Anthropology Professor Reflects on Disaster Nationalism

On March 12, Associate Professor of Anthropology at St. Olaf College Vivian Choi spoke to students and staff in a talk titled “Disaster Nationalism: Dispatches from Sri Lanka and Minnesota.” Choi drew on her recent book titled “Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka” to connect her scholarship on disaster to her experience living in Minneapolis. Choi applied her disaster nationalist framework to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) activity in Minneapolis, offering a way to understand these current events as continuities of a large strain of disaster rather than an abrupt occurrence.

Choi based her book on 18 months of fieldwork in Sri Lanka spanning 2008-2017, during which she studied national disaster management and reconstruction following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the country’s decade-long civil war, which ended in 2009. The war was fought between the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which the government designated as a terrorist organization. She opened the lecture by defining disaster nationalism “as both the process and mechanisms of state power that utilize disasters to produce, legitimize, and entrench national ideologies.” 

Following the devastation of the tsunami and the ongoing conflict, Choi said, the techniques of management and reconstruction fostered new forms of governance and militarization that led to lasting insecurity and precarity, especially for Tamil and Muslim communities in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. “Disaster management worked as a legitimate institutional framework, categorizing both tsunamis and terrorism as imminent disaster risks, in turn, sanctioning the state’s goal to protect and uphold existing exclusionary, majoritarian, singular Buddhist nationalist ideologies,” Choi said.

The Sri Lankan government, headed by then-President Chandrika Kumaratunga, received widespread criticism for delays and disorganization in response to the tsunami’s destruction. As a result, the government declared a state of emergency, granting certain rights and privileges to the government to act upon. 

As a result, the state established new disaster management institutions, including a parliamentary committee on natural disasters and the Disaster Management Act No. 13, which sought to create a comprehensive framework for disaster risk management. Choi argued that “the impetus of such programs and collaborations is to invoke a continual state of readiness and maximum security of state territory.” 

Choi framed post-tsunami initiatives — including national disaster warning systems, coastal no-build buffer zones, and new housing schemes — “as material, physical and ideological nation-building projects.”

According to Choi, these developments coincided with the government’s larger effort to project a unified, “free” Sri Lanka during and after the end of the civil war against the LTTE. She quoted a speech by the Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United States Mahinda Samarasinghe, delivered months after the war’s end as evidence: “We do not for a moment think that Sri Lanka’s national renewal will be quick or easy. There are ever present threats that we must and will guard against, including the threats of new violence and destabilization.” 

Choi claimed that Samarasinga’s statement reflects a broader logic in which disasters, both human-made and natural, are treated as continuous and ever-present. “Terrorism and nature are cast into the same category of another or imminent threat that must be continually managed,” she said. 

Reading from the conclusion of her book, Choi urged the audience to reconsider conventional understandings of disaster. “What happens if we consider disasters not just as events, as things that happen to people in the world, as externalities to be managed, but instead as a structure of power?” she asked.

Coming to Amherst from Minneapolis, Choi then reflected on ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge,” during which the Department of Homeland Security deployed over 3000 ICE officers and agents to the area. In the face of ICE’s intimidation and allegedly unlawful actions, Choi described experiencing fear and uncertainty, both personally and for her community. Choi noted that she has questioned whether to carry her passport before leaving home, and regularly checks public databases tracking ICE activity.

To understand the Minneapolis uprising, Choi argued, one must consider its long history of community organizing and protesting against state violence. She emphasized the importance of adopting “a broader historical lens that encompasses hundreds of years of occupation in Minnesota” to understand both state power and resistance. 

Returning to her central argument, Choi concluded that disasters should not be understood simply as isolated events, but rather as “disasters that continue to beget disasters”. “I do not think we have any other choice today to not see disasters as constitutive, as structures of contemporary life,” she said.

Attendees found the event thought-provoking. “I thought that her discussion of blame in relation to disasters and who we attribute blame to in natural disasters was really interesting, especially in comparing natural disasters to human-created disasters,” Isa Nava ’28 said.