Scales of disaster: Intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state

Abstract

Geographical scholarship highlights social contracts as a valuable lens on the dynamic and contested balance of rights and responsibilities between risk governance players. We apply this lens to post-disaster response and reconstruction, which provides an ‘analytical window’ to better understand the types of relationship frameworks between the state and its citizens in postcolonial contexts. Using two post-disaster contexts, Mindanao in southern Philippines and the Andaman Islands in southern India, we uncover intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state. The article complicates structural scalar analysis of state–citizen relations, arguing that respondents in our field sites do not engage at a ‘local’ level with a sub-national social contract or at a ‘national’ level with a central social contract. Rather our empirical work demonstrates that intimate social contracts are found in the intertwining of central government policy, personal relationships and organisational abilities of local community leaders.