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Assemblage theory and disaster risk management
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DOI: 10.1177/03091325211003328
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Submitted Paper
Assemblage theory and disaster
risk management
Peter McGowran
King’s College London, UK
Amy Donovan
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
This article builds on previous work that has sought to link assemblage theory with the study of disaster risk.
Specifically, we propose that the existing idea of a ‘disaster risk management assemblage’ can be used in two
ways. The first is an overall approach to analysing disaster risk. The second is to conceptualise disaster risk
management assemblages as objects of study. These are the assemblages, or apparatuses, that seek to manage
– but also create – disasters-in-the-making. We go on to explore how these ideas can be used in empirical
research and how they can help us to imagine doing research differently.
Keywords
assemblage theory, disaster, disaster risk reduction, futures, geography, methodology, more-than-human
I Introduction
This article, and the analytical framework it
develops, builds on work that links disaster
studies and human geography (Gaillard and
Mercer, 2013). To this end, it develops the con-
versation between disaster risk studies and
assemblage theory (AT) opened up by Donovan
(2017) in this journal and by others elsewhere
(e.g. Angell, 2014; Gillard et al., 2016; Grove,
2013; Grove and Adey, 2015; Marks, 2019).
The article begins with an overview of contem-
porary disaster studies literature and some of the
contradictory understandings of disasters,
hazards, vulnerability and risk that are present
within it (Kelman, 2018). We go on to argue that
although it is correct to argue that disasters are
not natural, this statement in itself does not actu-
ally answer the question of nature in disasters
(Chmutina and Von Meding, 2019; Dynes,
2000) in a satisfactory manner. We argue that
there is a danger that by arguing that disasters
are 100 per cent not natural and/or socially con-
structed, one deterministic view – that of view-
ing disasters as completely natural events – is
replaced by another that excludes the uncer-
tainty of the material environment and its sig-
nificant relationships with the social (Donovan,
2017). To provoke further theoretical engage-
ment, we ask: if disasters are not natural, then
what are they? The article answers this question
bydiscussing theemergence ofthe ‘Disaster Risk
Management (DRM) Assemblage’ analytical
Corresponding author:
Peter McGowran, King’s College London, Department of
Geography, 40 Bush House (North East Wing), Aldwych,
London, WC2B 4BG, UK.
Email: peter.mcgowran@kcl.ac.uk
Progress in Human Geography
1–24
ª The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/03091325211003328
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framework in which disasters are conceptualised
as ‘more-than-natural’ but also ‘more-than-
human’ (Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Donovan,
2017). From the outset, we propose that the idea
of a DRM Assemblage can be used in multiple
ways. It may be used as an analytical tool to aid
the analysis of disaster risk and its management,
as proposed by Donovan (2017). The idea can
also be used to describe multiple DRM Assem-
blages which are composed not only of the
apparatuses of power which attempt to manage
disaster risk in particular places but also of
the phenomena that they seek – and fail – to
‘manage’.
The DRM Assemblage – as an analytical tool
– is conceptualised as emerging from different
strands of human geography and disaster scho-
larship. It was developed as the ‘DRR assem-
blage’ in Donovan (2017), but in line with the
recent (2017) disaster risk terminology adopted
by the UN (UNGA, 2016, 2017), we prefer
‘DRM’ assemblage here.1
We enhance the con-
ceptualisation of the framework by first explor-
ing the emergence of flat ontologies with
respect to debates over the nature of scale, caus-
ality and agency in human geography (Castree,
2005; Demeritt, 2002). We then unpack our
understanding of the ‘virtual space’ of assem-
blages, starting from an adoption of Adam and
Groves’ (2007) reconceptualisation of the
Deleuzo-Guattarian virtual as ‘futures-in-the-
making’. We argue that a greater focus on the
futures of assemblages can help to address the
‘question of nature’ posed above as well as
some of the common critiques of assemblage
thinking in geographical scholarship. To com-
plete the conceptualisation, we link the futures
of AT to evental geographies and geographies
of emergency and crisis governance. In addition
to the DRM Assemblage as an analytical tool,
we propose the term can be used to describe the
assembled apparatuses of governance which
seek to govern more-than-human life – again
linking to established understandings of emer-
gency governance in human geography (Adey
et al., 2015). To help conceptualisation, we pro-
pose that Donovan’s (2017) six components of
DRM Assemblages – explored in depth in that
piece – can be used to help researchers frame
their analysis of disaster risk and its manage-
ment in all of its complexity:
1. governance and governmentality in
disasters;
2. expert advice, power and uncertainty;
3. values, ideologies and social
empowerment;
4. vulnerability and imbalances of wealth,
resources and scale;
5. disasters and geopolitical risk; and
6. hazard and risk assessment under
uncertainty.
We develop this work by exploring how the
DRM Assemblage may be deployed in praxis by
proposing four methodological principles of
research that draws upon the DRM Assemblage
as an analytical tool. With these principles in
mind, we propose that the broad category of
‘more-than-human methodologies’ are particu-
larly relevant to studies drawing upon the DRM
Assemblage (Dowling et al., 2015).
II Reclaiming Hazards for the
Social: Vulnerability, Unnatural
Multi-hazards and Complexity
In the 1970s and 1980s, disaster-focused
researchers in the broad field of political ecol-
ogy argued that, at the time of their writing,
‘most risk research . . . and efforts at hazard
reduction, have assumed a severity and geogra-
phy of risk based primarily upon hazard agents’
(Hewitt, 1992: 38). In response, they conducted
research to illustrate that many of the disasters
which were being studied were influenced sig-
nificantly by political and economic processes
(Hewitt, 1983; Watts, 1983; White, 1974; Lewis
1981, 1984) and thus were in fact not ‘natural
disasters’ at all (O’Keefe et al., 1976). The
2 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)

United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster
Risk Reduction of 2015 is testament to the fact
that this understanding of socially constructed
vulnerability and disaster risk has cut through,
at least at the international level and in a theo-
retical sense (UNDRR, 2015). However, the
predominance of the hazards paradigm still
exists at national levels (Briceño, 2015).
The flagship conceptual frameworks that
emerged out of this disasters literature are the
well-established ‘pressure and release model’
and associated ‘access model’ (Blaikie et al.,
1994; Wisner et al., 2003). These authors sug-
gest that the models are best used to describe
‘composite events’, triggered by a definite and
singular hazard, as opposed to ‘complex emer-
gencies’ – generally understood as the combi-
nation of environmental hazards and violent
conflict/state fragility (Wisner et al., 2003:
91). Different strands of contemporary disaster
research have since argued that such ‘compo-
site’ disasters exist only in simplistic imagina-
tions of how disasters unfold.
The study of multi-hazard interactions sug-
gests the idea of single, natural hazard triggers
is simplistic. In reality, most disasters are charac-
terised by multiple hazard processes triggering a
series of secondary – and beyond – hazards (Gill
and Malamud, 2014, 2016, 2017). Vulnerability
and the impacts of disasters also interact with
multiple hazards, particularly where recovery is
prolonged (Pescaroli and Alexander, 2018).
Furthermore, critical work in political ecology
suggests that the idea of ‘natural’ hazards fails
to consider how human actions actively contrib-
ute to the lethality/magnitude of hazards (Mus-
tafa, 2005) or how scientific expertise in the
modelling and mapping of hazards can also con-
tribute to the effective, or not, management of
hazard events (Donovan, 2017). We emphasise
that hazards must always be understood in rela-
tion to both the knowledges that represent them
and those at risk, but that this understanding
should notrender the hazardousprocess asunable
to act in unexpected ways: there are epistemic,
stochastic and social uncertainties that influence
hazards (Donovan, 2019). Hazards are both nat-
ural and unnatural; humanly defined and mod-
elled, but also more-than-human.
The conceptualisation of disasters as compo-
site events has been problematised further by
studies that have shown that more than 50 per
cent of deaths from ‘natural-hazard related dis-
asters’ occur in conflict affected and/or fragile
contexts (Peters, 2017; Peters and Budimir,
2016). Frameworks that are unable to account
for the complexity of disasters in areas affected
by conflict cannot then be drawn upon to under-
stand the majority of disaster-related deaths
(Collins, 2019; Marktanner et al., 2015; Siddiqi,
2018). Even disasters which occur in peacetime
tend to have long-lasting impacts following the
initial ‘event’ (Cutter, 2018); assuming the
event itself is even a singular event in space
and time – rarely a valid assumption in reality
(Pescaroli and Alexander, 2018).
Given these drawbacks, understandings that
speak more to complexity and the non-linear
interaction of ‘socially constructed vulnerabil-
ities’ and ‘natural’ hazards have started to flour-
ish within the study of disasters (Fekete and
Fiedrich, 2018). One such conceptual frame-
work is ‘social/socio-ecological systems’ (SES)
(Adger, 2006; Shukla et al., 2017) and more
recently cascading disasters – with the latter
essentially representing the linking up of a
plurality of SES (Pescaroli and Alexander,
2015). In these framings, it is the intersection
and interaction of both social and biophysical/
technological processes that determine the
vulnerability – or resilience/adaptive capacity
(Smit and Wandel, 2006) – of places (Cutter,
1996: 537). Such approaches, particularly cas-
cading disasters (Pescaroli and Alexander,
2016), rest upon the ecological and essentialist
concept of ‘panarchy’ (Holling, 2001; Holling
et al., 2002). However, the essentialist and geo-
metric conception of scale within panarchy is at
odds with the understandings of scale on which
contemporary political ecology and critical
McGowran and Donovan 3

disaster studies rest (Blackburn, 2014; Brias-
soulis, 2017). Furthermore, critics suggest these
approaches are unable to reflect accurately ‘the
social’ in disasters due to the tendency of eco-
logical concepts to quantify, or omit, unquanti-
fiable components of disaster risk such as power
and the political implications of violent conflict
(Ahmed and Kelman, 2018; Hinkel, 2011). Ulti-
mately, many analytical approaches tend to
oversimplify through their ontological basis.
Understanding disasters, then, requires engage-
ment not only with concepts but also with epis-
temology and ontology.
1 ‘Time to Say Goodbye to Natural
Disasters’?
Mami Mizutori, the Special Representative of
the United Nations Secretary-General for Disas-
ter Risk Reduction, recently wrote about the
need to say goodbye to the term ‘natural disas-
ters’ (Mizutori, 2020). She identifies the distinc-
tions between vulnerability that arises out of
poverty, exclusion and/or being socially disad-
vantaged; ‘natural disasters’, and hazards,
which now may be understood as natural,
anthropogenic or socionatural, according to the
UNDRR official definition of ‘hazard’. While
these distinctions can be of use with regard to
explanation, conceptualising disasters as the
outcome of interactions between socially con-
structed vulnerabilities and unnatural, socially
constructed multi-hazards could lead to incom-
plete explanations of causality in disasters (Col-
ette, 2016; Kelman, 2018) – and even to an
overdependence on notions of determinism.
While we endorse the continued and important
efforts to denaturalise disaster imaginaries, as
well as moving away from the term ‘natural
disasters’ – and ‘natural hazards’ – we argue
that these efforts often leave a key question
unanswered, particularly for anyone outside of
that scholarly community: if disasters in X loca-
tion are not natural, then what are they? There is
a political imperative to question the specific
more-than-human processes that lead to the
emergence of place-specific disaster risk, while
also acknowledging these processes might
include interactions between non-human ele-
ments that operate in uncertain ways, both inde-
pendently and in relation to anthropogenic
processes and knowledges.
III Flattening Ontologies
in Geography
Theories relating to SES and cascading disasters
are at odds with the understandings of scale
prevalent in human geography and urban polit-
ical ecology (UPE). In such interpretations,
scale is generally conceptualised as relational
and co-produced by socio-ecological phenom-
ena in ways that serve the needs and wants of the
powerful, often at the expense of marginalised
groups (Brenner, 2003; Neumann, 2009; Smith,
2010; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003; Walker,
2005). While such interpretations are now com-
monplace in human geography (Miller and
McGregor, 2019), tensions remain over the idea
that powerful human actors are invariably
responsible for the production of these rela-
tional scales and interactions (Castree and
Braun, 2001; Gandy, 2008; Head, 2009; Smith
and Doel, 2010). This tension emerges partly as
a result of the fact that UPE is theoretically
rooted in Marxist geographies and the associ-
ated dialectical understandings of the relation-
ship between capitalist society and nature that
these geographies provoke (e.g. Smith and
O’Keefe, 1980). Despite the more contempo-
rary and hybridised interpretations of these dia-
lectical approaches which can usefully dissolve
the false society/nature dualism (Royle, 2017),
these approaches still tend to overemphasise the
dominance of capitalist relations in specific
contexts (Gabriel, 2014), where other more
powerful relations – such as geopolitics, uncer-
tain scientific understandings and cultural ima-
ginaries – may be of equal importance to the
analysis (Collier and Ong, 2005; Grove, 2009).

It is these tensions and assumptions that
were, and remain to be, contested by advocates
of ‘flat ontologies’ in geography (Marston et al.,
2005). Partly as a result of debates over these
tensions, there has been a degree of cross-
fertilisation between UPE approaches and
assemblage-based flat ontologies (Castree,
2002; Holifield, 2009). For example, Ranga-
nathan (2015) identifies areas where UPE and
assemblage-based approaches can productively
engage with each other to understand the flows
and fixities of urban flooding in Bangalore,
India. Here, capitalist modes of production
interact with legacies of colonialism, changing
cultural understandings of storm drains and the
agency of water itself (Ranganathan, 2015). We
largely agree with Ranganathan’s approach but
also advocate for more engagement and synth-
esis with the oft-neglected field of disaster stud-
ies, which has a lot to offer – and learn from –
these debates. Such a synthesis is well placed to
unpick how these relations and interactions
emerge in situated socio-material assemblages
(McFarlane, 2011; Neisser and Müller-Mahn,
2018). Such interactions are conceptualised as
acting not across hierarchical scales but rather
between sited assemblages where power is dif-
ferentially distributed across scales as outcomes
or effects of these interactions (Agrawal, 1995;
Escobar, 2001; Legg, 2009). Disaster studies
have a lot to offer such inquiries, particularly
the idea that while powerful human actors are
generally better positioned to resist the impacts
of, recover from, and adapt after, disasters
(Blackburn and Pelling, 2018; Pelling, 2012),
it is difficult to suggest disaster events – such
as volcanic eruptions – emerge in ways that
always serve the needs of the powerful (Bennet,
2005), even if their impacts are frequently
manipulated in that way.
1 Flat Ontologies and the Future
The advance of flat ontologies in geography
has in part been driven by the growing
influence of ‘Assemblage Theory’ (AT) and
‘Actor–Network Theory’ (ANT) in the geogra-
phical literature (Escobar, 2007; McFarlane
and Anderson, 2011; Mol and Law, 1994).
Manuel DeLanda (2006, 2016) draws upon
the disparate allusions to the idea of agence-
ment/assemblage (Phillips, 2006) made by
Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze, 1992, 1994;
Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1988, 1994;
Guattari, 2005, 2009) and attempts to conso-
lidate his own ‘assemblage theory’, which
diverges significantly from its Deleuzo-
Guattarian origins in a number of ways. Such
divergences are beyond the scope of this arti-
cle but have been explored elsewhere (e.g.
Buchanan, 2015). ANT has been described
as ‘a set of overlapping propositions intended
to guide thinking and research about human-
nature relations’ (Castree, 2002: 117), origi-
nally emerging from the work of Latour
(1993, 2005), Law (1984, 1994) and Callon
(1984, 1999) (Callon and Latour, 1981). The
two ontologies are often conflated, which we
will argue can be theoretically problematic
(Farı́as, 2017) but methodologically produc-
tive (Müller and Schurr, 2016). In this article,
we adopt Müller and Schurr’s (2016) critique
of ANT (also see Thrift, 2000) and draw
more from a Delandan interpretation of
assemblage in our conceptualisation of the
DRM Assemblage. This is because it is the
future-focused components of Delandan/
Deleuzo-Guattarian inspired assemblage the-
ory(ies) which are of primary importance to
our approach. Specifically, we adopt ideas
relating to possibility spaces (Dittmer, 2014),
‘virtuality’ (DeLanda, 2005) and/or ‘futures-
in-the-making’ (Adam and Groves, 2007,
2011). Such ideas are inadequately theorised
in ANT (Müller, 2015; Müller and Schurr,
2016), a critique that is related to other domi-
nant critiques, such as its difficulty in articu-
lating human agency and power relations
(Hartwick, 2000; Lave, 2015).

IV AT: Reassembling ‘the Virtual’
as Futures-in-the-Making
In AT, the virtual can be understood as the pos-
sibility spaces which emerge out of the beha-
viour of – and relations within – assemblages
(DeLanda, 2016). Debates over the precise con-
ceptualisation of the Deleuzo-Guattarian under-
standings of virtuality remain alive and have
been covered in depth elsewhere (Buchanan,
2017; DeLanda, 2005, 2006; Deleuze, 1994;
Groves, 2010, 2019; Massumi, 1992). An in-
depth synthesis of these discussions is beyond
the scope of this article, where we choose to
adopt the well-established understanding that
the interactions of socio-material assemblages
can result in one of many potential outcomes,
with some outcomes materialising more often
than others (DeLanda, 2016; Lane et al., 2013;
McConnell and Dittmer, 2017). To ground our
understanding of AT in the contemporary geo-
graphical literature, we follow Adam and
Groves (2007)’s concept of ‘futures-in-the-
making’ – a rewording of the problematic
Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘the virtual’
(Adam and Groves, 2007: 175). For Adam and
Groves (2007: 196), futures-in-the-making are
real, despite not being material – reflecting the
DeLandan and Deleuzo-Guattarian understand-
ing of the virtual as real but not actual
(DeLanda, 2005). Futures-in-the-making are
expressive assemblage components (Adam and
Groves, 2007: 196), which, together with actual
material and expressive components, may be
thought together as heterogeneous assemblages
through which space is territorialised (Groves,
2017: 32).
A good example from the literature which
explains these ideas of territorialisation in rela-
tion to futures-in-the-making is Davis and
Groves’ (2019) research on post-Olympics
urban planning in London. They show how for-
malising processes lead to the planning assem-
blage being coded predominantly by the
‘economic rationale’ of developers, as opposed
to the everyday realities and routines of the local
people (Davis, 2019). They argue that this pro-
cess showed how the ability to anticipate and
territorialise socio-ecological imaginaries is dif-
ferentially distributed among actors in assem-
blages and thus how the territorialisation of
the imagined futures of the powerful deterritor-
ialises the imagined futures of the marginalised
(Davis and Groves, 2019: 27–30). A synthesis
of this approach with disaster studies would
work in a similar way but also pay attention to
how disasters tend to emerge not as imaginations
per se – this would be rather counterintuitive –
but more as unforeseen disasters-in-the-making
(Pelling et al., 2020). In the DRM Assemblage,
it is not only the planned – and often periodic
– results of decision-making that are the sub-
ject of analysis but also the unintended col-
lective consequences of human decisions,
which can be transformative (DeLanda,
1991; 1997: 16–17). Such an engagement
with this politics of disaster could also pay
attention to the ongoing dominance of the
hazard paradigm in the imagined futures of
governments (UNDRR, 2019).
Scholarly work on the political implications
of the 1999 Marmaris earthquake provides a
good example of such an engagement. Drawing
on the literature cited above which seeks to
denaturalise disaster imaginaries, Pelling and
Dill (2010) explore the ways in the earthquake
impacts – particularly the damage done in Istan-
bul – opened up a number of potential futures in
Turkey. They explain that while the disaster did
lead to the materialisation of an altered social
contract, the government closed down other –
more transformative and unsettling for the
government – futures-in-the-making through
economic sanctions and political suppression
(Pelling and Dill, 2010). Drawing upon AT spe-
cifically, Angell (2014) analyses the same
disaster to show how the risk of earthquakes was
reassembled as a natural and existential threat to
the population by the government to reinforce
the need for national governments to lead DRM

initiatives. This reassembly ran counter to pop-
ular narratives within civil society that ‘earth-
quakes don’t kill people, buildings do’, or that
the disaster was not natural but the result of poor
governance and risky, outsourced urban devel-
opment (Angell, 2014). Angell explores the
reverberations of the disaster through space and
time in relation to contestations over urban
development by showing that the government
deployed imaginations of future earthquakes
to pass a ‘Transformation of Areas under Disas-
ter Risk law’ through parliament. The law was
criticised for bypassing legal obstacles raised
against previous urban renewal projects and was
also perceived to be a useful political opportu-
nity for the government to create a profitable
opportunity for the construction sector (Angell,
2014). AT, then, provides a stronger theoretical
basis for established ideas in disaster studies
such as disasters representing windows of
opportunity for political change or tipping
points. Investigating these ideas also dovetails
well with the motivations behind action
research agendas in disaster studies (Yadav
et al., forthcoming): the desire to effect change
through research and empower the marginalised
to shift the dynamics of the futures-in-the-
making. These acts are also collaborative
between the earth itself (the geopower of the
earthquake) and human society – but not in a
linear and predictable way. The relationship is
rather mediated through the assemblage as it is
territorialised and reconfigured by, for, and
through different groups.
There are also important contributions to the
theorising of possible futures in human geogra-
phy by scholars who focus on emergency gov-
ernance and the politics of possibility and
potentiality (e.g. Amoore, 2013; Cooper,
2011). We recognise a distinction between such
studies and ‘critical disaster studies’, a body of
literature that exists within geography, other
disciplines, and in its own right. The reason for
this distinction seems to stem partly from dif-
ferent disciplinary histories, with critical
disaster studies emanating from more practice-
based approaches linked with humanitarianism
(Alexander, 1997, 2013; Lechat, 1990) and
political ecology (Hewitt, 1983), while geogra-
phies of emergency and crisis governance have
their roots in scholarly work on political econ-
omy and political philosophy (Agamben, 2005,
2009; Foucault, 2007, 2012). Each area of work
certainly focuses on risk, but each tends to speak
of it in different temporal terms, and much of the
emergencies and crisis literature (though not all)
is focused on the developed world. Critical
disaster studies have largely endeavoured to
show how past decisions, political economy and
environmental degradation led to the creation of
risk and subsequently an emergent past or pres-
ent disasters, most often in developing contexts
(Collins et al., 2015; Oliver-Smith, 1999). The
scholarly work on the governance of future
emergencies and crises has paid more attention
to the ways in which both emergent disaster
assemblages, and the prior imagination of these
disaster assemblages, influence, and have influ-
enced, the ways in which governments seek to
influence the conduct of their populations
(O’Grady, 2014, 2018). Other distinctions in
research foci revolve around the types of risks
and hazards considered. Critical disaster studies
have historically been more preoccupied with
meteorological andgeophysicalhazards(Burton,
1978;Collinsetal.,2017),whilethegeographical
study of emergency governance has tended to
focus on political/state emergencies (Anderson,
2020), national defence and terrorism (De Goede,
2012), health emergencies (Adey and Anderson,
2012) and technological/infrastructural emer-
gencies (Lakoff and Collier, 2010).
In recognising these distinctions, this article
can be read as an attempt to further develop the
conversation and possible convergence of these
disciplines and also outline work which has
already sought to bridge these gaps (Barnett,
2020; Blackburn and Pelling, 2018; Grove,
2014b; Grove and Adey, 2015). We argue that
critical disaster studies would benefit from

paying more attention to the work imagined dis-
asters – and attempts to mitigate them – do in the
realm of politics and governmentality, as is
done in geographies of crisis and emergency
governance. This type of critical work on the
practices of disaster risk reduction (DRR) such
as early-warning systems, vulnerability assess-
ments and technology-based risk mitigation
measures – too often presented as politically
neutral and purely ‘science-led’ – certainly
exists but has thus far only had a marginal
impact on policy and practice (Borie et al.,
2019; Donovan and Oppenheimer, 2015; Farı́as,
2014; Mustafa et al., 2015). Pointing critique in
the other direction, the geographical study of
crises and emergency governance could learn
from critical disaster studies by theorising fur-
ther how the imagined crises and emergencies
that are acted upon by governments are also
directly related to present decision-making and
also display qualities which demand the inte-
gration of knowledge from outside the social
sciences (Donovan et al., 2019). The former is
particularly important so that geographical stud-
ies of emergency and crisis governance and gov-
ernmentality do not reproduce the narrative that
disasters – particularly those which emerge in
relation to geophysical and meteorological phe-
nomena – are, or have to be, inevitable, excep-
tional or ‘natural’ (Kelman, 2020).
V Disaster Assemblages:
Reconciling Process and Outcome
In AT, disasters can be considered as an actua-
lisation of one of many possible futures of
an assemblage of expressive and material
components: as ‘disasters-in-the-making’. The
materialised disaster represents a disaster
assemblage – ‘characterized by complex ideas,
physical processes, physical-human interac-
tions, human cultures and technologies that
experience a varying power distribution in time’
(Donovan, 2017: 51). It has been argued above
that the territorialisation of assemblages can be
constrained by historical development trajec-
tories but also that the (de)territorialisation
caused by disaster assemblages can disrupt and
transform these trajectories through reverbera-
tions of Geopower (Donovan, 2017; Grosz,
2008). There are however key theoretical ten-
sions which arise out of this conceptualisation
of disasters. These tensions can be summarised
as between understanding disasters as poten-
tially transformational but also as moments
where dominant power relations persist, and
between conceptualising disasters as outcomes,
or events, rather than processes (Manyena,
2012). The latter also reflects a dilemma facing
assemblage theorists, apparent in Delanda’s
conceptualisation of assemblages as ‘real
things’ which can be analysed, while simultane-
ously in a constant state of becoming (Bucha-
nan, 2017). On these tensions, Guggenheim
(2014) argues that while disasters are reflective
of ‘normal’ social development processes – or
normal social development processes experi-
enced at a higher intensity – treating them as
such belies the fact that they are also inherently
related to non-social/human processes, often
experienced as ‘events’, and do represent rup-
tures originating outside of social processes.
The latter understanding of disasters has been
associated with a Badiouan understanding of
events by Cloke et al. (2017), who considered
the 2011 Christchurch earthquake through a
Badiouan lens. In a similar vein to Pelling and
Dill (2010) and Angell (2014), they argue that
the earthquake created a possibility space –
through a rupturing of previously territorialised
power relations – for new subjectivities and
political assemblages to emerge, as well as giv-
ing ‘pre-quake political visions traction/
momentum in a way that was not previously
possible’ (Cloke et al., 2017: 74). They argue
that the Badiouan framing of the earthquake
allows us to consider disasters as ‘continuing
events’ which are both ‘mappable moments’
in time but also continually reterritorialised

according to how people relate to and recollect
‘the event’.
While such a Badiouan understanding of dis-
asters as events can be productive, Deleuzian
understandings of events (e.g. Patton, 2002) can
be of equal utility in the analysis of disasters and
also speak more to the aforementioned tension
between understanding disasters as transforma-
tive events but also as processes through which
unjust power relations are reterritorialised. Such
a Deleuzian reading is particularly illuminating
when read alongside critical studies of disasters
as outcomes of development processes (Collins,
2018) and evental geographies. In a conceptual
piece which both synthesises and differentiates
the philosophies of Badiou, Deleuze and Heideg-
ger, Shaw (2012: 622–623) suggests that an
‘evental geography’ should be attentive to what
sort of transcendental powers hold assemblages
together and also to how ‘geo-events’ can –
through a form of creative destruction – de-
anchor the integrity of these powers by forcing
reconfigurations of how nation states, institutions
and individuals manage more-than-human life
(see also Donovan, 2020). Building upon Shaw’s
geo-event, it could be said here that disasters-in-
the-making are the ‘inexistent objects’ that are
simultaneously created and held back by the see-
mingly stable, stratified and transcendental
power relations that constrain development tra-
jectories and hold people’s imaginations of the
socio-material world in place (2012: 622). This
synthesis of evental geographies with critical dis-
asters studies helps us to understand how these
seemingly transcendental and stratified power
relations try to hold back the infinite contingency
of the world before, during and after disaster
events but also how they contribute to the emer-
gence of the disasters-in-the-making which per-
iodically disrupt and deterritorialise those very
same power relations and development trajec-
tories (Shaw, 2012: 622). This understanding
reflects the conceptualisation of assemblage put
forward by Legg (2011), where Deleuzian
assemblages and Foucauldian apparatuses are
considered dialectically. Legg suggests that
while Foucauldian assemblages appear as those
expressions of power that seek to manage the
emergence of more-than-human life through
omniscient foresight and the enforcement of cer-
tain types of development, they also get muddled
and mix things up, producing new subjectivities
– and disasters-in-the-making – which, through
their emergence and ongoing reverberations,
force governments to reconsider ‘the new’ and
thus the configuration of their DRM Assem-
blage/apparatus (Legg, 2011: 130–131).
Thus, we propose the DRM Assemblage as
both the assembled apparatuses that seek to
manage risk and emergence in a given location
and as an analytical tool which can be used to
analyse these assemblages/apparatuses in rela-
tion to disasters-in-the-making. Such an analy-
sis allows researchers to consider critically how
risk management techniques have emerged over
time (Donovan and Oppenheimer, 2014, 2015),
while remaining attentive to the localised condi-
tions of what risk management might mean in a
particular place (Woods, 2015; Zeiderman, 2012,
2016). This synthesis of disaster scholarship and
AT can help to unpick why some disasters-in-
the-making resemble Deleuzian events that
reshape power relations through their territoria-
lisation (Beck and Gleyzon, 2016), while some
do not (Kelman, 2011; Siddiqi, 2013, 2014). The
DRM Assemblage – as an amalgamation of AT
and disaster studies – echoes calls in the geo-
graphical literature to not fetishise the
description of the aleatory at the expense
of critically analysing the racialised (Ander-
son et al., 2019), gendered (Kinkaid, 2019),
sexualised (Seymour, 2013) and uneven ter-
ritorialisation of space and disasters (Grove,
2014a; Wachsmuth et al., 2011).
VI DRM and the Future – Towards
DRM Assemblages
A DRM Assemblage – as an object of study –
can be conceptualised as emerging from the

relations between those assemblages/appara-
tuses of governance which are concerned with
governing the futures of more-than-human life,
disaster assemblages and the socio-material
relations between those components which lead
to the emergence of disaster risk in a given loca-
tion. The way it behaves is determined by the
interactions between its more-than-human com-
ponent parts, which determine the possible
futures-in-the-making of the DRM Assemblage,
and thus the materialisation – or not – of disaster
assemblages. In the disaster and development
paradigm, sustainable development equates to
DRR (Collins, 2009: 218). Thus, in an ideal
world, the DRM Assemblage would sit within
assembled apparatuses of government to code
development – where development is under-
stood as the continued territorialisation of
futures-in-the-making (Mathews and Barnes,
2016) – with logics of risk reduction, equity
and sustainability. To link this with both the
geographical literature on crises and emer-
gency governance and critical disaster studies,
respectively, a DRM Assemblage would be
coded by logics of precaution and pre-emption
(Anderson, 2010) rather than logics of prepared-
ness in the face of future, and unavoidable,
catastrophes (Lavell and Maskrey, 2014: 275).
At the present moment, DRM Assemblages as
actual entities exist, at best, as under-resourced,
ineffective and de-territorialised assemblages of
actors and policies which are largely unrelated
to these dominant and everyday codes of devel-
opment and government (GNDR, 2018; Jones
et al., 2015).
To illustrate how the DRM Assemblage, as
an analytical tool, can help to analyse disasters-
in-the-making and the way in which the
emergence of them interacts with DRM Assem-
blages – or apparatuses – in-place, we consider
the example of the Soufriere Hills Volcano in
Montserrat. In 1995, the Soufriere Hills Vol-
cano on Montserrat – a UK Overseas Territory
in the Caribbean – began to erupt for the first
time in recorded history (Young et al., 1998).
Over the following 15 years, it destroyed the
capital city (Plymouth) and forced two-thirds
of the population off the island (Clay et al.,
1999). In 1988, a scientific paper had forecast
the eruption as one of the several potential
futures (Wadge and Isaacs, 1988), but this was
not incorporated into planning by those manag-
ing the DRM Assemblage of Montserrat – not
least because it was a scientific paper – and after
Hurricane Hugo in 1989, development on the
island continued to focus on Plymouth. Montser-
rat’s drive towards economic independence
through a strong tourist and music industry, a
strong sense of identity around Plymouth, the
lack of uptake of scientific knowledge, the chal-
lenges of colonial governance and then the
earthly forces from the volcano combined into
a disaster whose origins can be traced in many
different threads of the island’s socio-geological
history. There were scientific hints before the
eruption that this was a ‘disaster-in-the-making’.
However, the intersections between international
scientific institutions, the institutions and identi-
ties of Montserrat and the UK government, and
the vulnerabilities of a colonially administered
population prior to the eruption were not terri-
torialised to the extent that decisions to rebuild
Plymouth on the slopes of the volcano could be
challenged. This demonstrates the importance
of transdisciplinary understanding of risk in
relation to identity, culture and knowledges:
Transformation requires engagement with
imagination and experience-in-places.
VII The DRM Assemblage as
Method: Understanding and
Mitigating Emergent Disasters-
in-the-Making
To operationalise the six themes of the DRM
Assemblage – listed earlier and taken from
Donovan (2017) – in analysis, we propose four
methodological principles of assemblage-
inspired research into disasters. We then pro-
pose some possible research methods which one

drawing upon the DRM Assemblage as an ana-
lytical framework might use in practice.
1 Flat Ontology
The flexibility of AT requires researchers to
critically reflect on the geography of disasters
– that is, their spatial extent and differentiated
impacts. The strength of the flat ontology which
underpins the DRM Assemblage is that it allows
the researcher to investigate how place-specific,
uneven, socio-material relations emerge across
space-time in both contingent and unpredictable
ways, such as disasters, but also how specific
futures-in-the-making are actualised as systemic
orderings (Escobar, 2007: 109). Thus, the DRM
Assemblage answers calls in the literature for an
explicit epistemology of causation for studies of
disaster risk which can move disaster analysis
beyond ‘root cause’ analysis (Fraser et al.,
2020: 8). This shift need not represent a clean
break, as characteristicsofrootcauseanalysiscan
be usefully synthesised with the DRM Assem-
blage and taken beyond determinism (e.g. Fraser
et al., 2014; Oliver-Smith et al., 2016).
Recent scholarly work on the 2011 floods in
Thailand provides a good example of how the
flat ontology of AT can be used to understand
disaster risk and its management, without losing
sight of component four of the DRM Assem-
blage: vulnerabilities and imbalances of wealth,
resources and scale. Marks (2019: 75) uses an
assemblage lens to show how decisions made by
the Thai government to try and protect areas
housing political allies from flooding actually
led to many of these areas being some of the
worst hit. This was due to these decisions inter-
acting in unexpected ways with institutional
deficiencies, political changes, the unpredict-
able materiality of the rainfall, land-use change
and the physical geography of the landscape.
Such an analysis can enhance research using a
lens more rooted in UPE, such as Marks’ (2015)
earlier paper on the same disaster. In an unre-
lated but complementary piece, Tuitjer (2019)
explores the intersections of race – as assem-
blage (Amin, 2010; Weheliye, 2014) – and
mobility during the 2011 Thailand floods. She
highlights two separate incidents to demonstrate
the unpredictable ways in which race came to
matter during and after the 2011 Thai floods.
The first documents how migrant workers from
Myanmar were sent away from official emer-
gency shelters due to their race and political
identity; while the second documents an
instance where instead of checking some refu-
gees’ papers and taking them to a detention cen-
tre, the military offered support and drove the
refugees to a safe part of the city (Tuitjer, 2019).
In the latter instance, Tuitjer is unable to con-
firm the motive for this action, though hypothe-
sises it was either due to post-disaster generosity
or the authorities mistaking the refugees for
tourists. Either way, both of these instances and
their ambiguities highlight how discrimination
and marginalisation according to race ‘stuck’,
or were reterritorialised, during the disaster in
some instances but were seemingly forgotten, or
deterritorialised, in others (Tuitjer, 2019). Both
Marks and Tuitjer draw out the contingency and
potentially transformative characteristics of dis-
asters, but neither lose sight of the political,
economic and social power relations which led
to the emergence of the disaster and which, in
some cases, persisted through it. This supports
the argument that drawing on the flat ontology
of AT in this type of research does not give rise
to problems of indeterminacy or naı̈ve objecti-
vism (Wachsmuth et al., 2011). Rather, the flex-
ibility of the theory is a vital characteristic of an
analytical framework which seeks to analyse
complex phenomena (Anderson and McFar-
lane, 2011) such as disasters-in-the-making.
2 Understanding the Hazardous
Non-Human Components of Disasters:
Moving Beyond ‘(Un)natural Hazards’
This principle is best understood as drawing
upon the methodological toolboxes associated

with the ‘more-than-human’ scholarship in geo-
graphy, much of which has its roots in ANT.
This is not a controversial move, as the strengths
of ANT’s methodological approach are recog-
nised even by some of its staunchest critics
(Elder-Vass, 2008; Mustafa and Talozi, 2018).
In an ANT methodology, Latour (1996: 238)
quips that researchers should ‘follow the actors
themselves’, an approach which has been influ-
ential in more-than-human geography scholar-
ship (Baker and McGuirk, 2017; McCann and
Ward, 2012). In the context of disasters, this
means that the researcher pays attention to –
or even starts analysis with – the non-human
components of disaster assemblages. This
means understanding the specificity of the
socio-material hazards involved and the rela-
tions between them. These may be flows of
water through man-made infrastructures (Ran-
ganathan, 2015); masses of earth sliding down
hillsides that have been excavated by JCBs for
road construction (Petley et al., 2007); or viral
pathogens spreading through animals, humans
and public transport systems (Aitsi-Selmi et al.,
2015; Djalante et al., 2020). This methodologi-
cal principle rests upon theme 6 of the DRM
Assemblage being present in the investigation
of disasters and risk: hazard and risk assessment
under uncertainty. Importantly, in the DRM
Assemblage, hazard and risk assessments must
be understood as interacting with the five other
components.
Examples of this methodological principle
being used in practice are again provided by
Donovan’s research on the Caribbean island of
Montserrat. Here, the scientific hazard and risk
assessment component of the DRM Assemblage
became intimately involved with the reduction
of risk – not only through scientific reports and
warnings but also through the interaction and
integration of expert scientists and their instru-
ments in the values and ideologies of the com-
munity. For example, the Montserratian
population had to learn a new vocabulary,
which itself entered into song and poetry
(Donovan et al., 2011): the language of volca-
nology. At the same time, scientists learned
about Montserratian life and government – and
the science of volcanology made significant
advances. To explore the Montserratian case
further, Donovan and Oppenheimer (2014)
show how hazard mapping became very impor-
tant in Montserrat during the eruption crisis so
that ‘safe’ areas could be defined – but the deli-
neation of such areas had huge impacts on insur-
ance, businesses and livelihoods on the basis of
highly uncertain scientific models. This created
significant challenges for authorities, who had
to work closely with scientists to edit the maps
so that they made social sense as well as scien-
tific sense (e.g. by not having a property that
was cut through by a zonation line). With high
stakes involved, the consideration of social val-
ues and ideologies had to be integrated with
scientific modelling, especially under high
uncertainties (Donovan, 2021). Drawing upon
the DRM Assemblage can aid researchers in
understanding these interactions and new rela-
tionships between human and non-human
actors, arguably the most vital and central com-
ponent of holistic risk reduction.
3 Linkage of Non-Human Actors to
the Affective Imaginations of Humans
This principle of assemblage-based disaster
research is where the approach links most
strongly to the intellectual tools and political
orientations of critical disaster studies and crit-
ical geopolitical economy/ecology (Brenner
et al., 2011: 237). Through understanding the
complex relations of non-human activity related
to a given disaster (above), the researcher must
consider how these relations and the processes
emerging from them are, or are not, shaped and
influenced by the futures-in-the-making – or
imaginations, desires, needs and policies –
assembled by human actors in specific places.
DeLanda (2016: 138) argues that AT adopts a
realist ontology. This, alongside its empirical

disposition that is attentive to processes of com-
position and questions of how transcendental
forms, processes and powers are held together
(Greenhough, 2012: 202–203), means that in
practice, it shares many similarities with more
traditional critical realist approaches (Archer
et al., 2013). This means that research questions
should be ‘ontological’; that is, asking what is
the DRM Assemblage of the given location? Or
more specifically ‘who’ is conducting, control-
ling and governing ‘what (kinds of)’ more-than-
human disaster risk-related phenomena? This
makes room for a dialogue between social con-
structivist and realist approaches.
To illustrate how this principle of the DRM
Assemblage analytical approach could be used,
we consider the findings of Mena and Hilhorst
(2020) through the lens of the DRM Assem-
blage. Mena and Hilhorst (2020) show that the
futures-in-the-making of the DRM Assemblage
of Afghanistan are shaped more by the imagi-
nation of geopolitical risk, and the continued
territorialisation of International NGOs in the
governance of disaster risk in the country, rather
than the deterritorialisation of vulnerable
futures for those most at risk. They show how
DRR projects are more likely to materialise in
places which are deemed safe by the Afghan
government: places not affected by conflict or
under the control of insurgent groups and where
the NGO has a track record of implementing
projects on time and in line with outputs
requested by their donors. Mena and Hilhorst
(2020: 14–15) report that easily visible, quickly
created and measurable outputs relating to ima-
gined composite single hazards – such as flood
defence walls – tended to materialise; as
opposed to ‘soft’, long-term, complex and quan-
titatively immeasurable outputs which do more
to reduce the risk of both future disasters and
future conflicts. In conclusion, Mena and Hil-
horst (2020) argue that DRR projects in Afgha-
nistan tend not to speak to the needs of those
they are intended to support, lead to the materi-
alisation of infrastructures which can create
conflict over natural resources and do little to
address the continued territorialisation of vul-
nerability for the most at-risk populations in the
country.
4 The Researcher as a Component
of the DRM Assemblage
A recurring critique of scholarly work drawing
on AT is that it restrains the researcher’s ability
to reflect critically on their positionality in
research and knowledge production (Kinkaid,
2019). On the contrary, Fox and Alldred
(2015) would argue that AT allows the
researcher to critically reflect on their relations
within the assemblage they research. The
importance of self-reflection on positionality
in disaster risk research – and risk reduction
practice – has been elaborated by a number of
scholars (Gibson et al., 2016; Pelling, 2007,
2011). This methodological principle of the
DRM Assemblage should be understood as the
component where the burgeoning literature on
participation, performative research and radical
methodologies – across both geography and
disaster studies – can be drawn upon (Cameron
and Gibson, 2005; McCall and Peters-Guarin,
2012; Pugh, 2013). The research process itself
can be seen to open-up multiple futures-in-the-
making, each reflecting the outcome of deci-
sions made throughout the research process.
Some of these futures may be obvious, ima-
gined and planned for, while some will be
unforeseen, for better or worse (Turnhout
et al., 2010). Beyond reflecting on the need to
work against power relations, this principle
demands that researchers reflect on how their
understandings of the more-than-human phe-
nomena in question will differ from those living
with these relations day-to-day and how,
through drawing links between different more-
than-human phenomena in their analysis, they
are (mis)representing how disaster risk emerges
in particular places (Gaillard, 2019). Ulti-
mately, research using the DRM Assemblage

should seek to understand geosocial strata and
decolonise the practice of research-in-place
(Yusoff, 2018).
VIII Doing Research With the DRM
Assemblage
The DRM Assemblage does not demand the use
of specific research methods, though we suggest
the broad category of ‘more-than-human meth-
odologies’ may work well (Dowling et al.,
2016). These methodologies seek to unsettle
established research methods by questioning
and reconceptualising what it means to do
research (Barker and Pickerill, 2019). This pro-
cess of unsettling – of new ways of doing – may
relate to working both within and against power
relations that may be colonial, oppressive
and/or discriminatory (Sultana, 2020). In this
vein, Grove and Pugh (2015) reflect on how the
imagined futures of DRR initiatives may,
through their materialisation, reterritorialise
problematic relations of power if they are
coded by what they describe as modernist inter-
pretations of resilience; where the research or
programme may be designed to create self-
sufficient, empowered citizens in the face of
vulnerability generating processes over which
these citizens have increasingly little control
(Joseph, 2013; Mills-Novoa et al., 2020;
Rogers, 2015). In response, they propose that
the researcher reflects on ‘becoming resource’.
This involves acknowledging that participation
itself may not necessarily empower citizens,
and also examining how, through reimagining
researcher-researched relations and doing
research differently, participation can empower
both researchers and research subjects to chal-
lenge, recode and territorialise alternatives to
uneven and unjust power relations (Grove and
Pugh, 2015: 10).
Doing disaster research differently could
involve synthesising, and in many cases prior-
itising, local, traditional or indigenous knowl-
edge (Kelman et al., 2012). In many cases, like
AT, such knowledges are relational and dissolve
hierarchies and essences between humans and
non-humans, societies and environments and so
forth (Rai and Khawas, 2019). The potential of
AT to act as a boundary object between scien-
tific and/or Western understandings of disaster
risk and other place-specific, alternative knowl-
edges is a fruitful avenue for further DRM
Assemblage research (Mercer et al., 2007).
Another way of doing DRM Assemblage
research relates to ensuring the stories and
voices that speak through the research are those
which understand place-specific disaster risk
best: the ones who live with that risk every day
(Delica-Willison and Gaillard, 2012; Moezzi
and Peek, 2019). One well-trodden methodolo-
gical path which helps researchers to bring out
these at-risk voices is the interview. Dowling
et al. (2015) explore how more-than-human
geographers have ‘enriched the interview’
through combining these with go-along tours,
photography and video work (Dowling et al.,
2017) and how researchers supplement inter-
view data with data gathered through social
media, ethnographic diaries and observing rela-
tions between people and things. Other work has
been done to enrich the analysis of texts and
place this analysis in the context of more-than-
human worlds (Doel, 2016; Nimmo, 2011).
Such analysis can be particularly useful to his-
toricise the emergence of disaster risk (Adam-
son et al., 2018; Walshe et al., 2020). Research
that uses these types of methods, and which
embodies the four methodological principles of
the DRM Assemblage outlined above, can con-
tribute to the imagination of alternative, less vul-
nerable and more resilient, futures. This process
of imagination may territorialise new power rela-
tions – between researchers, decision makers and
participants – in transformative ways.
IX Conclusions
As the Sendai Framework has emphasised, the
role of science – including social science – in

DRR is and should be increasing. This is not
simple. Experts bring different types of knowl-
edge and resources into a risk reduction context,
and they interact with stakeholders in a wide
range of ways, through reports, warning sys-
tems, research projects and assessments that can
have significant impacts across a variety of
institutions. Placing hazard and risk assessment
at the heart of development is critically impor-
tant in reducing disaster risk but needs to be
done sensitively and with awareness of the
power dynamics and diverse ontologies that are
inherent in any local/national context – factors
which we have sought to argue that research into
DRM Assemblages is well placed to unpick and
potentially reconfigure. This article has shown
that in AT, disasters are understood as neither
socially constructed nor naturally occurring;
rather, they are seen as possible disasters-in-
the-making, materialising through the uneven
relationships between more-than-human phe-
nomena – be they the uneven relations between
geophysical forces which trigger landslides or
the uneven power relations between city plan-
ners and slum residents. By focusing on the six
components of the DRM Assemblage, research
using the framework is directed to understand-
ing, critiquing and potentially challenging the
ways in which diverse techniques and technol-
ogies of DRM attempt to manage uneven rela-
tionships of a more-than-human life (Anderson,
2012; Donovan, 2017). A focus on ‘root causes’
is replaced by a focus on how place-specific
political, scientific, economic and social imagi-
nations become dominant futures-in-the-
making and how these imagined futures interact
with uncertain more-than-human hazards to
lead to the continued territorialisation of
inequalities and vulnerabilities in disaster
events (Barnett, 2018, 2020; Granjou et al.,
2017; Grove, 2014b). The way in which these
vulnerabilities might be understood and
addressed is explored not only through transdis-
ciplinary hazard assessments and radical disas-
ter studies (Gaillard, 2019) but also through the
literature on feminist ethics of care and sustain-
ability (de La Bellacasa, 2017; Kinkaid, 2019).
It is this latter aspect of the praxis of the DRM
Assemblage where future work should focus
and where the radical potential of the approach
will be witnessed.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr George Adamson for his
support and encouragement to write this piece, and
also for suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.
We also thank the King’s College London, Depart-
ment of Geography’s Contested Development writ-
ing group for their edits and suggestions on early
drafts of this paper, particularly Dr Alejandro Bar-
cena for his in-depth recommendations and many
enjoyable discussions on the topic over the past few
years. We are also grateful to the Editor and three
anonymous reviewers for their constructive com-
ments that have certainly improved the paper.
McGowran also acknowledges the support and fund-
ing of the SHEAR Studentship Cohort (SSC)
(NERC-DFID funded programme).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following
financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: Peter McGowran is
funded by the Science for Humanitarian Emergen-
cies and Resilience (SHEAR) Doctoral Programme
(NERC/DfID funded). Dr Amy Donovan acknowl-
edges her ERC funding (ERC grant no. 804162) in
supporting the development of this paper.
ORCID iD
Peter McGowran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
5043-6430
Note
1. As part of the process to measure the implementation of
the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
2015–2030, an updated terminology was approved by
the UN General Assembly on 2 February 2017. It views

DRR as the ‘policy objective’ of disaster risk manage-
ment, which is a broader category that in this terminol-
ogy better describes the content of the ‘DRR
assemblage’ as described in Donovan (2017).
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Author biographies
Peter McGowran is a PhD Candidate in the Depart-
ment of Geography, King’s College London. He is
funded by the Science for Humanitarian and Resili-
ence (SHEAR) Programme (NERC/DfID funded).
Amy Donovan is a Lecturer in the Department of
Geography, University of Cambridge and a Fellow
of Girton College (University of Cambridge).
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