Disasters and catastrophes

Abstract

Introduction and genealogySince its emergence in the 1950s, disaster research has been concerned mainly with the development of operational tools for crises management and intervention, resulting in a prevalence of inductive approaches and a limited interest in more general theoretical issues (Calhoun 2004;Quarantelli 2005; Tierney 2007, p. 504). As a research field, disaster studies are still dominated by approaches (mostly North American) that scarcely dialogue with developments in social theory and critical theory. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the theoretical-empirical research on disasters produced in non-English-speaking countries in either the global south or Europe 1 . Gaillard (2019) denounced the persistence of a form of hegemony from the global north perspective in terms of both concepts and practices, despite the progressive centrality of the 'vulnerability' approach, which has sustained a critical turn in disaster research since it first appeared in the 1970s. In spite of this mixed picture, critical disasters research is today a field of increasing relevance for understanding the socioeconomic dynamics of the globalized world.The notion of 'disaster' first emerged as a specific social sciences category in the United States in the historical conjuncture of the Cold War 2 . Research on disasters was strongly influenced in the early days by governmental and military needs connected in particular with nuclear issues. More specifically, disasters were conceived by public authorities as laboratories for studying social and organizational behaviour in stressful situations. In this sense, disasters were seen as 'a duplication of war' and human communities as 'organized bodies that have to react organically against aggression' (Gilbert 1998, p. 4). In this view, the causes of disasters are situated either on the outside in the form of an external aggression or (less often) on the inside as an internal threat, as in the case of social unrest. As pointed out by Perry (2018), authors during this 'classic period' of disaster research would define disasters as 'rapid onset events' in which the impact or threat of an agent causes social disruption that requires readjustments. Early disaster studies thus focused on organizational and emergent social behaviour during and immediately following such disruptive events.Claude Gilbert (1998) distinguished this 'disasters as war' paradigm from two successive frameworks in which the definition of disasters was gradually reframed as 'social