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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Dramatic scenes of devastation and suffering caused by disasters such as the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, are viewed with shock and horror by millions of us across the world. What we rarely see, however, are the international politics of disaster aid, mitigation and prevention that condition the collective response to natural catastrophes around the world. In this book, respected Canadian environmental sociologist John Hannigan argues that the global community of nations has failed time and again in establishing an effective and binding multilateral mechanism for coping with disasters, especially in the more vulnerable countries of the South. Written in an accessible and even-handed manner, Disasters without Borders it is the first comprehensive account of the key milestones, debates, controversies and research relating to the international politics of natural disasters. Tracing the historical evolution of this policy field from its humanitarian origins in WWI right up to current efforts to cast climate change as the prime global driver of disaster risk, it highlights the ongoing mismatch between the way disaster has been conceptualised and the institutional architecture in place to manage it. The book's bold conclusion predicts the confluence of four emerging trends - politicisation/militarisation, catastrophic scenario building, privatisation of risk, and quantification, which could create a new system of disaster management wherein 'insurance logic' will replace humanitarian concern as the guiding principle. style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;" /> Disasters Without Borders is an ideal introductory text for students, lecturers and practitioners in the fields of international development studies, disaster management, politics and international affairs, and environmental geography/sociology.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Text Boxes
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: The Disaster Politics Nexus
Post-disaster Utopia and the Altruistic Community
De-politicizing Emergencies
The Disaster–Politics Nexus
Defining Disaster
Conclusion
CHAPTER TWO: The Global Policy Field of Natural Disasters
Architecture of Global Disaster Politics
Tensions in the Global Policy Field of Natural Disasters
Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE: The Kindness of Strangers
Humanitarianism and its Discontents
Disaster Relief before 1950
A New Order Rising
Disaster Relief and the Development Orientation
UNDRO
Humanitarian Battlefields
Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: A Safer World?
International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR)
International Strategy for Disaster Reduction
World Conference on Disaster Reduction (Hyogo Conference) 2005
Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE: Climate of Concern
Constructing the Climate Change/Disaster Risk Nexus as a Global Problem
Is Convergence Possible?
Future Prospects
Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX: Disaster Politics as Game Playing
Political Considerations in Allocating and Providing Disaster Assistance
Political Considerations in Accepting or Rejecting Disaster Assistance
Disaster Diplomacy
Disaster as a Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Disaster as a Catalyst for Political and Social Change
Neo-liberal Politics and Militant Humanitarianism
Conclusion
CHAPTER SEVEN: Mass Media and the Politics of Disaster
Volume and Breadth of Coverage
Depth and Accuracy of Coverage
Media Coverage, Politics, and Disaster Aid
Mass Media and Discursive Representations of Disasters
Conclusion
CHAPTER EIGHT: Disaster Politics: A Discursive Approach
Discourses of Disaster
Four Discursive Realms Contributing to DRR
Disaster Risk Reduction Paradigm: Diffusion and Barriers to Adoption
Conclusion
CHAPTER NINE: Conclusion
Emergent Institutionalism
Emergent Institutionalism and the Politics of Natural Disasters
The SCPQ Configuration
References
Index
To Ruth, as always
Copyright © John Hannigan 2012
The right of John Hannigan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2012 by Polity Press
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Acknowledgments
Disasters Without Borders began with a note from Louise Knight, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Polity Press. Louise said she would like very much to commission a really good introduction to the international politics of natural disasters and I had been recommended as someone who could potentially write on or advise her on the project. I was immediately intrigued. After many years of operating in separate realms, disaster studies and environmental scholarship were finally starting to seriously engage with one another, prompted in particular by events during 2004–5 surrounding Hurricane Katrina, and by the Indian Ocean tsunami. As an established urban and environmental sociologist with a background in disaster research theory and methods, I concluded that this would be a wonderful opportunity to explore and interpret disaster politics through a fresh set of eyes.
Over the course of the last three years, a number of people have contributed to the success of this project in ways large and small. At Polity, Louise deputized Assistant Editor David Winters to see the project through to completion. David has been unfailingly encouraging, courteous, and helpful at each stage of the publication process. Two anonymous referees, one an expert in international relations, the other a veteran in the disaster management field, provided extensive and detailed comments on the first draft. These were very useful in undertaking a revision of the manuscript. During a visit to England in 2011, Mark Pelling, a geographer at King’s College, London and author of a seminal book on disaster risk reduction, kindly spent an hour with me and sent me home with an armful of required reading. Mark Baker, a Toronto risk and insurance consultant with a degree in disaster management from Royal Roads University, opened my eyes as to the frequently unacknowledged but significant contribution of the private sector to natural disaster recovery and assistance. Viviana Jimenez, who is researching the impact of changing climate on Colombian coffee growers, sent me some useful reports and web links. Of course, the views expressed in the book are entirely my own.
As was the case with my previous two books, I couldn’t have done this without the help and support of my immediate family. Maeve, now launched on a career in corporate communications and public affairs, helped me to do the footnotes and to set up the diagram in chapter 8. I benefitted greatly from ongoing discussions with Tim, a doctoral student at Oxford, about innovation, publics, and organizational fields. T.J. and Olivia have been uniformly interested and supportive. Most of all, I want to acknowledge my wife of nearly 40 years, Ruth. Over the course of this book coming together, we spent many wonderful hours viewing television documentaries, reading, and talking about geologic phenomena, from the catastrophic Laki volcano in the eighteenth century to the threat of ‘super-volcanoes’ in the twenty-first. Thank you Ruth for your love and support, sage advice, and constant enthusiasm for this book project.
Finally, as I was completing the first draft, Andrew, our first grandchild, was born in Princeton, New Jersey. Immensely curious about everything new he encounters, especially music and the natural world, I pray that he will grow up to witness the advent of that safer world, which so many of the academics, bureaucrats, politicians, and humanitarian workers that you will encounter in Disasters Without Borders have worked so tirelessly to bring about.
Glossary of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Text Boxes
Introduction
On the morning of June 8, 1783, the earth split open along a 16-mile fissure in southern Iceland called the Laki volcano. Over the next two years, the Laki volcanic eruption killed an estimated six million people worldwide. The immediate, horrendous damage to Iceland caused by the molten lava flow, and by a vast plume of acid rain formed when volcanic gases dissolved in the vapor of clouds, was followed by a much greater trail of destruction that was eventually to “reach halfway around the world, from the Altai mountains of Siberia to the Gulf of Mexico” (“The summer of acid rain,” 2007: 133). A persistent dry fog, followed by several freakishly cold winters, contributed to devastating crop failures in France and to the destruction of the rice harvest in Japan, where as many as one million people died. Ice floes floated down the Mississippi river, past New Orleans.
The Laki eruption and its global trail of destruction is an early illustration of the notion of “disasters without borders.” In dramatic fashion, it established that a natural event originating in one geographic locale is capable of triggering thousands of other events miles away. Meteorologists and oceanographers have long acknowledged this, employing the term “teleconnected” to describe how world weather and ocean currents are linked in a network fashion. For example, El Niño conditions off the coast of Peru mean that there will be a drought in India and Australia.
A second meaning of “disasters without borders” is more sociological in nature. In this interpretation, we unquestionably accept the moral responsibility to help citizens of other nations who have fallen victim to the ravages of natural disasters or complex emergencies. It echoes a common theme in the research literature on the study of transnational civil society, which identifies transnational advocacy as “efforts to solve problems that span borders in the absence of border-spanning governments” (Florini and Simmons, 1999: 6). In this spirit, Keck and Sikkink (1988) title their seminal book on advocacy networks in international politics Activists beyond Borders.
The sans-frontièrisme (without borders) movement originated in France at the end of the 1960s among several international aid organizations, most notably a group of activist physicians who christened themselves Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) (Siméant, 2005). Four decades later, the movement has migrated across the social and political spectrum. Occupational groups who have adopted the “without borders” name now include architects, engineers, firefighters, journalists, lawyers, nurses, reporters, teachers, and even clowns. Most of these organizations contribute to humanitarian and development work overseas, although not exclusively in the disaster sector. More broadly, “without borders” has become shorthand for “transnational politics.” For example, a Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, recently headlined its editorial about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to make joint campaign appearances with Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential election in April 2012 “Merkel sans frontiers” (Globe and Mail, 2012). Furthermore, the phrase has penetrated mainstream commercial culture, where “without borders” simply denotes global consumer appeal. There’s even a franchised Mexican fast-food chain in the United States that calls itself “Burritos Without Borders.”
In humanitarianism and global politics, a central policy discourse has emerged and solidified around the notion of “disasters without borders.” In spite of a host of normative, ideological, and strategic differences, all of the players/actors in the international politics of natural disasters acknowledge to a greater or lesser extent that what happens in one part of the globe resonates elsewhere. As Adger et al. (2009: 150) put it, the “vulnerabilities of local systems, peoples, and places are networked or teleconnected in their social and economic implications.” Even those in the military and intelligence sectors, who are in the forefront of realist politics, understand the normative power and appeal of the phrase, and draw from its logic. Nonetheless, as I discuss in chapter 3, the assertion that natural disasters, and particularly their first cousins complex emergencies, are borderless continues to provoke considerable controversy, especially with reference to the moral and legal justifications for humanitarian intervention.
Over the last century, there have been two contrasting ways of imagining natural disasters within the framework of international relations and international law. As Fidler (2005) explains, the first equates natural disasters with other problems such as transboundary pollution that have the potential to cause friction among nations. Here, national states have favored multilateral treaties (hard law) to institute regulatory regimes designed to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons, landmines, ozone-depleting chemicals, and the like. By contrast, natural disasters have been treated as episodic, short-lived events that are optimally handled as humanitarian matters rarely connected to the fundamental material interests that states have in international relations. That’s not to say that humanitarian assistance hasn’t from time to time been used as a cover for achieving foreign policy or national security objectives. Nonetheless, rather than looking to a set of international legal rules, natural disasters (wartime emergencies are somewhat different) were routinely relegated to the vagaries of what international lawyers sometimes call “soft law” – non-binding actions and activities (Fidler, 2005). In the absence of a strong multilateral presence, natural disasters fell under the influence of an uneasy alliance of the Red Cross, United Nations development agencies, and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). While they had different agendas and frequently held conflicting views about disaster management, the three partners did share a conviction that citizens in the developed world have a moral responsibility to help, and even save, their less fortunate compatriots in the South. The cornerstone of this international relief system (Cuny, 1983; Green, 1977; Kent, 1987) was (and still is) a tangled web of donor and host governments, the military, NGOs, UN bodies, and private charities and firms. Humanitarian disaster relief operates within the broader context of development assistance and politics, and is guided by the prevailing international political situation (van Niekerk, 2008: 358).
In the 1980s, a new disaster risk reduction (DRR) paradigm emerged and began to assume a visible presence. This approach differs markedly both from the “business as usual” operation of international politics, and from the humanitarian intervention model that still predominates in international disaster planning and relief circles. In contrast to “sustainable development” and “global warming,” DRR is not a concept that resonates widely in the media and in popular discourse. Nevertheless, it has ascended to the top of the agendas of many agencies and donors who deal with disaster mitigation and protection. Despite being embraced by a number of key humanitarian and development agencies such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent and Oxfam, DRR activities still only account for a relatively minor proportion of the total money donated to and spent on overseas relief and recovery. Furthermore, action to reduce risk and build resilience does not seem to be trickling down to those at a grassroots level who are most directly impacted by natural disasters (Mercer, 2010: 260; Views from the Frontline, 2009).
Most recently, the political economy of disaster risk reduction has become part of a wider dialog about global climate change, poverty, and international development (chapter 5). Disaster risk reduction and the various multi-actor initiatives and partnerships that it has nurtured are increasingly popular at the World Bank (see chapter 2). On a positive note, this provides an unparalleled opportunity for DRR to reach a much larger global audience and to access sources of bilateral and multilateral financing than would otherwise be possible. At the same time, it carries a potential risk that DRR discourse could be co-opted by the much better funded and politically connected climate change adaptation (CCA) network. This is problematic for several reasons. CCA tends to be top-down, much like traditional humanitarian disaster relief. By contrast, DRR has been steadily moving towards a more consultative, grassroots model that values local knowledge and initiative. In addition to this culture clash, skating in the slipstream of CCA exposes DRR proponents to the multiple uncertainties and conflicts that characterize the politics of global climate change.
This odyssey of natural disaster aid, mitigation, and prevention over a period of more than half a century, from humanitarianism delivered straight-up to a mixed cocktail of risk management, poverty reduction, and climate change adaptation, is fascinating not just on its own terms, but also as a case history in the politics of transnational advocacy and institutional change. As I discuss in chapter 8, this trajectory is not adequately explained by turning to existing theories in political sociology, comparative politics, or international affairs. Change has not followed Kuhn’s model of scientific (and political) revolutions, wherein a challenging paradigm unseats and replaces an established one after a brief, intense period of conflict. Neither is it fully explainable by a world polity model that features a global diffusion of values with minimal opposition; nor by a global norm dynamics model that highlights the importance of cognitive framing, advocacy networks, and norm entrepreneurs. Unlike in the environmental field, there have not been influential epistemic communities of scientists who successfully spearhead the adoption of multilateral agreements or international agreements. In fact, there have only been two binding treaties, 70 years apart; the first failed and the second is narrowly technical.
The international politics of disaster takes the shape of a “global policy field” with nine major categories of organizational players (chapter 2) who populate four overlapping discursive realms: hazard, risk, and safety; international development; humanitarian aid; and environmentalism and climate change (chapter 8). These realms both engage and collide. Elements from each have been woven together to form the disaster risk reduction paradigm, but the field remains fluid and unsettled.
In the final chapter, I draw upon Ansell and Gingrich’s (2007) concept of emergent institutionalism, which they introduced in a study of how BSE (“mad cow disease”) was officially dealt with in Britain. By emergent institutionalism Ansell and Gingrich mean that the emergence of a new and uncertain problem requires the mobilization of a particular and possibly unique configuration of people, knowledge, and resources. Once an incipient institution has crystallized around an interpretation of a problem, it claims jurisdiction and rebuffs other attempts to engage in sense making. Unfortunately, what can occur is a serious mismatch between emergent problems and emergent institutions.
I conclude the chapter by proposing that a new wave of emergent institutionalism is currently unfolding in the international politics of disaster. This is located at the juncture of four trends (which I have labeled the SCPQ configuration): securitization, catastrophic modeling and scenario building, privatization, and quantification. Among its major players are international financial institutions, insurance (or more precisely reinsurance) companies, catastrophe modelers, defense policy analysts, and geospatial intelligence gatherers. Escalating concern over global climate change and its threats to economic prosperity and national security has prompted this shift in thinking about natural disasters. Whereas they were once viewed as epiphenomena, today, disasters are increasingly acknowledged as having important strategic and financial implications. Insofar as it attracts more resources, notably money and legitimacy, this newfound concern is welcome. However, there’s a downside. Insurance logic and security concerns will crowd out humanitarian concern. The language of disaster management will shift, with phrases like accountability, era of results, measurable outcomes, economic viability, cost efficiency, return on disaster risk reduction investments, disaster proofing, and willingness to pay becoming paramount. More broadly, a new humanitarian framework that focuses on strengthening the local community’s ability to prevent, prepare for, and respond to natural disasters may be derailed by strategies that are more oriented to a calculus of risk, profitability, and long-term global catastrophe mitigation.
CHAPTER ONE
The Disaster Politics Nexus
As the second decade of the new millennium dawned, a plague of natural hazards visited the Southern hemisphere, triggering multiple disasters. From early December 2010 to mid-January 2011, heavy rainstorms and flash floods – an “inland instant tsunami” – swept across the Australian state of Queensland, spreading over an area the size of France and Germany combined (Rourke, 2011). The flooding obliterated small towns in the Lockyer Valley and overwhelmed low-lying suburbs and parts of the central business district in Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city. This followed earlier flooding in the northeast part of the state that resulted in an estimated C$1 billion in lost agricultural production.
During the flood emergency period, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was criticized in the media for appearing stiff and emotionally distant from the problems confronting disaster victims. By contrast, Queensland State Premier Anna Bligh, a descendant of Captain William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, was praised for striking the right note of steady determination. Bligh saw her public approval rating skyrocket from 25 percent in November to 83 percent in mid-January (Dagge, 2011).
After the waters subsided, Gillard introduced a legislative package that included a temporary flood tax levy on higher income earners, the promise of fast visa processing for skilled migrants wanting to work on the reconstruction, and a A$2 billion payment to the Queensland state government. The third of these ignited a political firestorm, especially among members of the Australian Greens Party. To raise extra money for disaster relief, Gillard proposed abolishing various environmental programs: cleaner automobile initiatives, solar rebates, and the establishment of a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. Speaking on Radio Australia, Richard Denniss, director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, opined that Gillard was probably using the Queensland disaster as a smoke screen for getting out of carbon abatement policies that were ineffective, poorly designed, and had been widely criticized (ABC International/Radio Australia, 2011).
In a mountainous tourist region an hour’s drive from Rio de Janeiro, devastating flooding and mudslides precipitated by heavy rains buried several towns, killing over 700 and leaving more than 15,000 homeless. According to the daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, this was the worst natural disaster to hit Brazil in four decades (RTE, 2011). Recalling all too well the political fallout from President José Sarney’s reluctance to conduct an on-site inspection of Rio’s slums in the 1988 floods (see chapter 6), newly elected president Dilma Rousseff – in only her second week in office – donned black rubber boots to walk the streets of Nova Friburgo, one of the worst impacted communities, and pledged “firm action.”
Official response to the disaster played out politically in the context of international pressure to ensure safe and adequate facilities for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games. As the Homeland Security News Wire (2011), an American e-information service, points out, “Should a disaster strike during one of these events, the response by the Brazilian government could have the potential to create an international incident.” A second Brazilian daily newspaper, Estado de S. Paulo, questioned Brazil’s ability to successfully stage these mega-events given its poor track record, “A look at public policy … or the lack thereof … reveals a long chain of unpreparedness, administrative incompetence, technical incapacity, and political irresponsibility” (cited in Hake, 2011). Rousseff, who was attempting to secure finance for a major upgrade to Brazil’s infrastructure in time for the World Cup, readily acknowledged that this was “not only a natural disaster” but a problem caused by irregular land occupation and reckless development, “Housing in risky areas has become the norm in Brazil and no longer the exception” (Fick and Prada, 2011).
In this book, I view disaster events such as those that have recently plagued Australia and Brazil through the lens of international politics. Surprisingly, this analytic perspective has been slow to develop. With some notable exceptions, political theorists and researchers interested in global affairs have not traditionally been involved in doing disaster studies (McEntire, 2005: 2). This is indicative of political science and international affairs in general, where disaster research has tended to be marginalized and largely invisible. Those political scientists who are active in the disaster research field tend to publish in specialized places, and focus primarily on security and terrorism issues. This contrasts with several other social science disciplines, notably anthropology, geography, and sociology, where research on disasters has been published both in leading journals and annuals, as well as in multidisciplinary journals such as Disasters since the 1970s. To be fair, there is an extensive literature dealing with the history and politics of humanitarianism. Natural disasters are often included here, but not always distinguished from other emergencies such as civil war.
Rather than just a matter of benign neglect, there are more complex reasons why the disaster-politics nexus was overlooked until relatively recently. Of particular importance is the tendency to treat disaster and disaster response as essentially non-political in nature, or at least ideally so. Disasters are depicted as occurring in a liminal space beyond the pale of normal politics. There are two versions of this, one applicable primarily to community disasters in America, the other to international disaster management.
Post-disaster Utopia and the Altruistic Community
In the 1950s and 1960s, North American disaster researchers routinely characterized the period immediately following the impact of a flood, tornado, hurricane, or other natural disaster as a time of community consensus and solidarity where partisan conflict and political dealing are temporarily suspended. People are said to roll up their sleeves, pull together, and put prior political and social divisions on the shelf. This is sometimes described as a post-disaster utopia, wherein formal rules and regulations are set aside, the usual distinctions between rich and poor are disregarded, and people feel an unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Especially influential has been sociologist Alan Barton’s (1969) concept of the “altruistic community,” the tendency of citizens to selflessly help others in the immediate aftermath of a tornado, hurricane, or flood. As such, natural disasters are viewed as a “consensus-type crisis” with only limited long-term trauma for its victims (Picou et al., 2004: 1495).
This period is distinguished by the emergence of what Taylor et al. (1970) call “the ephemeral government.” By this they mean a period of radical revision where one finds “an ephemeral governing structure, different in form, action, and capability from that which had gone before” (1970: 129). In their case history of a tornado that struck Topeka, Kansas on June 8, 1966, the researchers found that community leaders, ordinarily unrelated in any formal sense, came together quickly to plan, coordinate, and expedite effective action, only to disband when the period of crisis ended.
According to this explanation, as the disaster impact recedes, the divergence of interests typical of everyday community life slowly reappears, especially with reference to the politics of reconstruction and the allocation of emergency relief (Quarantelli and Dynes, 1976; Hannigan, 1976). In contrast to sharing of common tasks during the utopian period, the long-term tasks of recovery require “a specialized bureaucracy with specialized roles and rationalized procedures – insurance adjusters, claim investigators, street crews and so forth” (Taylor et al., 1970: 160). This usually creates disillusion, strain, and conflict.
In her best-selling book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit (2009) revives and modifies this notion of the post-disaster utopia. Solnit, a San Francisco writer and activist, believes that calamity brings out the best in people and provides a common purpose. “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm,” she says, “most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones” (Solnit, 2009: 2).
Solnit introduces a second, related idea in her book. Not only is the immediate post-disaster period characterized by selflessness and consensus, but it also represents a time of extraordinary innovation and grassroots democracy. Solnit mixes Barton’s “altruistic community” and Taylor’s “ephemeral government” with the contemporary idea of “civil society,” yielding a utopian notion of an emergent, temporary, disaster society that operates outside of institutional politics and constitutes “the acting decision-making body – as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered” (2009: 305). If anyone can be found to be behaving badly here, it is the community “elites” and their foot soldiers (politicians, bureaucrats, police, firefighters, soldiers), who “panic” because they sense that their legitimacy and power are being undermined.1 In proposing this contemporary version of an emergent disaster community outside the limits of normal politics, Solnit is clearly reacting to events following Hurricane Katrina.
As I discuss in chapter 6, radical political and social change as a direct consequence of natural disaster is relatively rare, and even then most often occurs where disasters act as a catalyst of processes already under way. Solnit’s claim that a kind of “Arab Spring” spontaneously arises among disaster victims is more boilerplate than reality.
De-politicizing Emergencies
In the arena of international affairs, the historical reluctance of sovereign states to engage directly with disaster relief and governance beyond their borders has created the impression that such activities effectively lie beyond the limits of normal politics and legal jurisdiction. Fidler (2005) contrasts the extensive use of international law in the contexts of war, epidemics, and industrial accidents to its almost total absence in peacetime natural disasters. He describes the latter as episodic and short-lived with minimal impact on the material interests of national states in the theater of international relations. Whereas the international response to wars, epidemics, and accidents is based in “hard law” (multilateral treaties), the center of gravity in disaster response is situated in “soft law,” that is, the non-binding actions and activities of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs).
Citing an alleged comment by the late Maurice Williams, a US presidential coordinator for major disaster relief efforts before heading up the United Nations World Food Council, that “disaster relief is above politics,” Kent (1983: 708) observes that disaster relief is rarely regarded by practicing diplomats as a political weapon that can be utilized to gain advantages over an adversary or serve geopolitical interests. Three decades later, Williams’ comment seems naïve and out-of-date, but it does point to one reason why the political dynamics of disaster was previously downplayed in the study and interpretation of world affairs.
In the 2004 Sorokin Lecture, presented at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), sociologist Craig Calhoun argues that a discourse of emergencies is now central to international affairs. The term “emergency,” Calhoun says, implies that a well-oiled, smoothly functioning normal system of global processes in which business, politics, and the weather all interact properly occasionally goes off the rails. When this happens, quick action is recommended in order to restore equilibrium, ideally through external intervention. International emergencies “both can and should be managed” (2004: 375). This “managerial” perspective is de-politicizing, Calhoun believes, because it skirts democratic decision making. So too is a humanitarian response, insomuch as it “involves precisely trying to alleviate suffering without regard to political identities or actions of those in need” (Calhoun, 2004: 392). Calhoun is not suggesting that this “emergency thinking” is inherently apolitical, but that an emergency informs both managerial and humanitarian perspectives in a way that conjures up the illusion of being situated outside of “normal” politics.
The illusion that natural disasters lie beyond the purview of normal politics has been officially acknowledged by humanitarian agencies, permitted to deliver aid only on the assurance that they remain strictly neutral. This prohibition is enforced both by the United Nations2 and by individual nation states. In its “Code of Conduct for NGOs in Disaster Relief,” the International Red Cross/Red Crescent stipulated, “When we give humanitarian aid, it is not partisan or political and should not be viewed as such.” Note, however, that this position increasingly came under fire after the end of the Cold War, “when the political causes of many emergencies were more widely and openly acknowledged” (Buchanan-Smith, 2003: 6).
Nevertheless, some elements within the humanitarian aid community continue to have a marked aversion to all things political, which they equate with “nonfeasance, malfeasance, incompetence, corruption and/or obstructionism” (Drury et al., 2005: 454). Ironically, the agencies and institutions with whom these humanitarian NGOs must regularly deal rarely hesitate to take a political stance. Kent (1987: 118) cites a vignette in which former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim recalls, “Four years ago (1974) I believed that humanitarian relief was above politics. Now I know that humanitarian relief is politics.” Among others, the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) all link their political objectives to interventions in humanitarian disasters. Middleton and O’Keefe (1998: 157) describe this as being both paradoxical and problematic:
Yet many INGOs, including some who work with one or more of these and similar institutions, seem to regard what they do as somehow apolitical, as having no political agenda of its own, or even, except by accident, of having no political effects. Their philanthropic ancestry, their close connections with “donor” governments, their disbarment from overtly political activity within their parent countries, their existence within that culture of political world-weariness all conspire towards this self-defensive, but ultimately irresponsible reaction.
At the same time, individual practitioners working for humanitarian agencies usually come to accept that politics is central to disasters and that neutrality is largely a mirage. As Nick Leader (1999) points out, “A recent study of British agencies reported that the Red Cross/NGO code, a short and general code, is a statement which has ‘not been internalised by organisations and remains unused as a means of guiding and auditing their work.’ ” As one referee for the manuscript of this book commented, “I think this [the belief that disasters are apolitical] is a very rare view indeed … it’s long been accepted that weak governance underpins almost all disaster.” Nonetheless, disaster managers are usually smart enough to recognize that articulating an apolitical or neutral position facilitates cooperation with host governments, whereas a more politicized approach might jeopardize it. Thus, humanitarianism “is a form of politics in which it is useful to assert that one is non-political” (Volberg, 2005/2006: 63).
It’s fair to say, I think, that those who affirm the apolitical dimension of natural disasters are not so much stating that this is actually the case so much as they are expressing the fervent wish that it might be so. As Drury and Olson (1998: 153) observe, “Indeed, the end argument for most practitioners as well as academics concerned with disasters and disaster response is essentially normative: In this dominant outlook, it is expected that disaster management be apolitical or at least as non-political as possible.”
The Disaster–Politics Nexus
Alas, there is a wide gap between what should be and what is. “Every scholarly study of disasters documents that prevention, preparedness and response are determined by political factors,” insists Alex de Waal (2006: 129), a veteran observer of famines and other slow-onset crises in sub-Saharan Africa. His observation is echoed by numerous other disaster practitioners and scholars of sundry ideological and methodological stripes. Fuentes (2009: 100) describes post-disaster reconstruction as “fundamentally a political event that can have very discernible political outcomes.” Kathleen Tierney (2008: 135), a leading American sociologist of disaster, observes, “Disaster scholarship has long noted that decisions regarding hazard and disaster management are fundamentally political.” Political forces, she explains, drive decision making across the entire hazard/disaster spectrum: framing hazards as social problems requiring governmental intervention, political agenda-setting, crisis planning and response, the issuance of presidential disaster declaration, and the provision of disaster assistance. Lee Clarke (2006: 101), an expert in the study of risk communication, argues that politics and power are intertwined; and power “is exceedingly important in talk about disaster, the production of disaster, responses to disaster, and how people make sense of disasters after they happen.” Rather than temporarily receding during disasters, social conflict and political struggle are part of the fabric of disasters. Based on her participant observation and in-depth interviews with international aid workers, government officials, and local NGO representatives in Aceh, Indonesia several years after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, Lisa Smirl (2008: 236) concludes, “Humanitarian reconstruction after a large-scale natural disaster has become a key site of international politics; a site where global assumptions, relationships, and responsibilities are negotiated, solidified and questioned.” This being so, there is considerably less consensus over the breadth, strength and direction of the link between politics and disasters. Essentially, there are two versions of this relationship.
According to the more moderate version, politics and disaster are frequently intertwined, but one should never assume a cause and effect relationship. Thus, in a Harvard Business School working paper, Cohen and Werker (2008: 2) argue that natural disasters aren’t exclusively driven by politics, but neither are they immune; rather, disasters occur in a political space. In similar fashion, Welsh (1996: 409–10) proposes that the environment “needs to be understood as a site within which a number of social, cultural, economic and political forces intersect, compete and co-operate.”
In this spirit, economists, political scientists and public policy researchers have privileged an approach that treats disasters as a space/site/sphere within which political activity occurs. In an early example, Abney and Hill (1966) studied the effect of Hurricane Betsy on voting in the 1962 city election in New Orleans (they found that the hurricane was not a decisive factor in voting decisions, with “wet” precincts no more likely than “dry” ones to vote against the incumbent mayor). In Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events (1999), one of the better known books on this topic prior to Hurricane Katrina, Rutherford Platt, a geographer and land use lawyer specializing in public policy concerning urban land and water resources, spotlights the increasing involvement of the US government in domestic disasters. By being overly eager to issue a presidential declaration of a “major disaster,” thereby making the stricken area eligible for federal emergency relief funds, the government removes incentives for individuals and local communities to protect themselves.
By contrast, the strong version asserts that natural disasters are direct products of their surrounding social, political, and economic environments. This strong model is most strongly associated with scholars in anthropology, cultural geography, and development studies. Pelling and Dill (2006) state that they see disasters both as political events in and of themselves, and as potential producers of secondary political events. An acceptable political reading of disaster, they claim, “requires the situating of political action within the wider national and global socio-cultural and historical contexts in which they occur.” Researchers who embrace this approach take “an acknowledged political stance which more ‘traditional’ hazards researchers have tried to refuse or downplay” (Fordham, 2003: 59). Typically, they call for the adoption in Southern hemisphere countries of policies such as “land reform, enforcement of building codes and land-use restrictions, greater investment in public health, provision of a clean water supply and improved transportation to isolated and poorer regions of a country” (Wisner et al., 2004: 7).
Defining Disaster
Several authors (Bolin and Stanford, 1998; Oliver-Smith, 1996) have suggested that the disaster literature has become divided into two general camps, the behavioral and structural. The former paradigm conceives of disasters as events caused by physical hazard agents such as hurricanes and tornadoes. The central task of the disaster researcher is to focus on the social consequences of and responses to these impacts. In contrast, the structural paradigm conceptualizes disasters not as single, discrete events but as “part of the larger patterns and practices of societies viewed geographically and historically” (Bolin and Stanford, 1998: 27). This view is consistent with the “strong” version of the relationship between politics and disaster.
Key differences between the behavioral and structural are embedded in conflicting definitions of what constitutes a disaster. This has constituted an important ongoing debate in disaster research and has even generated an entire book (Quarantelli, 1998a) devoted to the question, “What is a Disaster?” One reason why these definitional disagreements are so important is the insistence by the behavioral school that disasters are something apart from normal social and cultural processes. This has led to an “ongoing concern with defining unique features of disasters and how they differ from other types of social phenomena” (Bolin and Stanford, 1998: 27).
While this debate has many, varied strands, a central difference arises over whether or not to include chronic, diffuse, and long-term situations such as famines, epidemics, and droughts (FEDs), which in contemporary parlance are called “complex emergencies.” According to E.L. (“Henry”) Quarantelli, co-founder of the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center and “dean” of American disaster researchers, with the exception of some applied disaster researchers in England who are primarily interested in international relief, most scholars in the disaster area have more or less ignored FEDs. Quarantelli gives several reasons for this. First of all, most established disaster researchers are from the First World where FEDs are less common. Second, leading FED scholars are not part of the same scholarly and social circles as disaster researchers.3 Third, there are valid conceptual reasons for excluding FEDs from the disaster rubric.
Quarantelli favors this third explanation. “My general inclination,” he says, “would be to exclude FEDs from the disaster category and to treat FEDs as social problems, involving chronic stress settings rather than crisis occasions” (1998b: 260). He gives two reasons for this exclusion. First, FEDs lack the suddenness of conventional disasters, such as those triggered by earthquakes and tsunamis. Furthermore, they can only be identified in terms of response, since the agents involved are complex and diffuse. Second, there is minimal overlap between the empirical data and theoretical ideas on famine and droughts and those relating to sudden-onset disasters. The two may have more in common than has heretofore been evident, but until a systematic point-by-point comparison is undertaken, “a good case can be made that the stressful kinds of FEDs discussed should not be conceptualized as disasters, and probably not even as instances of crises” (p. 261).
In an “invited comment” published in the Natural Hazards Observer, Russell Dynes, co-founder of the Disaster Research Center, covers some of the same terrain as his longtime colleague, Quarantelli, but, rather unexpectedly, arrives at a radically different conclusion. Dynes observes that existing theories of disaster are not at all helpful in helping to understand “disastrous events” such as forced migration, famine, and HIV/AIDS. Traditionally, the focus has been “predominantly Western, community-based, urban, and deals with sudden-onset agents from natural causes.” By contrast, these contemporary emergencies are “principally African, involve displaced populations, are predominantly rural, and deal with conflict or slow-onset events.” Dynes insists that it’s vital that we expand our research horizons,
Otherwise, the field of disaster research will be truncated into a catalogue of responses to natural hazards … Indeed, the lack of research attention to disaster events that result in enormous human costs in developing countries perhaps makes our current research an example of trivial pursuits (Dynes, 2004).
Dynes’ comments notwithstanding, the behavioralist viewpoint has been sharply challenged. As Oliver-Smith (1998a: 22) explains it, starting in the 1970s many anthropologists and social geographers started to broaden the focus of disaster research and embed it in deeper time frames. In doing so “they opened up new theoretical and practical (political) questions and began to reconsider disasters as less the result of geophysical extremes (earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, etc.), and more as functions of ongoing social orders, human-environment relations, and historical structural processes.” Thus, a famine should not be treated as the inevitable outcome of a lack of rainfall and/or of crop failures, but instead of the political failure of the state to deliver food to its citizens (Sen, 1981). It can even transpire that a famine is deliberately engineered by power-holders for tactical military purposes. According to David Keen (2008), this is what occurred in Sudan in 1988, where the Khartoum government deliberately funded ethnic militia groups to create famine in parts of the country. This mode of understanding is consistent with those political-economic approaches to society–environment relations, now commonly labeled political ecology (Bolin and Stanford, 1998: 40).
Several pages later, Oliver-Smith explicitly links this discussion to the cause–effect issue or, as he terms it, the “what-why” question. Traditional disaster researchers, he says, label the task of the definition as clarifying what disaster is or what disaster does rather than explaining why a disaster takes place (1998a: 24). This exclusion reflects their belief that disaster is a behavioral phenomenon that occurs at a specific moment in time and always in the context of societal disruption. At the heart of this controversy is a profound difference of opinion over whether a disaster is an event or a process (Bankoff, 2002: 155).
Anthropologists involved in disasters particularly object to the established paradigm because it renders the concept of “vulnerability” as irrelevant in defining disasters. Disasters do not simply happen, they assert, but they occur in the context of a specific set of human–environment relations. Thus, the root cause of famine can be attributed to the structural imbalances between rich and poor countries, as evidenced by the “high correlation between disaster proneness, chronic malnutrition, low income, and famine potential” (Oliver-Smith, 1998b: 74). What sociologists of disaster regard as antecedent or underlying conditions, political ecologists interpret as a defining feature or characteristic of the disaster itself. Citing Hewitt (1983: 27), Oliver-Smith (1998b: 75) urges that the perspective of disaster research and analysis shift from an exclusive focus on “extreme events” to one that gives equal weight to those societal and human–environment relations that “prefigure” disaster.
Since Oliver-Smith wrote this in the late 1990s, application of the concept of vulnerability has broadened. Southern Africa’s “current humanitarian emergency,” Ailsa Holloway (2003: 30) insists, “illustrates almost unequivocally how disaster risk is driven upwards by often silent but intensifying conditions of political, socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability.” Prime contributors to Southern Africa’s vulnerability include rainfall failure, disruptions to food availability, failures of governance, extreme levels of prevailing poverty, and, especially, poorly managed responses to HIV/AIDS. In a 2009 report entitled The Right to Survive: The Humanitarian Challenge for the Twenty-first Century, Oxfam International makes this quite clear, “Vulnerability to threats such as conflict or environmental hazards like floods and earthquakes is a direct result of poverty; the political choices, corruption, and greed that cause it, and the political indifference that allows it to endure” (Oxfam International, 2009: 4).
Consider the case of Nicaragua, a country that has been described as existing “in a permanent state of emergency.” Between 1972 and 1996, Nicaragua suffered 11 disasters that seriously affected its socioeconomic development, nine of which were caused by natural phenomena (Rocha and Christoplos, 1999). The situation here more closely resembles a chronic FED than it does a series of sudden, one-off disasters in North America, Western Europe, or Australia. The high human toll exacted by these earthquakes, hurricanes, tropical storms, tsunamis, and volcanoes – 77 percent of the country’s population were variously killed, hurt and injured, evacuated, displaced, and/or left homeless – is understandable largely in political and institutional terms. Since poor Nicaraguans have no choice but to build their houses and cultivate their crops on poorly irrigated mountain slopes, they tend to be especially vulnerable to severe floods. Rather than undertake measures to reduce this vulnerability, the federal government has wrongly opted for broad economic development initiatives, on the assumption that natural disasters are first and foremost a sign of underdevelopment and, therefore, only affect the poor. Cases such as that of Nicaragua clearly illustrate the folly of trying to conceptually isolate natural disasters from the everyday practices of politics and power relations.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I argue that the global politics of disasters has consistently been downplayed compared to other aspects of disaster management. Rather than just a matter of benign neglect, this reflects a lingering belief that disasters suspend and transcend normal politics. This is evident in the notion of the “post-disaster utopia” in local emergencies; internationally, it takes the form of a humanitarian disaster politics in which it is desirable to assert that one is non-political. However, over the last decade or so, this view has changed. Most disaster scholars and practitioners now readily concede that prevention, preparedness, and response are determined by political factors; in particular, humanitarian reconstruction after a major disaster has become an important venue of international politics.
Two versions of the relationship between politics and disasters can be identified. According to the more moderate version, politics and disasters are frequently intertwined, but one should never assume a cause and effect relationship. Rather, politics is a space or site where political activity occurs. By contrast, the strong version asserts that natural disasters are direct products of their surrounding social, political, and economic environments. This view is predominant among anthropologists, cultural geographers and development studies scholars. These differences in perspective also play out in the ongoing debate in the disaster research community between proponents of the behavioral and structural paradigms over what constitutes a disaster. The latter assert that a disaster constitutes a process rather than a single event, and is primarily traceable to “vulnerabilities” caused by chronic poverty, inequality, corruption, and government inaction. As we will see in later chapters, this emphasis on vulnerability has become a central tenet of most current thinking on international disasters and the politics that suffuse them.
Notes
1 Clarke and Chess (2008) first introduced this notion of “elite panic.” Tierney (2008: 131) claims that there is growing evidence that elite panic was quite evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was evidenced, she says, by “media and public officials’ obsessions with looting and lawlessness, the issuing of shoot-to-kill orders arising primarily out of a concern with property crime, and the rush to act upon rumors that circulated regarding the ‘savage’ behavior of lower-class community residents, immigrants, and people of color.”
2 United Nations Resolutions 43–131 (“Humanitarian assistance to victims of natural disasters and similar emergency situations”) and 46–182 legally spell this out.
3 One exception is the ongoing collaboration between Quarantelli and Ian Davis. Now retired, Davis remains a respected figure in international disaster planning and management. In 2002 he was selected as one of four witnesses to appear in front of the (Parliamentary) Select Committee on International Development to discuss disasters. When Davis came to the United States in the spring of 1973 en route to the devastated city of Managua, Nicaragua, following the 1972 earthquake, he visited Quarantelli and co-director Russell Dynes at the Disaster Research Center seeking advice on what he might expect to observe in Managua (Davis, 2004: 130–1). A commonly shared interest in the popular culture of disaster has recently been consummated with the joint publication of a monograph (Quarantelli and Davis, 2011).
Further Reading
Craig Calhoun (2004) A world of emergencies: fear, intervention, and the limits of cosmopolitan order. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 41, 373–95.
Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susannah Hoffman (eds.) (1998) The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. Routledge, London and New York.
