Living With Floods In A Mobile Southeast Asia

This book contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between migration, vulnerability, resilience and social justice associated with flooding across diverse environmental, social and policy contexts in Southeast Asia. It challenges simple analyses of flooding as a singular driver of migration, and instead considers the ways in which floods figure in migration-based livelihoods and amongst already mobile populations. The book develops a conceptual framework based on a ‘mobile political ecology’ in which particular attention is paid to the multidimensionality, temporalities and geographies of vulnerability. Rather than simply emphasising the capacities (or lack thereof) of individuals and households, the focus is on identifying factors that instigate, manage and perpetuate vulnerable populations and places: these include the sociopolitical dynamics of floods, flood hazards and risky environments, migration and migrant-based livelihoods and the policy environments through which all of these take shape. The book is organised around a series of eight empirical urban and rural case studies from countries in Southeast Asia, where lives are marked by mobility and by floods associated with the region’s monsoonal climate. The concluding chapter synthesises the insights of the case studies, and suggests future policy directions. Together, the chapters highlight critical policy questions around the governance of migration, institutionalised disaster response strategies and broader development agendas.

This book examines how states in eight countries across Asia and the Pacific address internal displacement in the context of disasters and climate change. The Asia and the Pacific region accounts for the majority of global disaster-related displacement, but the experience of the millions of individuals displaced differs according to gender, age, ethnicity, (dis)ability, caste, and so forth and is dependent on the legal, administrative, social, and economic structures and processes in place to support them. This book adopts a human rights-based approach, investigating the role of law and policy in preventing displacement, protecting people who are displaced, and engendering durable solutions across cases drawn from Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands. The specific cases in the book also reflect critically on the term ‘displacement’ and the wider normative framework within which this phenomenon is conceptualised and addressed. The book will be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners working at the intersection of human rights, human mobility, development, disaster risk reduction and management, and climate change adaptation.

This Element explains how cross-border mobility defines diplomatic relationships between Southeast Asian states and social and political dynamics within the region's key destination countries. It begins by providing an historically situated discussion of bordering processes within the region, examining evolving historical conceptions of power and sovereignty, and processes of bordering in colonial and post-colonial times. It then turns to the political, environmental, and economic drivers of contemporary cross-border mobility before examining governments' efforts to manage different kinds of border-crossers and the tensions that these efforts give rise to. Having discussed the politics of cross-border mobility in host communities, the Element returns to the question of why consideration of bordering practices and cross-border mobility is necessary in understanding contemporary Southeast Asia.

This book explores how population mobility varies among the countries of Asia. While much attention has been given to international migration, movement within countries is numerically much more significant. Coupling innovative methods developed in the global IMAGE project with the contextual knowledge of experts on 15 Asian countries, the book measures and explains how people across Asia differ in the probability of changing residence, the ages at which they move, and the impact of these migrations on the distribution of human settlement within each country. It demonstrates how stage of economic development, coupled with historical events, local contingencies, cultural norms, political frameworks, and the physical environment shape human migration. By using rigorous statistics in a robust comparative framework, this book provides a clear understanding of contemporary migration in Asia for students and academics, and a valuable resource for policy-makers and planners in Asia and beyond.

This open access book focuses on the Salween River, shared by China, Myanmar, and Thailand, that is increasingly at the heart of pressing regional development debates. The basin supports the livelihoods of over 10 million people, and within it there is great socio-economic, cultural and political diversity. The basin is witnessing intensifying dynamics of resource extraction, alongside large dam construction, conservation and development intervention, that is unfolding within a complex terrain of local, national and transnational governance. With a focus on the contested politics of water and associated resources in the Salween basin, this book offers a collection of empirical case studies that highlights local knowledge and perspectives. Given the paucity of grounded social science studies in this contested basin, this book provides conceptual insights at the intersection of resource governance, development, and politics of knowledge relevant to researchers, policy-makers and practitioners at a time when rapid change is underway. - Fills a significant knowledge gap on a major river in Southeast Asia, with empirical and conceptual contributions - Inter-disciplinary perspective and by a range of writers, including academics, policy-makers and civil society researchers, the majority from within Southeast Asia - New policy insights on a river at the cross-roads of a major political and development transition

In a world shaped by the forces of nature, humankind has always sought to understand and mitigate the impacts of natural hazards. Natural Hazards - New Insights delves into the intricate realm of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteoritical hazards, mining-related disasters, and other major catastrophes that afflict our planet. This book takes readers on a journey to gain a deeper understanding of these phenomena, unearthing fresh insights into their causes, impacts, and strategies to mitigate their effects. Organized into six comprehensive sections, this book begins with a global perspective on natural hazards, laying the foundation for understanding the diverse range of challenges they pose. It then explores seismic hazards, analyzing earthquake patterns, urban damage assessment, fault reactivation, and more. Shifting the focus to flooding as a natural hazard, the book examines hydrological extremes, flood mapping, and risk reduction strategies. It further explores climatological hazards, including the intricate relationship between climate change and natural disasters, remote sensing technologies, and the impacts of climate change on agriculture. Landslides are also scrutinized as significant natural hazards, with chapters on polarization analysis, landslide assessment, hazard zonation, and the impact of underground coal mining methods on slope stability. Lastly, the book addresses the social challenges that arise when disasters strike, examining psychological reactions, spontaneous volunteers, urban planning responses, and social vulnerability to earthquake hazards. Through peer-reviewed chapters, this book offers valuable insights and expertise from renowned authors in the field. Their contributions have shaped this comprehensive exploration, which aims to navigate the challenges, minimize risks, and build a safer and more sustainable environment for future generations.

This book assembles cutting edge contemporary research and thinking on multiple forms and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their normal context; and replacements of one thing by another. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization in 2020, produced new displacements and intensified existing patterns of displacement and dispossession. At the same time, socionatural displacements - floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, species loss, and dislocation - were the backdrop to the displaced and deferred hopes of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The chapters in this volume contend with how we as geographers conceptualize and theorize displacements; the range of sites, spaces, processes, affects, scales, and actors we study with to understand them; and what is at stake politically in how we research displacements. It is also a pandemic archive of academic labor, in which we find traces of displacements within and beyond the academic discipline of geography. Geographies of Displacement/s will be of particular interest to students, scholars and researchers of Geography including those interested in human geography, socio-natural displacements, and the politics of migration and displacement. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Revealing the role of discrimination in disasters challenges received wisdom about who is a refugee.