Geopolitics, infrastructure and imagination in Kalimpong’s disaster risk management assemblage

Drawing on the ideas of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) assemblages and disasters-in-the-making, Peter McGowran will discuss how the more-than-human relations that contribute to landslide/disaster risk in Kalimpong are shaped and influenced by geopolitical assemblages and/or political geology. Through empirical examples based on his fieldwork of 2019-20, he explores how sociomaterial geopolitical processes interact in diverse ways with landslides-in-the-making. He shows that landslides are very much entangled within the territorialising ambitions of the postcolonial West Bengal and Indian governments – a legacy inextricably linked to the territorialising ambitions of the British colonialists.

Within this geopolitical context, the research also shows that landslides are often reassembled as concrete opportunities for geopolitical and economic gains by various actors. Based on a chapter of his thesis, this research contributes to debates on the nature of disaster risk, the geopolitics of the Himalayas, and more-than-human geographies.

About the speakers

Peter McGowran

Peter McGowran is a PhD student in the Department of Geography. Prior to joining King's, he completed a BA (Hons) in Human Geography and a MSc in Disaster Management and Sustainable Development at Northumbria University. Peter is interested in disaster risk, hazards, political theory, post-structural theory, human-environment relations and the policies related to them.

Discussant

Niranjana Ramesh

Niranjana Ramesh joined the LSE Department of Geography and Environment as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in September 2019. She is an urban geographer with working experience as a journalist reporting on urban development and culture in south India. Her work has long been rooted in ethnographic engagement with the everyday life of cities.