Religion, the state and disaster relief in the United States and India

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to explore the place of religion in civil society and how that relates to the problem of social order. Design/methodology/approach -An exploratory comparative case study was conducted of flood relief in Mumbai with the relief following the Katrina disaster in the summer of 2005, using a qualitative content analysis of regional media documents. Findings -A more fluid and less clearly defined division between religion and government in the USA was found that created opportunities by which a much larger response by religious institutions occurred. Religiously-based disaster relief in the US case is conducted more through groups and networks, while in the Indian case, religious-based relief takes place more through values and norms. These conditions led to more immediate social order following the floods in Mumbai but less intensive cooperation and coordination that was not tied to religious institutions. After Katrina in the US case, coordination and cooperation were less immediate but of higher intensity and explicitly tied to religious institutions. Research limitations/implications -This research offers new categories for understanding the role of religion in civil society by focusing on disaster relief in a comparative manner, proposing a framework based on qualitative and exploratory research for pursuing more deductive and explanatory quantitative analyses in the future. Originality/value -Finally, instead of assuming religion as either a source of conflict or a source of social order, dependent on the nature of a given religious group, this paper shows the additional complexity and variation in social order that is dependent on the relationship between religion and state and the social context in a given time and place.

Strategies of salvation: Evangelical Christian praxis and sites of degradation in Sri Lanka

“…Religion intersects with disasters, development and (sites of) degradation in manifold ways. Places of religion often act as assembly points for the coordination of communities and relief workers, the dispersement of aid and the development of resilience, whilst a religious worldview can be used to reframe disasters in eschatological terms (Rigg et al, ; De Silva, ; Falk, ; Paulson and Menjívar, ; Clarke, ). As the provision of aid becomes an increasingly privatised practice around the world, religious organisations have become important actors within global webs of disaster response.…”

“…These gaps often map onto the most vulnerable sections of society and can create niches for exploitation. Not only that, but there is also a growing trend for official aid to be 'complemented by diverse and growing unofficial flows' (Tan-Mullins et al, 2007: 341; see also Fountain et al, 2004;Paulson and Menjívar, 2012;Thornton et al, 2012), especially those that originate from overseas (see Kampe, 1997). The neoliberalisation of aid has transformed the processes of reconstruction by bringing into focus existing inequalities in the sociopolitical domain(s), and providing avenues for other, more (in)equitable outcomes (see Le Billon and Waizenegger, 2007;Flanigan, 2010;Falk, 2012).…”

Identification and prioritization of critical success factors in faith-based and non-faith-based organizations’ humanitarian supply chain

“…Moreover, some researchers like Fountain et al 2004, Paulson and Menjivar 2012, Benedetti 2006, McLachlin et al 2009, Aijazi and Panjwani 2015, and Rivera 2018 argue that religion (of beneficiaries or organizations) also play an essential role in the relief supply chain, especially in religiously inspired societies. They further suggest that these factors should be considered among success factors when discussing the humanitarian supply chain.…”

“…Despite the handful of studies indicating to explore this area further, not much attention has been paid to this suggestion in humanitarian literature. According to Paulson and Menjivar 2012, it is important to study religion in the disaster relief context for two reasons. First, situations like disasters exploit social phenomena and uncover hidden sociological outlines.…”

“…In humanitarian literature, these factors are commonly referred to as either CSF (Pettit and Beresford 2009;Barve 2015, 2018) or key success factors (KSF) (Oloruntoba 2010). Through this paper, we aim to develop and explore not only the significance and importance of the selected critical internal and external success factors of the humanitarian supply chain (Martinez et al 2011) but also examine and explore the understudied area of religion in humanitarian settings (Paulson and Menjivar 2012), and we do so by identifying the differences in opinions of faith-based organizations (FBOs) and non-faith based organizations (NFBOs) about the selected CSFs. Moreover, we further examine within FBOs the differences between Islamic and Christian relief organizations.…”