Disasters without Borders: The Coronavirus Pandemic, Global Climate Change and the Ascendancy of Gradual Onset Disasters

Abstract

Throughout much of its history, the sociological study of human communities in the disaster has been based on events that occur rapidly, are limited in geographic scope, and their management understood as phased stages of response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness. More recent literature has questioned these concepts, arguing that gradual-onset phenomena like droughts, famines and epidemics merit consideration as disasters and that their exclusion has negative consequences for the communities impacted, public policy in terms of urgency and visibility and for the discipline itself as the analytical tools of sociological research are not brought to bear on these events. We agree that gradual-onset disasters merit greater attention from social scientists and in this paper have addressed the two most significant ongoing disasters that are gradual in onset, global in scope and have caused profound impacts on lives, livelihoods, communities and the governments that must cope with their effects. These disasters are the coronavirus pandemic and global climate change both, of which include dimensions that challenge the prevailing definition of disaster. We begin with an examination of the foundational work in the sociological study of a disaster that established a conceptual framework based solely on rapidly occurring disasters. Our focus is on several components of the existing framework for defining and studying disasters, which we term “borders.” These borders are temporal, spatial, phasing and positioning, which, in our view, must be reexamined, and to some degree expanded or redefined to accommodate the full range of disasters to which our globalized world is vulnerable. To do so will expand or redefine these borders to incorporate and promote an understanding of significant risks associated with disaster agents that are gradual and potentially catastrophic, global in scope and require international cooperation to manage.

Multinational enterprises and natural disasters: Challenges and opportunities for IB research

“…Third, the other important characteristic of natural disasters that distinguish them from other types of uncertainties is their geographic scope, which is more relevant to IB scholars but often ignored. Unlike hazards and uncertainties that directly affect locations confined by artificial borders and managed by governments, the natural forces behind natural disasters are oblivious to such human made limits (Yamori & Goltz, 2021 ). As such, they can directly span different administrative and judicial controls affecting streets, towns, regions, countries, and the entire planet.…”

Challenges Associated with Creeping Disasters in Disaster Risk Science and Practice: Considering Disaster Onset Dynamics

“…While slow-onset phenomena have not been ignored per se, these literatures have remained poorly integrated into mainstream disaster theories. A few recent contributions have attempted to remedy this state of affairs but have tended to focus on concept formation (Hsu 2019;Staupe-Delgado 2019a;Boin et al 2020;Yamori and Goltz 2021), methodological aspects (Merila ¨inen and Koro 2021), or diplomacy (Kelman et al 2018). Distinctions between rapid-onset and slow-onset disasters have been discouraged in the field on the grounds that all disasters are conceptually understood as inherently slow processes to begin with due to the fact that they all originate from prefigured patterns of vulnerability (Lewis 1988;Wisner et al 2004;Merila ¨inen and Koro 2021).…”

Living through and with the global HIV/AIDS pandemic: Distinct ‘pandemic practices’ and temporalities

“…Many scholars in the field of social and health sciences have increasingly argued for the importance of understanding how slow-onset phenomena result in new and continuously changing socio-cultural practices as societies and people react to factors like new data, political scandals, secondary effects, and wider meta-narratives ( Boin et al, 2021 ; Yamori and Goltz, 2021 ; Staupe-Delgado, 2019 ; Viens and Littmann, 2015 ). Overall, COVID-19, as a totalising phenomenon, has resulted in a number of interesting analytical innovations revolving around socio-cultural practices as well as the lived experience of pandemics.…”