It is a common yet inconvenient truth that disaster risk reduction, response, and recovery efforts too often exclude key groups in the decision making, planning, and distribution of information and resources. These exclusions occur willfully, by malign neglect, or through rote machinations of bureaucratic process. Given this reality, many community-based groups, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations advocate for more inclusionary state disaster policies and practices•ones that include historically marginal actors in the planning of future scenarios and the distribution of vital information and resources. At the same time, however, marginalized groups and organizations often craft and enact autonomous processes for risk reduction, response, and recovery, electing (by preference, necessity, or both) to construct their futures outside of the state. This panel interrogates the politics, strategies, and processes of and for inclusion, autonomy, and combinations thereof in a variety of disaster-related contexts. Each panelist's work complicates these basic distinctions and confronts the state not as a unified apparatus with clear insides and outs, but also as a shifting assemblage of actors and agencies in human dramas and practices.