Raja Swamy moves from resilience to resistance in the struggle against exploitative development

Raja Swamy is a social anthropologist with an interest in the political economy and political ecology of natural disasters. In this conversation we unpack the ideas in his recent book Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami. This is a disaster that killed nearly 230,000 people. It’s trauamtic, but Raja takes us into that trauma in order to talk about what it meant in the wake of that disaster for states and multinational companies to see it as an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that prioritized profit and alignment with global financial regimes, rather than in a way that put the needs of already existing grassroot networks and forms of collective labour first. Swamy’s generous, generative answers to my questions about his work tell an extraordinary story of globalization and its effects in post-tsunami India. He explores how “gifts” in that context were, in many cases, really a sort of lure or bribe, designed to displace existing worlds through incentivizing the realization of a different, more exploitative one. What he calls the “glib neoliberal rhetoric of reconstruction” really disregarded, and continues to disregard—as we enter a period of intensifying climate impacts—the energy, self-sufficiency, insight and agency of the so-called “developing world” and those whose lives, livelihoods and lifeworlds stand to be most affected by climate change. What would it mean, Raja asks, to look people in these frontline positions as the best guides to the future we want? We’re talking about the use of disaster for the purpose of pushing through opportunistic development, the privatizing of land and the displacement of populations from the world they know. It feels inevitable, this orientation of development toward the dictates of the free market, but it isn’t. Raja poses the question of why it is assumed that, in the interest of gaining autonomy or economic well-being, people should be forced into a position of, really, underdevelopment and neglect under neoliberalism. It’s in this context that he says we should be thinking about how to change the way we talk about things like climate adaptation, this idea of building back better. As he pointedly says: “Better for whom?” As disasters become more frequent and the need to build and rebuild becomes more profound and more pressing, we should be asking what kind of world we want, and who we mean when we say “we.”