Governing disasters: policies, knowledge and organization of disaster management in South Africa.

Summary The purpose of this thesis is to show how a government of disasters is elaborated in South Africa through the development of instruments, knowledge and a profession that equip and operationalize the state, build a sector of intervention, and thereby orient the meaning of disasters. The thesis traces the emergence of a concern for disasters with civil defense, which constitutes disasters as an object of intervention for the state through the development of emergency planning techniques and the formation of a profession in the 1980s, in connection with the securitization of the state at the time of the repression of the anti-apartheid struggle. The reconfigurations of politics at the time of democratization in 1994 took place in conjunction with global transformations that, at the same time, promoted models of "disaster risk management. To explain the consequent transformation of the state, the thesis shows the importance of the circulation of experts, knowledge and instruments, but also their localization, through a process of "academization" that anchors disaster sciences in the university. The latter contribute to redefining disasters as risks affecting vulnerable populations, and through their knowledge, reorient state action. These new tools, knowledge, and policies contribute to the establishment of a protective state for "vulnerable" populations, but whose scope remains limited by the political contradictions of the post-apartheid state, the bureaucratic constraints of local governments, and the reconfigurations of the profession.