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Some disasters are declared. Others are simply administered. In 1919, at the height of European fear of Bolshevik revolution, liberal reformers built an international organisation to give workers an alternative to the streets. A century later, the ILO responds to the deaths of over 1,100 garment workers with training programmes and insurance schemes. In 1943, three million people died in Bengal in a famine that the colonial administration never formally declared — because declaring it would have triggered the duty to feed them. These two essays argue that these are not separate histories. Both trace how power depoliticises the harm it produces: by converting antagonism into procedure, exploitation into a coordination failure, and atrocity into misfortune. Reading Sen alongside Said, Spivak, Foucault, Mbembe and Cox — and drawing on original fieldwork with brick kiln workers and labour officials in Pakistan — the collection asks not only who suffers, but who gets to author the record of that suffering. Contents • Labour Rights and the Afterlives of Empire: A Critical Analysis of the International Labour Organisation as a Depoliticising Project — Ayatain Ali, Raja Omer & Kashaf Noor • The Bengal Famine of 1943: Coloniality and How Famines are Man-Made — Raja Omer “Its legitimacy lies precisely in its ability to promise reform without threatening the foundations of the global economic order.” Essential reading for students and scholars of international law, labour studies, postcolonial theory, and development.