Emergent Conversation 26

This essay is part of the series Making Vulnerability Work
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 26

By Omer Aijazi

Vulnerability is not a description; it is a decision. In humanitarian practice, it sorts bodies. In academic discourse, it disciplines thought.

When we label a person, place, or system as vulnerable, we do more than describe a condition—we enact a relation of power. Who has the authority to assign vulnerability, and under what institutional, discursive, or affective conditions does this consignment take place? These allocations are never neutral.

Vulnerability works on multiple levels: it carries affective resonance—eliciting empathy, fear, or urgency—and it has institutional backing—shaping policies, funding, research priorities, and social interventions. To call a group “vulnerable” is to activate responses, allocate resources, and sometimes, transfix them in relation to care, control, or risk. This is scripting from above.

What is the performative and political life of vulnerability? What does it authorize? What does it foreclose? What kinds of futures, subjectivities, or geographies does it produce? And crucially, what happens when the label is embraced versus when it is resisted? Vulnerability, far from being a neutral descriptor, operates as a technology of governance—one that disciplines, delimits, and forecloses alternative ways of being (and feeling). Rather than resigning to this conceptual enclosure, there is value in attending to the ways people resist, reframe, and live beyond the scripts assigned to them.

Shaped by my ethnographic research in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and prior practice as a humanitarian responder, I reflect on how vulnerability operates both discursively and materially, and where it collapses.[1] My intervention is to destabilize its institutional use as a fixed category. And to look for a conceptual marronage—a fugitive ethics—that refuses the carceral frame and insists on unruly life, radical particularism, and shared unknowing.

A fugitive ethics is not the same as redefinition. I disagree with my comrades who believe that the way forward is the reclamation of existing concepts. For instance, by locating vulnerability within critical feminist epistemology to create a more liberatory framework that “centres the strength and disobedience of oppressed and marginalised people” (von Meding and Chmutina 2023, 366). It is too late for this.  Secondly, redefinition does not necessarily undo the material and discursive violence that the category enacts.

Reframing vulnerability—even under critical or transformative frameworks—can still subject people to the same patterns of institutional control, surveillance, and unequal treatment.  Vulnerability is structurally carceral. Care under its regime can too easily slip into new circuits of control. Its regime is too saturated with power. The task, I believe, is to open space for something else.

This essay welcomes conceptual escape. This is not a refusal of care—it is a refusal of capture.

Vulnerability Is the Structure

The undoing of vulnerability is a colonial fantasy. It conjures the possibility of sovereign invincibility. Its conceptual normalization sustains the ongoing colonization of land and climate, as also echoed by Charlotte Kate Weatherill (2024). Vulnerability, as a hardened concept, does not merely describe. It imprisons. It is carceral.

What does it mean to be vulnerable? “Vulnerability is both constitutive, ontological, and politically distributed” (Abadía 2020, 38). Alongside its twin, resilience, vulnerability occupies a formidable role in disaster studies.  It is mobilized both as a “scientific positivist and individually measurable phenomenon” (Weatherill 2025, 36) and as part of a “broader discursive landscape… of imaginative geographies of risk” (37).[2]  Racialized people, those in the Global South, and the lands they inhabit are confined to an epistemic location where risk and danger are presumed to dwell forever. This perpetual exile, like forever war, separates those deemed in constant peril from those in permanent safety.

Mónica Cano Abadía (2020) asserts that prevailing understandings of vulnerability rest upon a fiction: “Most of us are invulnerable, while there are some that are living under certain circumstances that make them vulnerable,” thus establishing a “binary framework that both presupposes and reinforces an asymmetric relationship with the other” (139). Vulnerability, then, is a modality of power, a structure of governmentality and redress: You are vulnerable. Therefore, I have a say in your life. I concur with Emma Barnes (2022) that the same colonial technologies that produce “vulnerability” are also those that foreclose the possibility for those considered “vulnerable” from shaping the terms of their survival or rejecting the technologies of their rescue.

Vulnerability is most often framed as an exceptional state, a deviation from a stable normativity. Yet the nature of that normative ideal is rarely interrogated. It is silently embodied in the figure of the able-bodied, productive, reproductive (White) man.

My ethnographic research in Pakistan-administered Kashmir—an ecologically and politically fractured terrain—reveals the inverse: vulnerability is not exceptional. It is the dominant condition, forged through racial capitalism, settler colonialism, ecological degradation, militarization, bordermaking, carcerality. Crisis is not interruption. It is the structure. Disasters are not ruptures; they are the slow, grinding extensions of daily dystopia (see Aijazi 2024).

When Vulnerability Collapses

 Rather than illuminating the fissures of our systems, vulnerability is used to decide which lives are grievable, and which are not—to mark the “life unworthy of life” (Wynter 2003, 318). It flattens suffering into sameness.

For over a decade, I have worked with rural and pastoral mountain communities in Kashmir. My interlocutors are not centrally positioned within their families, communities, or the nation-state.

They reside on the geopolitical and affective peripheries of empire, subjected to incredible forms of structural violence. This ranges from cross-border conflict to recurring environmental disasters. By every institutional metric, they rank high on the so-called “vulnerability index.” Some live with permanent injuries, some alone and in need of care, others seek fortune in the very military that occupies their land.

Yet, under every regime of aid provision, they are consistently excluded.

“You cannot even walk; what will you do with this cow?” an NGO worker mocked while distributing livestock (Interview October 2022).

“This village is so near the Line of Control, no tourist will ever come here,” another surveyor declared while assessing entrepreneurial potential (Interview March 2019).[3]  

“You rejected our help last time, saying you only accept assistance from Allah. Why should we include you now?” asked another (Interview November 2017).

It is precisely at the site of the “most vulnerable” that the category collapses.

My interlocutors live at the edges of the nation-state and the imagination. Their “radical particularism” (Peng 2025, 321), their embodiment of human contingency, exceeds and escapes the conceptual frames imposed. In their refusal to conform to institutional scripts of rescue or legibility, they are striving—not as subjects of vulnerability, but as agents of refusal and reworlding. As Dorothy E. Smith (2009) reminds us, when we begin to treat categories as social relations, “they become ambiguous” (79). People are not categories. Must we imprison them within concepts? 

Vulnerability Makes Borders

all around, and creeping
self righteous, let’s say it, fascism,
how else to say, border

—Dionne Brand (2006, 17), Inventory

 Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Queer bodies have long experienced world-ending genocidal and ecocidal violence, well before the “climate crisis” began to touch White lives. Scholars like Leanne Simpson (2017), Kathryn Yusoff (2018), and Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2018) remind us that for many, climate catastrophe did not begin in the Anthropocene but in conquest.

Just as vulnerability orders aid and care, it also orders exclusion. From bureaucratic rejection in Kashmir to steel walls in Europe, its logic is border-making. When the United Nations first raised the alarm on climate change in the early 1990s, the Global North responded not with open arms but with walls of stone and steel. Today, at least 74 fortified borders scar the earth, monuments not only to power and politics, but to fear. These are not just geopolitical artifacts—they are climate adaptation strategies for the rich to keep out those fleeing the devastation of climate change (Miller et al. 2021).

Juxtaposing these reflections with my own experience as an aid worker, I recall being tasked with drafting a list of “vulnerable villagers” deemed worthy of receiving assistance in the wake of world-ending monsoon floods. My only tools at the time were a paper and a pen. With a sweeping gesture, and guided by a deeply inadequate, formulaic rubric shaped by years of flawed humanitarian training, I determined who should be prioritized for aid and who should not. In that moment, I enacted an imprecise sorting of lives. A border was created.

Vulnerability is a border. It works by separating. It encloses subjects within folds of carceral care. Ida Danewid (2017) argues that vulnerability discourse disconnects interlinked histories, suppressing questions of culpability, restitution, and reparation. It enables the colonial subject to reimagine themselves as ethical. But, as The Circle’s Conspiracy of Writers (2021) insists, “Solidarity is difficult and painful. It means returning the gaze” (39).[4]  Vulnerability is not solidarity. It is its antithesis.

Towards Conceptual Marronage

Vulnerability is a frame. “A frame typically binds our view . . . it encloses our vision rather than allows for its expansion” (Routin 2024). A frame is a prison. A frame is a prison.

Carl Death (2022) calls for escape—an imaginative leap toward other sites, such as Afrofuturist writings, which he describes as climate theory: the “intellectual and literary descendants of Fanon—and Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ben Okri, and Octavia E. Butler” (453). We must remain attentive to the histories and afterlives of slavery, colonialism, ecocide, militarism, and Indigenous dispossession. Only then, we might bear the weight of our ghosts and confront the denial that haunts their memory (Tuck and Ree 2013).

“What are you plotting?” Sylvia Wynter (1971) would sometimes ask.  The question gestures both toward narrative—the plot of a story—and toward land: the plantation plot where enslaved labor was extracted, exploited, extinguished. But “the plot” was not only a site of death. It was also a ground of “survival, resistance, creativity, and the struggle against death” (McKittrick 2013, 14). In genocidal times, when the descriptive capacities of conventional language break down, we are called to forge new lexicons—“superlatives and new terms to describe the scale and breadth of the devastation” (Demos 2025, 8).

Ethical life, then, may reside not in legibility, but in marronage: a form of perpetual flight, a struggle to remain free—psychologically, socially, metaphysically, politically (Roberts 2015). Rather than seek to render life legible through conceptual incarceration, we might ask: how can we “care more than we know,” and extend our vision beyond the ruins of the world and the disciplines that have brought us here? (Shange 2019, 10).  How can we “disrupt the structures that make lives unliveable?” (Rexer 2022). For me, it means returning to and attuning to the fugitivity of life, how people escape frames.

What are you plotting?
A coup.
A riot.

Omer Aijazi is a transdisciplinary scholar of disaster and conflict, interested in how people imagine and claim their worlds in the wake of colonial rule and environmental ruin while in the shadows of empire. Questioning disciplinary norms within disaster studies and the carceral logics of South Asia, he explores these ideas in the mountain borderlands of the disputed territory of Kashmir and its continuity with Northern Pakistan. Omer is the author of the multi-award-winning book Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania, 2024). He is an Assistant Professor in Disasters and Climate Crisis at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester.

Notes

[1] At present, the disputed territory of Kashmir remains stuck within the state seeking nationalisms of India and Pakistan. Parts of it also lie within China. The struggle for self-determination and freedom (or Azadi) led by the Kashmiri people remains alive and well in Kashmir.

[2] Mark Neocleous argues that resilience is by definition against resistance. “Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance. Not a passive acquiescence, for sure, in fact quite the opposite. But it does demand that we use our actions to accommodate ourselves to capital and the state, and the secure future of both, rather than to resist them” (2013, 7).

[3] The Line of Control is the de-facto border that divides Kashmir into Pakistan and Indian-held areas; it is heavily militarized.

[4] Emphasis mine.

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