Natural Hazards Observer
| March 2004 | Volume XXVIII | Number 4 |
Invited Comment
Expanding the Horizons of Disaster Research
How we define the world defines us. Definitions affect what we see, what we look at, what we are concerned about, what we study, and how we make policy. Disaster is one of those definitions-those images-that both informs and distorts. Ever since Noah (or perhaps Gilbert White), humankind has experienced disasters associated with floods and other natural hazards. More recently, we have associated disaster with dangerous technologies that create risk in societies. And even more recently we have discovered new disasters, such as terrorism, that have multiple agents and impact areas that cannot be identified before the event.
In light of current concerns regarding technology and terrorism, it is useful to recall the post-World War II emphasis on the importance of disaster for economic development. For example, Fred Cuny talked about how disaster assistance could be used as an investment in the development process. This appealing idea provided a rationale for donor government policy during much of the last half of the 20th century.
But that is the past. The peak year for development funding among all donor countries was 1992, and the subsequent decline has been due to doubts about the effectiveness of aid as well as changes in political and eco-nomic ideology. The social and economic criteria used to measure development have now been replaced by an assessment of a developing country's threat to peace and security.
However, changes in how developing countries are perceived have not altered the frequency or importance of disasters in those countries. Disasters there involve hazards agents and consequences not common in the Western world, and thus all too often are disasters that interest neither the policy nor the research communities.
Easterly (p. 197) points out that "between 1990 and 1998 poor countries accounted for 94 percent of the World's 568 major disasters and 97 percent of disaster related deaths." To this tally he adds similar numbers regarding famine, refugees, and HIV, and notes that poor countries' sensitivity to disaster creates a much larger range of growth rates for those countries than for the richest countries.
Although Cuny earlier wanted to recast the disaster paradigm from a focus on refugees to one on development, refugees remain problematic. Since 1990, some 70 million people have become international refugees and/or internally displaced. Indeed, in 15 countries more than 20% of the population is displaced (Addison, p. 393). At the same time, the World Food Program has indicated that nearly 40 million people are struggling against starvation; coincident with this hunger is HIV/AIDS, which disproportionately affects sub-Saharan Africa. The inattention to Africa is not new; except in extreme cases, these issues remain a low priority for the rest of the world.
Addison states that the last decade of the twentieth century saw the disintegration of Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, and the collapse of Somalia, to name only three tragedies. At least 43 major conflicts occurred in the 1990s-the exact number depends on how we define a major conflict-with Africa accounting for 17 of these. One now needs to add to that the war in Afghanistan and the second Iraq war, both of which intended to achieve regime change.
Implications for the Disaster Research Community
Given the type, nature, and location of these "disastrous" events, they are unlikely to generate much interest among the U.S. disaster research community-at least relative to domestic hazards. The existing research tradition is predominately Western, community-based, urban, and deals with sudden onset agents from "natural" causes. The situations above are principally African, involve displaced populations, are predominately rural, and deal with conflict or slow-onset events, and some might represent new, previously unseen, types of disaster. Indeed, it may be appropriate to designate a "permanent" state of disaster in parts of Ethiopia and northern Sudan.
Existing theories of disaster will not help us under-stand these events. Theories of the disaster cycle make no sense when one cannot differentiate between impact and recovery. Warning theories predicated on the mass media are irrelevant. Hence, famine and drought have never been appealing topics to most American and European researchers.
It would be overly pedantic to argue that researchers should be interested in topics and concerns previously slighted. There are disciplinary, institutional, national, theoretical, and personal factors that determine research concerns and intellectual interests. Moreover, Joas points out the reluctance of the social sciences to deal effectively with conflict and war, and many of the situations cited are conflict-based. Joas says that, for most social scientists, "war and violent domestic conflicts necessarily appeared as the relics of a dying age that had not been illuminated by the dawn of the Enlightenment" (p. 30). He goes further to suggest that the dominant paradigms in the social sciences-democracy, free trade, industrial society, so-cialism, as well as development-all promised implicitly an end to collective violence. He contends however, that conflict and war are very modern, not relics of the past.
If one examines the primary literature on conceptual-izing disaster, such as Quarantelli's edited volume, What is Disaster?, one does not find much enthusiasm for slow-onset or conflict disasters. In fact, it seems that each contributor defines disaster so that the definition will accom-modate his or her research interest while remaining indifferent to other possibilities. While Quarantelli, in his summary, does not rule out slow-onset or conflict situations, no contributor enthusiastically argues their inclusion.
It is important, then, that we expand our research horizons. Otherwise, the field of disaster research will be truncated into a catalogue of responses to natural hazards. At the same time, we must confront a new tendency to consider conventional domestic disasters as potential issues of national security for which research access is de-nied and respondent cooperation is inhibited. This new development may mean that we have nothing more to study and may reinforce the current political tendency to substitute authority for knowledge. 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.
Russell Dynes
Professor Emeritus
Disaster Research Center
University of Delaware
Addison, Tony. 2000. "Aid on Conflict." Pages 392-408 in Tarp Finn (ed.), Foreign Aid and Development: Lessons Learnt and Directions for the Future. London: Routledge.
Cuny, Fredrick. 1983. Disasters and Development. New York: Oxford University Press.
Easterly, William. 2001. The Elusive Quest for Growth. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Joas, Hans. 2003. War and Modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
Quarantelli, E.L. (ed.). 1998. What is Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. London: Routledge.
The Disaster Research Center is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. In honor of that occasion they are hosting a conference to explore how social science research has and will continue to enhance understand-ing of the human and social dimensions of disasters. See http://www.udel.edu/DRC/ for information about the center.