Unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community-based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, explores how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts.
Through a genealogy of Jamaican disaster management, shows how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory.