Achieving sustainability in contexts of conflict requires parallel progress in disaster resilience and peacebuilding. While communities living in conflict-affected settings are among the most vulnerable to climate and disaster risks, investments in disaster risk governance (DRG) remain limited and often profoundly misaligned with the scale and complexity of individuals’ vulnerabilities. This article applies a critical lens to failed-state discourses that persist despite widespread scholarly critique. It finds that disasters are frequently invoked as evidence of state failure, normalizing particular expectations of state performance and, in turn, of DRG. These framings are not merely discursive; they carry material consequences, shaping international policy, financing structures, and aid delivery mechanisms. Drawing on empirical insights from elite interviews conducted at multi-sited intergovernmental forums using a conference-based method, the article examines how labels of fragility are experienced, negotiated, and contested by individuals working within DRG institutions in South Sudan and Somalia. I argue that fragility and cognate terms often obscure more than they reveal. Rather than dismissing formal state institutions or reproducing state-centric assumptions, this article advances a (re)humanizing orientation to DRG analysis – one that recenters the lived experiences, agency, and relational labor of those working within state structures under conditions of constraint. In doing so, the article contributes to decolonial efforts to recenter the human experience, move beyond extractive policy logics, and engage with the political and institutional realities of DRG in conflict-affected contexts. Such an approach offers a more grounded basis for advancing sustainability and peace in conflict-affected contexts that are too often written off as “failed.”
Katie Ann Harris Peters (Wed,) studied this question.