
Disaster Capitalism Comes to Barbuda
On this tiny island, modern colonizers—including Robert De Niro—are taking advantage of a catastrophic hurricane to build luxury resorts. But Barbudans are determined to defend their unique form of communal land ownership.
The actor Robert De Niro was recently interviewed in the New York Times Travel section, where he boasted about his latest business venture—an ultra-exclusive luxury resort complete with a swanky, Nobu-branded sushi restaurant. The interview took place on location at the very site where De Niro’s pet project is currently being constructed: the remote Caribbean island of Barbuda (not to be confused with either Bermuda or Barbados). It’s not hard to see why De Niro and other wealthy investors have the island in their crosshairs: it has a population of fewer than 2,000 people spread out over about 60 square miles of beautiful limestone terrain circumscribed by a ring of pristine beaches. The Times reporter gushed over the delicious irony of taking a helicopter for an afternoon meeting with a world-famous movie star at a world-famous restaurant on a “semi-deserted” beach. But Barbuda’s natural features and sparse population are not really what set it apart from other Caribbean islands. And that beach is not “semi-deserted” at all. In fact, it is the epicenter of a political struggle between the island’s local population on the one hand and a cadre of billionaire developers and political elites on the other.
Barbudans, who are mostly descendants of enslaved people brought to the island by British aristocrats, have shared the island in communal ownership since the mid 19th century, when slavery there was ended. While other islands in the region have developed a more traditionally capitalist orientation in terms of private land ownership, Barbuda has maintained its unique model of communitarianism for generations. Unfortunately for Barbudans, however, developers from around the world, including at least one movie star, have been chomping at the bit to see the island transformed from a remarkable experiment in communal ownership to a playground for the mega-rich. Hurricane Irma, which caused widespread destruction and forced evacuations on the island in 2017, provided the perfect opportunity for those pushing for this transformation. The ongoing “development” of Barbuda in the wake of Irma is a brazen example of disaster capitalism, which, as Naomi Klein famously put it, “uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”
Along with the more populated island of Antigua, Barbuda makes up part of the two-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. It was first colonized by the British Crown in 1678, and in 1685 the island was leased to the Codrington family, who used Barbuda as a support station for sugar plantations on the more fertile island of Antigua. The Codringtons brought enslaved people from Africa to Barbuda to work, and those people’s descendants now make up most of the present-day Barbudan population. Despite the brutally oppressive conditions to which they were subjected, Barbudans remained defiant through their nearly two centuries of enslavement. Famously, when the managers on the island attempted to move some of the enslaved Barbudans off the island to Antigua, they refused to leave. During this period they also orchestrated numerous uprisings and revolts, demonstrating a spirit of independence and self-determination that would foreshadow the Barbudans’ current struggle to maintain control of their island and way of life.
The Codrington family left the island in 1870, and slavery was formally abolished throughout the British empire in 1873. Even in the wake of their enslavement, the Barbudans’ defiance continued. They refused to pay rent to the Crown for the land they had toiled on for generations. Furthermore, they made a conscious effort to maintain a communal ownership system, which grew out of a deep connection to the land that Barbudans developed during their enslavement. In practice, this means that all of the island is co-owned by all Barbudans. In 1904, the British government acquiesced and formally recognized this communal land organization. After Antigua and Barbuda gained independence from the United Kingdom and became a sovereign nation, the Barbudans’ struggle to maintain their land practices was focused in opposition to their sister island of Antigua and its central government, which had developed a more traditional practice of private property. This culminated in the Barbudan Land Act of 2007, which again codified communal ownership into formal law. In practice, this means all land on Barbuda is held communally by all, with each Barbudan having the right to occupy any vacant parcels of land designated by the community for residential or commercial use. The Barbuda Council—an 11-member, democratically elected administrative body responsible for the internal affairs of the island—is responsible for administering this policy. The law does allow room for land to be leased to non-Barbudans for residential, commercial, or other development projects, but, importantly, this can only be done at the discretion of the council and with the consent of the majority of the Barbudan people.
Antigua, on the other hand, where about 98 percent of the nation’s population resides, followed a more traditional path of post-colonial development. Its beaches are riddled with opulent resorts owned by wealthy foreign investors, and its once pristine coastal ecosystems are suffering from significant environmental pollution and destruction—two aspects of “development” that Barbudans have explicitly rejected. Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne clearly sees Barbudan communal land ownership as an obstacle to his mission of turning the nation into “a globally competitive, premier tourism and financial services economy.” Browne betrayed his vision for how Barbuda would fit into his plans when he announced his government’s intention of turning the island into “Jumby Bay on steroids,” referring to a posh 300-acre private island off the coast of Antigua that’s exclusively enjoyed by the very wealthy. It’s hard to see how Barbudans’ cherished virtues of self-determination and independence can withstand the central government’s plans for “development.” Indeed, Browne dismissed as irrelevant any suggestion that his plans might be contradictory to the Barbudans’ wishes—not to mention the law—stating that “these nonsensical arguments about ownership and ownership in common and so on, they need to stop.”
Despite Gaston Browne’s belittling of the Barbudans’ centuries-old communal land practices as a “glorified welfare system,” the 2007 Land Act dictates that he would need the approval of Barbudans to proceed with his agenda. The people of Barbuda have clearly stated their stance, and they are not interested in the prime minister’s plans. Their reasons surely vary. For some, it might be a desire to protect the island’s fragile ecosystem from the destruction that large-scale tourism and development often brings. For others, it could be an aversion to seeing large swaths of their ancestral homeland turned into places accessible only by the ultra-wealthy, who commute to and fro on private jets. At the very least, as Council member Trevor Walker stated, development projects at this scale “should be done by negotiation with the laws on the books.” Whatever the Barbudans’ reasons are for deciding against this brand of wealthy foreign investment, that decision, by any measure—moral, legal, or otherwise—should be theirs to make.
Robert De Niro apparently disagrees. As a founder of the development group Paradise Found LLC, he has been working with partners to build an exclusive hotel on the island since at least 2014. Due to local opposition, the project could never have passed the hurdles set up by the 2007 Land Act. Fortunately for De Niro, however, he had a staunch ally in Gaston Browne’s government. In 2015, Browne pushed through a piece of legislation called the Paradise Found Act, which circumvented the council’s authority and granted the developers the rights to build their hotel. Interestingly, the hotel is now being branded as a Nobu Inn, as opposed to its initial name, Paradise Found. One wonders if, in a flash of self-awareness, the actor and his partners recognized that a hotel bearing the same name as a piece of legislation responsible for dismantling a cherished communal land practice was a bit too ‘on the nose’? In an effort to legitimize his Paradise Found legislation, Browne’s government helped pass a separate referendum on the island, which apparently narrowly approved the development. However, there are significant questions about the legitimacy of the referendum, not the least of which is the fact that non-Barbudans were allowed to vote.
In the wake of the Paradise Found Act’s passage, one opposition senator told the media that “a very bad precedent has been set.” His concerns would prove prescient. In the decade since, several major development firms including the Abercorn Trust, Escape to (Barbuda) Inc., and others have started projects. There is also the Peace, Love & Happiness LLC and the Discovery Land Company, each partially owned by wealthy American businessmen who are jointly building a resort called the Barbuda Ocean Club as an “heirloom community where you can extend your legacy for generations.” The legacy in question will presumably be of the non-Barbudan persuasion.
De Niro speaks about his investment plans in a 2016 interview
If the Paradise Found project started to erode the cultural and legal frameworks that protected the Barbudan people’s sovereignty, it was a 2017 Category 5 hurricane and its aftermath that has pushed it to the brink. On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma touched down on Barbuda, bringing dangerously high winds and large-scale flooding. The central government of Antigua and Barbuda issued mandatory evacuation orders so that the island was mostly empty when the storm hit. What little infrastructure existed on the island—mostly modest homes and a few public buildings—sustained significant damage. These facts are indisputable. What is in dispute, however, is the motivation behind the government’s evacuation order and the veracity of their claims that the island was “95% destroyed” and “unhabitable” after the hurricane. Many Barbudans feel that the government’s post-disaster relief efforts were simply a pretense to keep them off the island while encouraging foreign developers to move in. As one Barbudan resident put it to me when I visited the island in the summer of 2024, “Irma was destructive, but the destruction of Barbuda was not [from] Irma.” Prime Minster Browne himself more or less dropped all pretenses that the Barbudans’ traditional way of life should be respected after Irma when he said “you cannot run a country on sentimentality. We’re saddened by the extent of the damage, but there are opportunities to be exploited.”
Browne would not miss this opportunity for exploitation. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, and while Barbudans were kept from returning to the island, the central government began working on legislation that would further gut the communal ownership provisions and ultimately repeal the 2007 Barbuda Land Act. It passed in December of 2017. The government now argued that moving away from communal land tenure toward private ownership and foreign investment was an essential part of “recovery.” In other words, according to the Browne government, the motivation for this transition was purely humanitarian, with only the Barbudans’ best interests in mind. For their part, the Barbudans were apparently expected to believe that it was pure coincidence that this “necessary step” in post-hurricane recovery was in lockstep with the pre-Irma “development” agenda of Browne and the billionaire developers. Robert De Niro played his part as well as ever, delivering one trademark performance after another on cable news and at the United Nations pleading with the world to stand with the “vulnerable” people of Barbuda and pledging to personally assist in the recovery efforts. During these public appearances, he made no mention of the hotel he and his partners already had in development. Again, a happy coincidence that advocating for the Browne government’s version of “recovery” through private development would help facilitate his own “special” investment on the island.
If, as Browne and De Niro claimed, the focus of this post-Irma development was to improve the lives of the Barbudans, one might expect that the first priorities would be repairing homes, hospitals, and schools. Not so. Instead, the first major construction to begin on the island, during the forced evacuation order and just days after the storm, was a new airport—one that was specifically designed to accommodate private jets and aimed at “attracting the luxury traveler and private jet owners from around the world.” Meanwhile, most Barbudans were still picking up the pieces of their shattered lives. Seven years after the storm, as I walked around the island, I was shocked to see many Barbudans still living in houses never fully repaired, with tarpaulin roofs bearing the worn logos of the NGOs that placed them in Irma’s aftermath. The crumbling roads used by most Barbudans, wrecked by the storm, have only been made worse by the massive construction trucks brought in by developers heading to and from their luxury hotel and residential projects.
Another major concern Barbudans had with the initial post-Irma development was that the government had not done the proper environmental impact assessments to ensure that projects like the new airport would not damage the island’s unique and fragile ecosystems. There is also an Abercorn Trust Inc. development, started in 2020, which includes a 15,000-square-foot residential complex with swimming pools, tennis courts, and a helicopter pad sprawling over 114 acres. These are being built dangerously close to a protected wetland, which is a vital frigate bird sanctuary and a turtle nesting site. Another construction project being challenged by Barbuda land activists on ecological grounds is the aforementioned Barbuda Ocean Club, which is slated to consist of around 400 luxury residences, an 18-hole golf course, a beach club and a natural gas storage facility on more than 600 acres, also on protected wetlands. Even the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has taken notice. They filed a report in 2022 expressing alarm that Barbuda’s wetlands were “at risk, with serious human rights implications, due to the construction of the Barbuda Ocean Club resort.” Furthermore, they mention concerns about “the quality and quantity of Barbuda’s groundwater, which could be further affected by the project, sand mining, and waste pollution.” For Barbudans, who have a deep historical and cultural connection to the island, the impending environmental damage must be agonizing.
The term disaster capitalism, coined by Naomi Klein in her influential 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, describes how those in power exploit a disaster to “consolidate and amplify their own power and resources, usually at the expense of the most disaster-affected people.” It is not a new concept; the phenomenon is probably as old as capitalism itself. In fact, there are many examples in which the specific goal of those in power was to develop a profitable tourism industry. For example, in the aftermath of a 1998 hurricane in Honduras, developers conspired with the government to rob indigenous people of their land to develop Honduras as an ecotourism destination. In India after the 2004 tsunami, buffer zones were set up and deemed unsafe to inhabit, clearing the way for developers to start construction. It is hard to imagine a better application of the term than what is happening in Barbuda. The central government clearly embellished the humanitarian needs that supposedly compelled them to maintain a forced evacuation order for weeks while they started the construction of the airport. They, along with their celebrity investors, used the publicity the storm generated—as well as the sympathy for “the most vulnerable” (to use De Niro’s words)—to raise millions in investments from governments, aid agencies, and private citizens.
But the Barbudan Council was not included in the allocation and management of these funds, and they are rightfully suspicious about how the central government has used them. For example, the European Union provided a $5.5 million grant meant to build 150 homes. As of 2024, only 91 small, barren concrete structures—which residents call “hurricane homes” and say barely qualify as livable—have been built. Even some donors have expressed concern about how the government has used the charitable funds. Steve Morgan, whose philanthropic group gave a $1 million donation for relief efforts after the storm, stated he “would love to do more” but asked, “how can we trust when we give money to a government opened bank account and it doesn’t get used?” The truth is that the current government is not incentivized to repair the infrastructure that is most important for Barbudans’ daily life. That would only entrench the “nonsensical arguments about ownership,” and wouldn’t be very lucrative. This is not to say that no infrastructure is being built. But it is not homes, schools, or hospitals. It is primarily mansions, hotels, and airports designed for private jets. This is why the irony of a glamorous Nobu sushi restaurant that caters to the world’s richest jetsetters being located on this little island, which so delighted the New York Times travel journalist, is likely not lost on the Barbudans.
As for the argument that the central government has made regarding communal land ownership being incompatible with effective disaster response and preparedness, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The Barbudans’ communal control of resources and strong social bonds are potent sources of resilience. Despite the destruction caused by Hurricane Irma, their ability to provide each other with shelter and adequate food once they returned to the island was a testament to the effectiveness of this form of social relations. Beyond the inherent value in the Barbudan form of participatory governance, there are also practical advantages. In the uncertainty of a crisis, the adaptability and direct accountability that this structure offers can prove invaluable. One wonders how things may have been different if the millions of dollars in aid had been controlled by the Barbudan council, with its members drawn directly from the community.
Anarchist and radical democratic thinkers have long recognized these advantages. In fact, these scholars have coined the term radical resilience, which describes the “capacity of inhabitants to be active, aware, and engaged in realizing and developing their own resilience in the face of shared vulnerabilities during and after disasters.” Even more mainstream scientific literature emphasizes the efficacy of community engagement in times of crisis. An instructive example of these concepts can be found in Sudan, which is currently in the thrall of a bloody civil war that has resulted in limited access for traditional aid groups. Filling this void are community-based mutual aid groups that have spontaneously grown from preexisting grassroots organizations. They have set up “emergency rooms” which are providing vital services such as sheltering displaced people, supporting hospitals, and securing food and water supplies. These mutual aid groups did not appear in a vacuum but instead were made possible thanks to a “rich heritage of social solidarity in Sudan.” Barbudans have their own “heritage of social solidarity” that has enormous potential to respond to crises. Unfortunately, in the case of Irma, this potential was stymied by the central government and its ulterior motives.
As climate change is making natural disasters, particularly hurricanes, more common, we are likely to see more and more disaster capitalism at work. And we need not look to remote islands to find examples. Consider the recent fires that ravaged Los Angeles. While much of the press coverage has focused on the wealthier areas like the Pacific Palisades, there are many working-class neighborhoods in places like Altadena that were decimated by the fires. Some residents of these communities are rightly concerned that reconstruction might accelerate gentrification and price them out of their neighborhoods. And disaster capitalism does not only rear its head in the aftermath of natural disasters, but war and genocide as well. President Trump’s flippant comments about a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip so that developers could turn it into a “riviera” is another prime, and particularly grotesque, example.
The Barbudans have maintained their resistance at every turn. They have partnered with legal organizations like the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) to file lawsuits aimed at halting the land grab. Save Barbuda and other grassroots organizations are working to organize local and foreign advocates, and ordinary Barbudans are taking to the streets to protect their sovereignty. Those of us in the U.S. could do our part by putting pressure on some of the highly visible developers who have worked to cultivate otherwise respectable public images. For example, John Paul DeJoria, the American philanthropist and co-owner of the development group Peace, Love & Happiness (PLH), fancies himself an environmentalist, even boasting about his environmental restoration of Barbuda. A coordinated boycott of his famed hair product company, Paul Mitchell, or his Patrón tequila brand, might draw enough attention to make him reconsider PLH’s controversial residential development projects. PLH’s work on the island is clearly in conflict with DeJoria’s purported goals of restoring the island's “critical ecosystem” by “utilizing a hands-on approach involving the locals.” As for Robert De Niro—we could bring the Barbudans’ message across the Caribbean and confront the movie star by disrupting the glitz and glamor of his next red carpet appearance.
Barbudans’ struggle has implications that reach far beyond this small Caribbean Island. Their communal land ownership and direct democracy stand as a centuries-old model for how communities all over the world could build their own form of “radical resilience” and control their own destinies. Unfortunately, this example is now at the risk of being wrecked on the shoals of disaster capitalism, all so that a cadre of wealthy elites can take private jets to eat sushi on a “semi-deserted” beach. This should, of course, bother anyone concerned with justice and human rights. But when I think about why this fight really matters, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a Barbudan a few months ago. I posed to him some of the government’s claims about the development bringing greater economic opportunity for Barbudans. He looked at me and responded something to the effect of, “What opportunity? The opportunity for our children to become their servants. That is not the economic path we chose.”