Caribbean Reconstruction and Climate Justice: Transnational Insurgent Intellectual Networks and Post-Hurricane Transformation

The devastating impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the northeastern Caribbean not only bring closer a world of immediate climate disaster and halting recovery, but also cast a long shadow of slow disasters and impossible futures for small island states in the face of significantly unstable and unpredictable climate patterns. In contrast to the mainstream idea of just “building back better” the paper underscores the need to also better account for the root causes of disaster risk and violent histories that still influence recovery processes at present. The paper draws on the recent debates over Caribbean reconstruction in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, but sets this immediate crisis in the context of longer debates over Caribbean reconstruction, reparations and climate justice. Revisiting arguments in W.E.B. DuBois’s classic sociological study of “Black Reconstruction in America”, this commentary also foregrounds Aldon Morris’s concept of “insurgent intellectual networks” to analyze the emergence of transnational “liberation capital” in the Caribbean region. These approaches help not only to ask how should we recover from or adapt to such storms, but how should major contributors to global warming pay for rebuilding, reparations, and restitution? What forms of deliberation, participation, procedural processes, and capabilities are necessary to make these determinations? Should restorative justice be linked to the Caricom demand for the European Union to pay reparations for slavery? And finally, what forms of epistemic justice are needed to recognize and support the work of insurgent intellectual networks?