Caribbean Reconstruction and Climate Justice: Transnational Insurgent Intellectual Networks and post-Hurricane Transformation
With Hurricane Dorian currently unleashing her destructive power on the Bahamas, this summary of the article that I recently published in the Journal of Extreme Events may be of interest to readers thinking about the long difficult process of reconstruction ahead.
Hurricane Recovery
The devastating impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the northeastern Caribbean not only bring closer a world of immediate climate disaster and halting recovery, but also cast a long shadow of slow disasters and impossible futures for small island states in the face of significantly unstable and unpredictable climate patterns.
In contrast to the mainstream idea of just “building back better” this paper underscores the need to also better account for the root causes of disaster risk and violent histories that influence recovery processes at present. The article draws on the recent debates over Caribbean reconstruction in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, but sets this immediate crisis in the context of longer debates over Caribbean reconstruction, reparations and climate justice..
Liberation Capital and the Work of Reconstruction
The paper revisits arguments in W.E.B. DuBois classic sociological study of “Black Reconstruction in America.” It also focuses on Aldon Morris’s concept of “insurgent intellectual networks” to analyze the emergence of transnational “liberation capital” in the Caribbean region. These approaches help not only to ask how should we recover from or adapt to such storms, but how should major contributors to global warming pay for rebuilding, reparations, and restitution? What forms of deliberation, participation, procedural processes, and capabilities are necessary to make these determinations? Should restorative justice be linked to the Caricom demand for the European Union to pay reparations for slavery? And finally, what forms of epistemic justice are needed to recognize the work on insurgent intellectual networks?
Insurgent Intellectual Networks
Today there is also an insurgent intellectual network that is trying to develop a nonhegemonic school of thought around questions of reconstruction linked to climate justice and reparations (Baptiste and Rhiney 2016; Beckles 2017). In the face of natural disasters and post-hurricane reconstruction, there are many dominant institutions that kick in with efforts at “disaster recovery,” “building back better”, and various damage assessments, rebuilding plans, and funding streams. However, the aftermath of recent hurricanes, including Hurricanes Irma and Maria, reveals the contours of a deeper struggle for reconstruction, one that gets at not just the immediate crisis but at the deeper questions of economic security and reconstructing democracy that DuBois raised. DuBois argued that:
Reconstruction was an economic revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide reverberation. Reconstruction was not simply a fight between the white and black races in the South or between master and ex-slave. It was much more subtle; it involved more than this… viewing it slowly and broadly as a tremendous series of efforts to earn a living in new and untried ways, to achieve economic security and to restore fatal losses of capital and investment (DuBois 1992, p.346).
What if we thought about post-disaster reconstruction in the Caribbean the same way?
A DuBoisian sociology of reconstruction can help us understand the deeper histories and wider stakes of post-hurricane recovery efforts. DuBois identified the post-slavery Reconstruction era in the United States as a formative moment of black reconstruction of American capitalism and American democracy. The same should be the case in post-hurricanes reconstructions today. In the face of extreme events, we need more extreme forms of reconstruction that go beyond the neoliberal managerial approach to “building back better” as a form of property recovery and continuation of extractive economies. Instead, the radical approach of insurgent intellectual networks have brought to light an alternative reconstruction process grounded in the combined struggle for food justice, racial justice, and climate justice