Gendered Political Violence and Urban Post-Disaster Reconstruction

The past few decades has witnessed a steady rise in natural disasters such as earthquakes, cyclones, landslides, and floods. Their impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods are severe, yet vulnerability to such impacts is shaped by gender, race, religion, ethnicity, language, class or caste, and other social inequalities. Thus, disasters and their impacts are complex products of social, political, and economic environments. This research projects offers a holistic approach into the study of gendered political ideologies of post-disaster reconstruction in the city of Bhuj, Gujarat. It responds to an urgent need for analysis that focuses on how disasters mobilize political ideologies that raise tensions with gendered and sexualised impacts. Combining meta-theory on gendered humanitarian governmentality and resistance with micro-ethnography, the research design provides a combination of policy analysis, ethnography, personal narratives.