Into the Paucity of Anxious Isolation: Time-Space Appropriation and the Liberalization of Suffering

“Capacity building” in DRM is typically approached through an access model that normalizes technical transfers of innovations from ‘developed’ to ‘developing’ areas. Through a framework of world systems political ecology, normalization of this flow is shown to be a mystification of the social relations of exchange that undergird the manufacture of such innovations. “Capacity building” turns out to be a problem of material distribution in the appropriation of time-space through unequal exchange. Developed areas benefit from such exchange not least by the displacement of environmental loads, which ever more often now make necessary technology transfers of disaster assistance to begin with. Another benefit is the engraining of a liberalist model of personhood in areas where it had not been extant, an appropriation of time-space that transforms subjectivity not least by converting difficult moral problems into mere technical ones. Hinged on a deontological framing of personhood, attribution of ‘vulnerability’ in this way conceals the magnitude of horrors in the global system in liberalization of the experience of suffering.