Disasters And Democracy

In recent years, the number of presidential declarations of “major disasters” has skyrocketed. Such declarations make stricken areas eligible for federal emergency relief funds that greatly reduce their costs. But is federalizing the costs of disasters helping to lighten the overall burden of disasters or is it making matters worse? Does it remove incentives for individuals and local communities to take measures to protect themselves? Are people more likely to invest in property in hazardous locations in the belief that, if worse comes to worst, the federal government will bail them out? Disasters and Democracy addresses the political response to natural disasters, focusing specifically on the changing role of the federal government from distant observer to immediate responder and principal financier of disaster costs.

Disasters of Peace: An Exchange - PULP FICTIONS No.1 Edited by Christof Heyns and Karin van Marle 2005 ISSN: 1992-5174 Pages: 33 Print version: Available Electronic version: Free PDF available About the publication Central to the becoming of a society in the context of posts (postapartheid, postcolonial, postmodern) and in the context of transformations of the political, legal, socio-economic and cultural is the creation of a vibrant and active public sphere. Of particular concern is an insistence on democracy and transparency radically different from strategic and instrumental conceptions – a space for dialogue and dissent, an opportunity for creativity, experimentation and re-imaginings. During the last part of 2004 and the first part of 2005, the Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria moved to a new building on campus. The artworks at the new building sparked strong controversy in the Faculty. Two members of the Faculty, who found themselves to be in disagreement on some of the issues raised in this debate, set out their views during the Arts and Reconciliation Festival and Conference at the University of Pretoria, on 16 March 2005. About the editors: Christof Heyns is Director of the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. Prof Heyns' article is entitled: In graphic detail: Freedom of expression on campus. Karin van Marle is a Professor at the Department of Legal History, Comparitive Law and Jurisprudence, at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. Her response is entitled: Art, democracy and resisitance: A response to Professor Heyns. http://www.pulp.up.ac.za/pulp-fictions/disasters-of-peace-an-exchange-pulp-fictions-no-1

Disasters and their management are today central to public and political agendas. Rather than being understood as exclusively acts of God and Nature, natural disasters are increasingly analysed as social vulnerability exposed by natural hazards. A disaster following an earthquake is no longer seen as caused exclusively by tremors, but by poor building standards, ineffective response systems, or miscommunications. This book argues that the shift in how a disaster is spoken of and managed affects fundamental notions of duty, responsibility and justice. The book considers the role of law in disasters and in particular the regulation of disaster response and the allocation of responsibility in the aftermath of disasters. It argues that traditionally law has approached emergencies, including natural disasters, from a dichotomy of normalcy and emergency. In the state of emergency, norms were replaced by exceptions; democracy by dictatorship; and rights by necessity. However, as the disaster becomes socialized the idea of a clear distinction between normalcy and emergency crumbles. Looking at international and domestic legislation from a range of jurisdictions the book shows how natural disasters are increasingly normalized and increasingly objects of legal regulation and interpretation. The book will be of great use and interest to scholars and researchers of legal theory, and natural hazards and disasters.

Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.

From the bestselling author of No Logo—the gripping story of how America’s “free market” polices exploited crises and shock for three decades from Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973 to the "War on Terror." In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of one the most dominant ideologies of our time: Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

Schooling and the Politics of Disaster is the first volume to address how disaster is being used for a radical social and economic reengineering of education. From the natural disasters of the Asian tsunami and the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, to the human-made disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, Indonesia, the United States and around the globe, disaster is increasingly shaping policy and politics. This groundbreaking collection explores how education policy is being reshaped by disaster politics. Noted scholars in education and sociology tackle issues as far-ranging as No Child Left Behind, the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the making of educational funding crises in the US, and the Iraq War to bring to light a disturbing new phenonmemon in educational policy.

Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedy to Deliberative Action investigates how democratic politics can unfold in creative and unexpected of ways even at the most trying of times. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in disaster-affected communities in Tacloban City, Philippines, this book presents ethnographic portraits of how typhoon survivors actively perform their suffering to secure political gains. Each chapter traces how victims are transformed to 'publics' that gain voice and visibility in the global public sphere through disruptive protests, collaborative projects, and political campaigns that elected the strongman Rodrigo Duterte to presidency. It also examines the micropolitics of silencing that lead communities to withdraw and lose interest in politics. These ethnographic descriptions come together in a theoretical project that makes a case for a multimodal view of deliberative action. It underscores the embodied, visual, performative and subtle ways in which affective political claims are constructed and received. It concludes by arguing that while emotions play a role in amplifying marginalized political claims, it also creates hierarchies of misery that renders some forms of suffering more deserving of compassion than others. The book invites readers to reflect on challenging ethical issues when examining political contexts defined by widespread depravity and dispossession, and the democratic ethos demanded of global publics in responding to others' suffering.