community efforts âto make the world safer and more resilient,â she addressed the audience directly. Reminding them that most of the worldâs religions are based on the notion of interconnectedness among humans, who are part of a transcendent whole, she called on the Hindu concept of âMayaâ (illusion) to illustrate her point:
The Hindu concept of Maya warns of us an illusion that we are separated from the whole and our work is to realize the whole. We here are part of a whole group of people who are working to make the world safer and more resilientâif you canât see the connectionâseek it out! I hope this next post-2015 framework makes provisions to facilitate these connections between stakeholders and to make DRR inclusive, so that we donât fall victim the illusion that we in our silos can do this work alone.3
What do these two scenes tell us? First, that ânaturalâ4 disasters have become matter for international political negotiations, the stakes of which are high enough to prevent hundreds of people from sleeping for several days and to jeopardize the conference closing ceremony, cancelled because negotiations were not concluded in the allotted time frame. Furthermore, these negotiations exhibit features of an âinternational government of ânaturalâ disasters,â that has gradually emerged on the international scene in recent decades. For the moment I associate the notion of âgovernment of disastersâ (Revet and Langumier 2015) with that of âapparatusâ (dispositif), which I understand as a heterogeneous assemblage of professionals, institutions, objects, and standards deployed on an international scale, the purpose of which is to prevent ânaturalâ disasters or to deal with their consequences.5 But as the American delegate said, in some regards, this âgovernmentâ is more like a âwhole group of people who are working to make the world safer and more resilient.â6 In the present work, I will opt to refer to this âwhole group of peopleâ by the notion of âworld.â
The World of Disaster
Michel Agier defines the âhumanitarian governmentâ as âan efficient and globalized apparatus, made up of experts and expatriates who have tasked themselves with managing chaos, controlling and containing the âdisastrousâ effects of the division of the world into zones of prosperity and the supernumeraryâ (Agier 2013: 117). This definition can easily be applied to the world of ânaturalâ disasters. In some regards, what I observed was indeed an attempt by international experts to manageâeven controlâthe chaos and disorder produced in parts of the world populated by those Michel Agier refers to as âsupernumerary.â
This perspective is shared by many anthropologists and sociologists working on global apparatuses or assemblages and views them as tools of âgovernmentalityâ (Ong and Collier 2004; Shore and Wright 1997; Duffield 2001; Satterthwaite and Moses 2012). These works follow in line with critical analyses of development heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, which view itâoften solely from a discursive perspectiveâas an ideological tool produced by the North aiming to impose its worldview on countries of the South (Atlani-Duault 2005). Such works see development as a new form of cultural imperialism, a discursive entity asserted as a âtruth regimeâ that has considerable ability to exercise control and power (Ferguson 1994; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Escobar 1995).
Two notions will help me to conceptualize what I observed in the field, which the notion of government does not fully enable me to grasp. The first is that of âsocial world,â which I borrow from interactionist sociology and in particular Anselm Strauss (Strauss 1992). In developing his argument âto study worlds and to take a âsocial world perspective,ââ Strauss reminds us,
Though the idea of social worlds may refer centrally to universes of discourse, we should be careful not to confine ourselves to looking merely at forms of communication, symbolization, universes of discourse, but also examine palpable matters like activities, memberships, sites, technologies and organizations typical of particular social worlds. (Strauss 1978: 121)
Howard Becker, in his study of art worlds, points out,
One important facet of a sociological analysis of any social world is to see when, where, and how participants draw the lines that distinguish what they want to be taken as characteristic from what is not to be so taken. Art worlds typically devote considerable attention to trying to decide what is and isnât art, what is and isnât their kind of art, and who is and isnât an artist; by observing how an art world makes those distinctions rather than trying to make them ourselves we can understand much of what goes on in that world. (Becker 1998: 36)
A social world approach provides the means to focus on the processes at work in shaping and stabilizing a world that, once it has been presented by the institutional actors, dissolves into a multitude of disparate segments, the unity of which it is sometimes difficult to grasp. This is what others before me have done, such as LaĂ«titia Atlani-Duault in her âanalysis of the circumstances that have produced a world (that of development) devoid of history and cultureâ (2005: 28â29) and Jean Copans (2006, cited by Atlani-Duault and Vidal 2009: 22), who defines the development world as âa world-society of civil servants, experts, volunteers, military personnel as well, who make their livings off of development but who especially represent it, socialize it, materialize it on the ground and in the mediaâ (Copans 2006: 43). The world of ânaturalâ disasters has had to carve out a place for itself at the intersection of several other more or less highly institutionalized worlds: global health, development and poverty, crises and conflicts, the environment and climate c...