Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Changing Urban Riskscapes (2025)

“Changing Urban Riskscapes: Climate Change, Finance, and the Built Environment” (2025)  Savannah Cox, Zac Taylor, Stephen Collier, and Harriet Bulkeley Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy 4(1) (File)

ABSTRACT: This special issue explores the centrality of finance, risk rating, and
valuation in driving urban adaptation pathways and outcomes. The articles in this
issue do so through a vast set of sites. These include adaptation efforts underway
in high- and low-income cities in Mexico, Portugal, India, the United States, and Taiwan, as well as novel climate risk governance experiments in large and small cities
in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. The articles also look beyond
the boundaries of the city and explore the risk rating and valuation practices of
increasingly climate-exposed insurance companies and water utilities in Australia
and the United Kingdom. All the articles trace the complex and consequential interplay of risk, finance, and adaptation in cities with a specific goal in mind: to consider
how urban policies, financing, and planning measures can be repurposed to
advance equitable, transformative adaptation

Revisiting ‘Resilience’ (2025)

Stephen J. Collier, Savannah Cox, Kevin Grove, and Nathaniel O’Grady (2025) “Revisiting ‘Resilience’: Politics and State Practices in a New Conjuncture” Geoforum 166 (File)

Abstract

This special issue explores the striking proliferation of robust government interventions and forms of political mobilization around resilience today. In contrast to a “first cut” of critical scholarship that tied resilience to depoliticizing neoliberal regimes of governance, the articles in this issue identify resilience as an explicit aim of state actions, a central pillar of state legitimacy, and a contested terrain over which political claims and counter-claims are made. They examine a range of geographies and scales, from major state interventions in the US, the UK, and Southern Africa, to community level actions in the Caribbean. From these varying perspectives, the articles explore how resilience is both shaping and being shaped by a new contemporary conjuncture–one in which international trade, energy security, and planetary life are being reconfigured by state interventions that challenge the norms of liberal politics and economics. Collectively, the articles sharpen our understanding of the present and equip us to ask what kinds of futures are being built, foreclosed, or deferred in the name of resilience.

Insurance and the ‘Irrationalization’ of Disaster Policy (2025)

Stephen J. Collier (2025) “Insurance and the “Irrationalization” of Disaster Policy: A Political Crisis Theory for an Age of Climate Risk” British Journal of Sociology (File)

ABSTRACT

In the last several years, disaster insurance programs around the world have experienced disruptions that many observers interpret to be a primary symptom of “climate crisis” (Bittle 2024). Governments have responded to these disruptions through disjointed and at times contradictory measures: they treat disasters, alternately, as “Acts of God” that should be a collective responsibility, or as the result of decisions that can be attributed to individual agency. This article argues that such shifts between mutualism and individualization in disaster insurance are symptoms of an “irrationalization” of disaster policy. The concept of irrationalization, derived from the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe (1973), describes the process of goal identification and policy formulation of contemporary states as they navigate simultaneously valid but ultimately contradictory principles of political morality and governmental rationality. Through case studies of two disaster insurance programs in the US—the National Flood Insurance Program and property insurance in California, which covers wildfires—the article shows that irrationalization processes are becoming more marked as disasters grow ever larger and costlier, fueled by climate change and other anthropogenic causes. It also suggests that the concept of irrationalization offers insight into the emerging forms of “climate crisis” that are unfolding in disaster policy and other domains. The concept of climate crisis is frequently invoked to designate the ruptural change that will follow from global warming, and to both summon and justify radical action to address problems that are attributed to a particular causal or moral agent. But in the context of the irrationalization of disaster policy, technical and moral attributions are uncertain and disputed. Disasters generate political conflict and crisis-driven reorganization rather than decisive courses of action.

The Disaster Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism (2025)

Stephen J. Collier (2025) “The disaster contradiction of contemporary capitalism: Resilience, vital systems security, and ‘post-neoliberalism’” Geoforum 159 (Journal Page)(File)

Abstract

In the last few years, governments in the U.S. and Europe have responded to a series of events—from the Covid pandemic and energy shocks to a series of large-scale disasters—by directing trillions of dollars to measures that seek to bolster “resilience.” These interventions aim to ensure the function of vital systems by restructuring supply chains, investing in infrastructures, and providing governmental backstops for critical social and economic functions. The proliferation of such robust state actions challenges scholarly accounts—which were based on state practices of resilience in the 2000s and 2010s—that analyzed resilience as a philosophy of state inaction, or, at most, a norm of government actions to restore market self-organization following disruptions.

Drawing on the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe, this article analyzes the variable forms of resilience in terms of the coherent dynamics of a ‘disaster contradiction’ of contemporary capitalism. Contrary to the dominant assessment of recent scholarship, it argues that the increasing centrality of resilience as a governmental norm reflects an ongoing politicization of disaster outcomes: contemporary capitalist states are held responsible for ensuring the continuous functioning of vital systems, and for fostering adaptive adjustment to shocks. But this responsibility is pulled between contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, events that disrupt vital systems threaten capital accumulation and social welfare, catalyzing state actions to curtail the scope of markets or individual choice. In this moment of the disaster contradiction, interventions in the name of resilience impose social, economic, and spatial order. On the other hand, such interventions create rigidities, inefficiencies, and unintended consequences, including a heightened risk of future catastrophes, that result in what Offe referred to as crises of crisis management. In this moment of the disaster contradiction, resilience appears in critiques of planning and intervention, and as a norm of state actions to establish—or, following crises, restore—market self-organization. It is argued that government interventions in the name of resilience in the 2020s may be analyzed as a distinctive episode in the development of the disaster contradiction, in which resilience is emerging as a key mode of ‘post-neoliberal’ government.

Climate Change and Insurance (2021)

Collier, S. J., Elliott, R., & Lehtonen, T. K. (2021). Climate change and insurance. Economy and Society, 50(2), 158–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2021.1903771 (Journal Page)(File)

Abstract

This special collection examines insurance as an increasingly central mechanism in shaping how the effects of climate change are transforming local economies and ways of life. The papers study a range of exemplary cases, ranging from agricultural micro-insurance in development policy and regional sovereign risk facilities in the Caribbean to public and private insurance in the United States. This framing essay situates these papers in a longer tradition of scholarship on the government of risk and security. It also describes three themes that run through the papers: the economization of climate change; the moral economy of risk and responsibility; and the plasticity of insurance as an abstract technology that may be taken up in various governmental assemblages, in the name of various political projects.

Governing Urban Resilience (2021)

Stephen J. Collier and Savannah Cox (2021) “Governing Urban Resilience: Insurance and the Problematization of Climate Change” Economy and Society 50(2), 275–296. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2021.1904621 (Journal Page)(File)

Translating Social Dilemmas into Gameful Designs for WildfireResilience (2025)

MJ Johns, Yael Nidam, Mario Escarce Junior, Linda Hirsch, Yiyang Lu, Bridget Ho, Anna Toledo, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Stephen Collier, Edward Melcer, and Katherine Isbister (2025) “Translating Social Dilemmas into Gameful Designs for Wildfire Resilience.” CHI EA (File)

Abstract
Developing wildfire resilience is a complex social problem since approaches to achieving it vary significantly across the population. Our interdisciplinary team designed serious games focusing on dilemmas that affect decision-making for wildfire resilience and trade-offs among different decisions. We developed two serious games to aid individuals and communities in increasing their resilience
towards wildfires, based on need finding interviews (N=21), which revealed three critical dilemmas around home hardening and evacuation. We contribute our collaborative reflection about the process, the design of the two games, and a small user study (N=5) of the games. Our findings suggest that our approach led to designing authentic, carefully balanced serious games to support community resilience through exposure to the dilemmas that occur in crisis situations and in preparing for such situations. The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of our team allowed us to effectively translate social dilemmas into gameplay.

The Government of Emergency

My book with Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security has been published by Princeton University Press.

Global Anthropology and the Art of the Middle Range (2020)

Stephen J. Collier (2020) “Global Anthropology and the Art of the Middle Range” HAU 10(3), 1052–1054 (Journal Page)(File)

A comment on Jacquie Best’s “Security, Economy, Population” in Security Dialogue

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