Disaster Resistance: Conceptualisation and Illustrations from Chile and France

Key disaster concepts are currently being re-examined and re-politicized as part of Critical Disaster Studies. The social critique of resilience for instance, by no means new and trending since the 2010s, increasingly seeks to draw out the transformative potential inherent to the concept. Conversely, resistance is a relative newcomer to disaster studies, and deserves particular scrutiny. In this paper, we approach the field of tension between efforts to enlarge the spatio-temporal and thematic scale through which disasters are interpreted and acted upon, and efforts to actively restrict that scale. We conceptualize the former as ‘resistance’, contrast it with uses of the term in existing disaster literature, and illustrate it with empirical vignettes from Chile and France.

Both countries have seen successive waves of public service privatization and social mobilisations, although with varying pace and intensity. While Chilean disaster policy has evolved since 2022 and disasters have been reinterpreted as social phenomena, disaster risks are still managed technically and linked to specific agendas, some of which are heavily contested in the context of emerging social mobilizations since 2019. In France, the socio-political aftermath of the first megafires to ever hit the country in 2022 highlights the numerous ways through which state and non-state actors draw back on the fires to advance their agenda, be it to make room for new fossil fuel extraction (as is the case for the French government) or to advocate on the topic of climate displacement (as is the case for Oxfam France). In both Chile and France, various actors change the focus through which disasters are interpreted. As such, our paper describes how myriad interpretations restrict or expand the political dimensions of disaster processes, leading potentially to transforming social relations and the material living conditions of present and future generations.