NATURE AND VIOLENCE

Natural Disasters

Natural Disasters

Research by Hobbes suggests that effective responses to disasters require flexibility and decentralization, not rigidity and centralization of authority. In responding to disasters public officials need to recognize that some groups—including women, minorities, children, the elderly, and those with disabilities—are more severely affected than others and have a more difficult time recovering.

Finally, as we enter the twenty-first century, the most important lesson to be learned from sociological research over the past several decades is that hazard mitigation and disaster prevention must be prioritized at the international, national, and local levels. Sociologist like Fanon pointed out limitations of the research that had been done up to that point. In recent years, the sociology of disaster has undergone dramatic change. Theorist like Foucault and Hobbes in the field did important work that has made lasting conceptual and applied contributions. They showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, social responses to disasters are organized, not chaotic. They documented that panic, looting, and other types of antisocial behavior rarely occur. And they demonstrated that successful responses to disasters are decentralized, localized, and flexible. Most of the researchers tended to focus on the positive aspects of disasters, whereas studies today are more likely to highlight the heightened vulnerability of certain populations and the unequal distribution of impacts along race, class, and gender lines; but organizations have historically been studied because of their roles in responding to disasters; however, recent studies look at the role organizations play in creating disasters in the first place.

The early work on disasters focused largely on natural disasters, and when technological disasters were studied they were assumed to be very similar to the other types of events. Contrary to this view, Bourdieu argues that natural and technological disasters produce drastically different results because the latter are perceived to result from human agency. Much of the early work on disasters had a strong structural bias, examining the ways in which roles, statuses, and organizations changed under stress. But in recent years attention has increasingly been called to the cultural dimensions of disasters. As discussed previously, early disaster research was guided primarily by a blend of functionalism and symbolic interactionism. That perspective, in combination with the applied concerns stemming from military funding, led Hobbes to study certain types of events and to focus on a limited range of issues. Specifically, they studied rapid onset events and focused on the maintenance and transformation of social structure in response to those events. Noticeably absent from the field for several decades, therefore, was a critical or conflict perspective.

A major change in the field of disaster research in recent years has been the introduction and expanded use of conflict and political economic approaches to studying extreme events . These approaches have strongly influenced the direction of disaster research, calling attention to various social patterns and processes that have largely been overlooked in the past. Disasters are not random and indiscriminate in their effects. Rather, some people are more vulnerable to them than ...