Disaster Justice in Recovery Processes: Exploring Bhabha’S ‘Thrid Space’ and Soja’S Trialectics

It is well acknowledged that impacts of disasters are socially and spatially uneven, and the worst affected are the poor and those who live in marginal and hazard-prone geographies, experience diverse risks and precarity in their everyday lives. These are manifestations of the working of hegemonic systems of power social, economic, and political which often have a strong institutional sanction /base. Disaster justice is an issue of governance that draws from studies of social vulnerability, justice theory, disaster law, and the environmental justice movement.

Recognising in the way that poor and vulnerable populations inhabit hazardous zones in pre and post-disaster recovery phases is important. Similarly recognising that the exclusion, lack of participation, and silencing, results in the absence of diversity of the in knowledge production, and disaster recovery becomes a site where colonial approaches are reproduced. In order to decolonise practices, the paper argues for an exploration of how multiple social identities and forms of discrimination interact to create unique experiences of oppression or privilege for people affected by disasters. The experiences of their access to relief and rehabilitation, or their denial and exclusion needs to be viewed within the broader frame of disaster justice. While exploring research and practices around post-disaster recovery that value local ontologies and epistemologies, Bhabha’s (1994) concepts of “Third Space” and “hybridity” are useful. Post disaster recovery processes provide opportunities to "displace the histories that constitute it and set up new structures of authority, new political initiatives" (Rutherfold 1998). At a conceptual level, the paper further contextualises disaster justice, in the socio-economic manifestation of space/ spatiality in disaster recovery, using Soja’s concept of “trialectics” (1996).