1.
On disaster: disciplines, domains and
definitions
Marie Aronsson-Storrier and Rasmus
Dahlberg
1. A CONTESTED CONCEPT
What is a disaster? This question has frustrated and fascinated countless schol-
ars, artists and professionals through centuries; from the dialogue between
Rousseau and Voltaire after the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake over Samuel Henry
Prince’s observations in the aftermath of the 1917 Halifax Explosion to recent
discussions about existential risk, global pandemics, Artificial Intelligence and
the use of digital social media to coordinate emergent behaviour during times
of crisis.
It is clear that the number and impact of disasters are on the rise, and it is
increasingly acknowledged that scholars, practitioners and policymakers will
need to cooperate across disciplines, sectors and domains in order better to
prevent and mitigate disaster losses. At first glance, the concept of disaster
may seem obvious and easily accessible. Most people have an intuitive
understanding of disaster as something that happens suddenly and unexpect-
edly with grave consequences. But does this mean that a disaster necessarily
must be unforeseen? Could we image a ‘planned disaster’, produced by bad
foresight, social inequality and lack of political will to change things? A brief
look at the world of today is enough to challenge our immediate interpretation
of disaster as the mere implication of forces (‘divine’ or ‘natural’) outside the
realm of human influence. It is clear that there remains significant disagree-
ment among disaster researchers on the meaning of central concepts, which
hinders productive cooperation. Enhancing our understanding of what a dis-
aster is can assist us in breaking down the building blocks of disaster and start
interrogating the concept from different angles. Thus, the question becomes
not only what ‘is’ a disaster, but what ‘makes’ a disaster. Working from the
premise that disaster losses should be prevented and mitigated to the extent
possible, we consider that a multidisciplinary (and, ideally in the future, inter-,
or transdisciplinary) understanding of the concept of ‘disaster’ is essential. It
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2 Defining disaster
is not enough, however, simply to discuss the different approaches in social
versus natural sciences, but it is imperative also to interrogate the significant
differences within social sciences, in order to break down the theoretical silos.
For examples, as noted by Kristoffer Albris in his contribution on anthropol-
ogy, this discipline – unlike other social science disciplines – does not seek to
find or develop universal concepts, but rather embraces emic understandings
of disaster, exploring not only how society affects disasters, but also how
disasters affect societies.
Disaster is also often perceived to have a certain temporality to it: an earth-
quake happens in an instant, like lightning strikes, and we easily envision
a time before the disaster and a time after. But disaster could also be under-
stood as the manifestation of vulnerabilities that have slowly built up through
time until something (such as a hurricane, famine or disease) eventually
disrupts the system and reveals what lies beneath the surface. Sometimes there
is a slow, almost indiscriminate drift from what is perceived as normality into
disaster. Only in retrospect this trajectory becomes visible, such as what we are
currently witnessing in relation to the increasingly manifested consequences of
rapid, human-induced, changes to the Earth’s climate.
To complicate things further, ‘disaster’ is commonly used to attribute
value to statements totally unrelated to any scholarly definitions: ‘The Trump
administration was a disaster’ or even more casual uses such as ‘the party
was a disaster and the guests left early’. Disaster as a concept has exceeded
specific contextual use and permeated our everyday discourse as a way of
expressing anything out of the ordinary. The distinction between intentional
and non-intentional events may enlighten us in our attempt to define disas-
ter – or it could add further to the complexity of the concept by steering the
attention away from the processes which led to them happening, or creating
such damage, in the first place. Still, many would agree that the sinking of the
Titanic in April 1912 was a disaster, but what about the loss of the Lusitania
three years later? Both were widely publicised tragedies, both resulted in the
death of a very significant number of passengers and crew, both were maritime
incidents that could have been avoided if circumstances had been just slightly
different. The difference lies in the trigger: in the 1912 incident, the main
cause was a night-time collision with an iceberg, while the Lusitania was lost
following the intentional launch of a torpedo from a German submarine, which
was conceived as producing not a disaster, but an atrocity that contributed to
drawing the United States into World War One. For the unfortunate passengers
and crew on the Titanic and the Lusitania, however, there was probably little
difference between the two.
All this, of course, assumes that a disaster can be measured. But how do we
measure disaster? Again, many would probably subscribe to some intuitive
understanding of the difference between, say, an accident and a disaster being
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On disaster: disciplines, domains and definitions 3
at least to some extent measurable by the damage caused and/or the number of
individuals affected. Two cars colliding with four people losing their lives is an
accident, while 200 people on an aircraft dying in a crash is a disaster. But what
about 50 car accidents on the same stretch of road in one year resulting in the
same number of fatalities? What about hundreds of accidents in a wider geo-
graphic area? Some institutions take a very practical approach to this question;
the EM-DAT international disaster database defines four criteria that must be
met for an incident to be called a disaster: 10 or more people must reportedly
be killed, 100 must be affected, a state of emergency must be declared, and
there must be a call for international assistance. However, other institutions,
such as the UN DesInventar database, take a more nuanced approach and
define as ‘disaster’ the ‘set of adverse effects caused by social-natural and
natural phenomena on human life, properties and infrastructure (an “Event”)
within a specific geographic unit during a given period of time’.
2. STRUCTURE AND SCOPE
As clear from the above, there is no commonly accepted clear and uniform
definition of disaster (nor does there necessarily need to be). The aim of this
edited volume is to broaden the understanding and improve the usability of this
complex, sometimes misunderstood and often contested concept by unpacking
it from a variety of academic approaches. With contributions from leading
and emerging scholars from a broad variety of disciplines who provide their
definitions of disaster we attempt to tap into their experience and traditions in
order to present the reader with perspectives not necessarily consistent, but
hopefully complementary and thought provoking. As previously mentioned,
a particular divide can be seen in relation to the use of the term ‘natural disas-
ter’, which for decades has been rejected by scholars in ‘disaster studies’, but
yet prevailed in the hard sciences, as well as, until recently, also in law and
policy. At the heart of the debates around the (un)naturalness of disaster lie
some fundamental questions of the forces and building blocks of disaster, and
disaster as processes and/or events.
The topics represented in this book are not by any means suggested to
exhaust the needed coverage, but have been identified as particular spaces
which are fruitful to represent and which bring unique and important per-
spectives to ongoing debates, while speaking to a broader audience, thus well
suited for a first multidisciplinary attempt to define disasters. We have chosen
two categories as our main structuring principle: disciplines and domains.
While the first cover more traditional approaches rooted in classic disciplines
the latter looks at disaster from cross-cutting angles using either geography or
social concepts as frames. The disciplines include anthropology, law, social
work, public health, engineering and volcanology. The domains further include
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4 Defining disaster
popular culture, space, communities, famines, the Arctic and systemic risk.
This dichotomy, in itself ironically siloed, should only be interpreted as a very
broad way of structuring the book – it could be argued that all disciplines are
domains or vice versa. For example, in his chapter on droughts and famines,
Olivier Rubin describes his topic as ‘famine studies’ (a discipline), while we
have positioned the chapter as a domain that allows for certain approaches to
and definitions of disaster.
3. INTRODUCING THE CHAPTERS
Tricia Wachtendorf, director of the Disaster Research Centre at the University
of Delaware, writes in her prelude to the book that ‘It is common in
twenty-first-century disaster scholarship to emphasise the social nature of
disasters’. She shows how much of the earliest social science research on the
topic was grounded in the field of sociology. Later, the discipline expanded
our knowledge of collective behaviour, improvisation, convergence and emer-
gence. The body of scholarship that grew from that work solidified how dis-
asters are not solely tied to external natural or technological forces impeding
on a social system, but that how they manifest are very much rooted in social
systems, how those systems are structured, and the cultural norms and values
present at a particular time and in a particular place. Decades of research on
social construction of risk, role improvisation, or how inequality generates
differential disaster experience, disaster sociology continues to inform our
understanding of disasters as both events and processes. The author writes
from an American perspective, but with global outreach and relevance, thus
laying out the foundation for most of the other contributions to this volume.
3.1 Disciplines
In the first chapter in the disciplines section, Kristoffer Albris offers an
insightful analysis of disasters from an anthropology perspective. He clarifies
how the significant position of analytical relativism in anthropology reduces
the importance (and, indeed, appetite) for a universal definition of disaster,
and rather turns the attention to ‘how human groups respond and adapt to
disasters, and how they themselves define them’. He also provides interesting
insights into how concepts within disaster anthropology have their origins in
other disciplines such as geography and sociology, while at the same time the
unique characteristics of anthropology perspective is increasingly embraced by
scholars in other disciplines, as can be seen in Loïc Le Dé and J.C. Gaillard’s,
as well as Carin Björngren’s contributions to this volume.
In her chapter ‘Keep the Curtains Drawn! Event, Process, and Disaster
in International Law’, Marie Aronsson-Storrier argues that the definition of
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On disaster: disciplines, domains and definitions 5
disaster as emerging in international law, particularly through the International
Law Commission’s 2016 Draft Articles on the Protection of persons in the
event of disaster, risks limiting enquiries into the relationship between inter-
national law and disasters. While a focus on disasters as events rather than
processes is not a surprising feature of a legal instrument, it is important,
she argues, that scholars working on law and disaster engage with the highly
complex, but yet immensely important questions about the role of law within
the very building blocks of disaster and engage more comprehensively with
critical disaster studies and the relationship between international law and the
creation of disaster risk.
Coming from the perspective of social work, Carin Björngren Candra
introduces us to a social notion of disaster which is rooted as much in soci-
etal conditions as in a socially framed understanding of disasters, risks and
vulnerabilities. The dual attention to both individuals and the structural level
offers a fascinating insight into disasters, which also speaks to the approaches
taken in anthropology. Björngren Candra demonstrates how disasters from
this perspective can be considered as continuum, which range from individual
experiences to larger societal disturbances.
Kevin Blanchard explores disaster from a public health perspective centred
around the effects on health services and the health of affected persons and
communities. He explains how human health is often directly affected by
a hazardous event, but also stresses how public health issues can emerge in
the aftermath of a disaster. Arguing that public health is a ‘core function’ of
disaster risk management, Blanchard explores how public health emergen-
cies interact with hazards, and the role of public health in the preparedness,
response, recovery and prevention of disasters. The chapter also connects to
the theme of other chapters in challenging the clear distinctions between disas-
ter and the everyday, as public health aims to promote and support the health
of the population on a local, national, regional or global level, regardless of the
kind of situation faced.
In her contribution, Sólveig Thorvaldsdóttir provides a short and precise
answer to the question: how do earthquake engineers define disaster? ‘They
don’t’, she states, explaining how civil engineering addresses multiple aspects
of earthquakes and subsequent damage including risk assessment and planning
scenarios depicting physical damage to buildings. Engineering work does not
require a specific definition of the term disaster, but does require definitions
of numerous associated terms, such as hazard, exposure and vulnerabil-
ity. The chapter also explains ‘functional recovery’, a recently introduced
earthquake-engineering community-resilience term denoting the restoration of
building services as needed to support a significant measure of the building’s
intended pre-earthquake use, therefore incorporating recovery processes into
design criteria.
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Looking at disasters from the perspective of volcanology, Jazmin P.
Scarlett, Ailsa Naismith and Ashleigh Rushton introduce us to the value of
feminist methodologies and theory in volcano scholarship as a way of captur-
ing the knowledge and perspectives of persons whose voices have traditionally
not been heard. They argue that volcanology traditionally has suffered from
a strong focus on hazards and quantitative approaches, which has failed to
account for social factors and to listen to – and learn from – marginalised
persons. Drawing on the examples of Volcán de Fuego (Guatemala) and La
Soufrière (St Vincent), the authors illustrate how volcanic disaster can better
be understood through a feminist intersectional approach, which pays close
attention to the stories and voices of those affected by volcanic eruptions and
hazards.
3.2 Domains
In their chapter on communities, Loïc Le Dé and J.C. Gaillard ask the impor-
tant questions: ‘what disasters are studied, how, by whom, and for whom?’.
They argue that the three main paradigms used on disaster studies to apprehend
the concept of disaster – the ‘war’ analogy of the external hazard paradigm;
the vulnerability paradigm; and the resilience paradigm – all tend to reflect
‘Western’ outsiders’ constructs. From this follows a disconnect between the
common conceptualisations of disaster, as outsiders’ perspectives often fail to
address the concerns and priorities of local people and communities. Le Dé and
Gaillard, therefore, call for a greater role for local researchers and the use of
participatory approaches in the study of disasters in order to better inform risk
reduction policies and practices.
Famines are as elusive as they are fatal. While famines are often over-
looked in the disaster literature, they are among the deadliest contemporary
events: a quarter million people perished in the 2011 Somalia famine, argues
Olivier Rubin in his discussion of definitions and potential delineations of
this elusive type of disaster. Rather than being primarily triggered by natural
hazards, famines are more closely related to complex emergencies and mass
atrocities such as pogroms and ethnic cleansing. His chapter outlines the
main theoretical streams of famine analysis by drawing on a broad range of
contemporary famine cases such as the 2017 South Sudanese famine, the 2011
Somalia famine and the North Korea famine in the 1990s. Rubin argues that
the already interdisciplinary domain of famine analysis could be strengthened
from a closer integration with disaster studies, both in terms of expanding
the epistemological community as well as benefiting from the disaster field’s
greater analytical and theoretical dynamism.
Nathan Clark approaches the definition of disaster through the lens of
international space governance. His chapter explores the tension between
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On disaster: disciplines, domains and definitions 7
sovereignty and solidarity in space through different legal instruments and col-
laborative efforts relating to space governance and disaster risk management.
Considering the often non-binding nature of obligations and the impact on
the self-interests of states, he finds that while in relation to terrestrial hazards,
states have thus far predominantly been willing to share information and data
in the aftermath of disaster, states are seemingly more willing to collaborate to
reduce risks of extra-terrestrial hazards.
Using five illustrative case studies from the Arctic region, Natalia
Andreassen and Rebecca Pincus argue that the definition and understanding of
‘disaster’ must necessarily be broader in the Arctic context than in most other
parts of the globe. The authors use the concepts of magnification and ampli-
fication to clarify how Arctic conditions, and the close link between humans
and the natural environment, contribute to magnifying disasters, as well as
amplifying the impact that they have on communities. They also clarify how
Arctic conditions and ways of life mean that processes such as climate change
and toxic pollution, which in other contexts are considered slow-moving
hazards or hazard amplifiers, are better understood as ongoing disasters in the
Arctic context. This, again, calls for reflection as to the importance of taking
local contexts and perspectives into account when addressing the concept of
disaster.
Disaster movies are seen to describe society’s collective fears, contextu-
alized by recent tragic real events or transposed onto historical or fictitious
backgrounds, Uta Reichardt and Rasmus Dahlberg argue in their chapter.
As a genre, disaster movies can hint at how disasters are perceived by movie
makers and audiences. Their chapter discusses the concept of ‘disaster movies’
from a genre approach to delineate how various scholars have described and
categorised disasters and disaster movies. A brief historical outline of the genre
follows, tracing the depiction of catastrophic events on the big screen. From
the early days of film making to the present, the authors follow the change of
the industry’s interpretation of disaster over time. Finally, three recent disaster
movies from different countries are analysed with special emphasis on discuss-
ing how the selected works of fiction define and portray disaster as a concept
and interact with the real life of disasters.
Livhuwani Nemakonde embraces the complex nature of disasters and uses
systems theory in order to deepen our understanding of ‘the complex inter-
actions between the natural environment and human systems’. In an analysis
that combines perspectives and insights from different research traditions,
Nemakonde stresses the social dimension of disasters, but simultaneously
criticises the vulnerability paradigm for often ignoring to a large extent the
hazards element of disasters. Rather, he argues, a systems approach to disasters
highlights how disasters result from complex interactions between the Earth’s
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8 Defining disaster
physical systems, human systems and the human-constructed systems, and that
disasters, therefore, ‘can be considered a system of systems’.
Instead of offering yet another definition of disaster, Ilan Kelman’s con-
cluding epilogue focuses on what disasters are not. Although some extreme
exceptions exist, as a general rule, disasters are not ‘natural’ as they involve
human choices, nor are they ‘events’; they are long-term processes. Disasters
also lack an ‘un’-ness in that they are ‘not uncertain, unpredictable, unprevent-
able, unusual, or unstoppable’. Despite the complexities of disasters explored
in previous chapters, Kelman argues that causes of disasters are generally well
known and could thus be addressed should there be a will to do so by those
with the necessary power and resources. In this way, his argument echoes that
in many – if not all – of the chapters above: despite their common framing as
exceptional, disasters are about everyday life and choices.
4. OUR AIM WITH THE BOOK
Importantly, despite the divisions into separate ‘disciplines’ and ‘domains’,
the scope of this book goes beyond the very definition of disaster in any given
field, but rather invites the authors – and now the readers – to reflect on the
very understanding of disaster and how it has been shaped by and within their
field of research and practice. What are the building blocks of disaster? How
does the understanding of disaster affect the way in which we approach disas-
ter prevention and management? What role does the discipline or domain itself
have within the wider field of ‘disaster studies’ as broadly understood?
We hope that this book becomes a point of reference for researchers across
disciplines who will not only be able to find a representation of their own dis-
cipline or domain, but also better understand how that discipline maps on to the
wider works. When working in a multifaceted and multidisciplinary context
we all need to be curious about our colleagues’ approaches and open-minded
about our own.
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