Why Vulnerability Still Matters

by Greg Bankoff (Editor), Dorothea Hilhorst (Editor)

We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change. The chapters highlight different aspects of vulnerability and disaster risk creation, placing the stress rightly on what causes disasters and explaining the politics of how they are created through a combination of human interference with natural processes, the social production of vulnerability, and the neglect of response capacities. Importantly, too, the book provides a platform for many of those most prominently involved in launching disaster studies as a social discipline to reflect on developments over the past 50 years and to comment on current trends. The interdisciplinary and historical perspective that this book provides will appeal to scholars and practitioners at both the national and international level seeking to study, develop, and support effective social protection strategies to prevent or mitigate the effects of hazards on vulnerable populations. It will also prove an invaluable reference work for students and all those interested in the future safety of the world we live in.

254 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2022

About the author

I am a non-western historian with interests in the role of disasters in human societies, resources and risk management, the environmental consequences of modern conflict, human-animal relations, and the development of colonial science. Though my particular geographical focus is on Southeast Asia and on the maritime nature of Spain’s empire in the Pacific, I have increasingly become more of a global historian in recent years.
Thinking like an environmental historian means considering not simply what happened between peoples in the past but also about how different peoples related to the inanimate and animate world around them: the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, floods and droughts that regularly affected communities; the buildings, forts, ships, roads, fields and forests, what they were made of and how they were used; and the livestock, game and pets that men and women worked alongside, hunted and shared their homes with. In my work, I always try to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach that combines the social with the natural sciences, theoretical insights with historical perspectives. I find that it is working at the intersections of these enquiries that produce the most exciting research.

In particular, disasters are set to become a major new field of historical studies, receiving increasing popular and governmental attention that corresponds to their escalating magnitude and frequency. One only has to think of the impact and concern that events like the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina engendered to appreciate this point fully. Yet little work of an historical nature has so far been done in this area both in assessing the true extent of past events and their consequences but equally, and perhaps more importantly, in determining what role they have played in the development of human societies over time