Disaster, Conflict and Society in Crises

Everyday Politics of Crisis Response

Dorothea Hilhorst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415640817
• eBook ISBN: 9781136179419
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Humanitarian crises - resulting from conflict, natural disaster or political collapse – are usually perceived as a complete break from normality, spurring special emergency policies and interventions. In reality, there are many continuities and discontinuities between crisis and normality. What does this mean for our understanding of politics, aid, and local institutions during crises? This book examines this question from a sociological perspective. This book provides a qualitative inquiry into the social and political dynamics of local institutional response, international policy and aid interventions in crises caused by conflict or natural disaster.

Emphasising the importance of everyday practices, this book qualitatively unravels the social and political working of policies, aid programmes and local institutions. The first part of the book deals with the social life of politics in crisis. Some of the questions raised are: What is the meaning of human security in practice? How do governments and other actors use crises to securitize – and hence depoliticize - their strategies? The second part of the book deals with the question how local institutions fare under and transform in response to crises. Conflicts and disasters are breakpoints of social order, with a considerable degree of chaos and disruption, but they are also marked by processes of continuity and re-ordering, or the creation of new institutions and linkages. This part of the book focuses on institutions varying from inter-ethnic marriage patterns in Sri Lanka to situation of institutional multiplicity in Angola. The final part of the book concerns the social and political realities of different domains of interventions in crisis, including humanitarian aid, peace-building, disaster risk reduction and safety nets to address chronic food crises.

This book gives students and researchers in humanitarian studies, disaster studies, conflict and peace studies as well as humanitarian and military practitioners an invaluable wealth of case studies and unique political science analysis of the humanitarian studies field.

1 Disaster, conflict and society

Everyday politics of crisis response

Dorothea Hilhorst

Natural disasters and conflicts have always occupied people's nightmares and lived experiences. In our times, natural disasters appear to be on the increase. Although there are fewer conflicts than in previous decades, conflicts tend to be prolonged and often recur within years of achieving peace. Some of the plagues of yesteryears have virtually disappeared or have become more manageable, but other crises have become more intense. Modern communications bring crises to everybody's home and they continue to be very much part of everybody's mindsets.

Our times are also marked by the rapid development of international response mechanisms. Humanitarian aid started its modern history in the nineteenth century, yet has been evolving and restructuring considerably in the last twenty years. Peacebuilding initiatives have become more robust since the end of the Cold War, and are increasingly framed in languages of human rights or human security. Disaster response has increasingly become proactive, with attention to disaster risk reduction mechanisms that aim to reduce people's vulnerability to natural hazards.

This book unravels the everyday politics of conflict and disaster and crisis response. Everyday politics – like every type of politics – concern the control, allocation, production and use of resources and the values and ideas underlying those activities (Kerkvliet 2009: 227). Everyday politics are about

the deliberate or implicit political dimensions of everyday life, involving people that embrace, comply with, adjusting and contesting, and contesting norms and rules regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organised and direct.

(ibid.: 232)

Everyday politics are different from official politics that involve people with authoritative positions in organisations, and they are different from advocacy politics that involve direct and concerted efforts to support, criticise and oppose authorities, their policies and programmes. In reality, the boundaries between these different kinds of politics are not clear, and we will find reference to all of them throughout this book. Nonetheless, we like to emphasise the importance of focusing on everyday politics in conflict and disaster.

This notion of everyday politics is broad and can encompass all kinds of activities. The key is that we are not looking for specific activities, yet aim to identify the political dimensions and implications of everyday practice. Casting a vote on election day can be said to be a purely political act. Distributing food aid is more complex and multi-dimensional: it is an act of humanity, requires skill and organisation, and is moreover political. Food aid may acquire symbolic meaning in international relations, allowing a level of access and control to international actors, and it can have profound local political consequences, ranging from changing levels and scope of displacement to abuses of aid that co-determine the outcome of a violent conflict (Macrae and Zwi 1992). Disaster management can be analysed from a technocratic point of view, where research aims to improve protocols, mechanisms and logistics. However, it also has political properties. The same elements can be studied for their everyday politics: the selection of risks to be addressed, the allocation of burdens brought about by particular risks, the intentions and interactions of different actors, the choices to apply certain techniques over others and their implications for the generation and allocation of knowledge and resources.

Disaster, conflict and humanitarian crises

This book takes the perspective that disasters and conflict, and the responses they trigger, are social phenomena. Natural disasters are the outcome of social vulnerabilities, are differently understood and trigger different responses among local people, bureaucrats, politicians and disaster managers. Conflicts are not just the outcome of social processes: they penetrate deep into society where the causes and manifestations of conflict are locally altered, and where doing conflict becomes a practice, that can be studied as any other form of social practice. Interventions seek to bring about change into societies, yet are themselves populated by actors who socially negotiate the meaning and effects of their programmes.

Disaster, conflict, crisis and crisis response are socially constituted as much as they affect society. They can never be understood as separate from the societies in which they occur. This may be read as a truism, because everything that involves human beings is a social phenomenon. One of the tasks this book therefore sets out to achieve is to show that, in fact, most common understandings and responses to crises display a different view. Disasters are usually perceived as radical disruptions of development and conflict, as a societal state that is totally different from peace. Likewise, interventions around conflict and disaster are often conceptualised as insulated from the crises they operate on, in or around.

The social nature of humanitarian crises starts with the question: how do we define crises? Definitions of disaster and conflict may centre on the number of people who die, the havoc they wreak, or their overwhelming effects (such as used in the EMDAT database: www.emdat.be). There are many sophisticated mechanisms by which to define, for example, the different stages of food insecurity building up to a famine (www.fews.net). However, these definitions have very little relevance in predicting societal response to events. Some risks are easily elevated to the status of ‘crisis’, while others that may be equally or more devastating are considered normal. As Douglas and Wildavsky argued, societies selectively choose risks for attention and this choice reflects beliefs about values, social institutions, nature and moral behaviour (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). There are in the end no objective criteria by which to measure a crisis. This means that an inquiry into conflict, disaster and crisis always has to start with the question of who defined the crisis and how its response came about.

Natural hazards

Natural hazards are on the increase. The number of disasters triggered by natural hazards has been sharply increasing over recent decades, due to a combination of factors including worldwide population growth (there are more people to be exposed to hazards), urbanisation, environmental degradation, climate change and increasing vulnerabilities. Interestingly, while we see a trend of increasing numbers of affected people and damage done, the number of people who die from disasters has decreased. This can be attributed to the world's increased capacity to forewarn disasters, reduce their risks and provide relief to their victims. Reducing disaster risks has been incorporated into international policy agendas and governance bodies. The United Nation's Hyogo Framework of Action of 2005 has rendered Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) one of the global concerns that individual countries increasingly institutionalise and report progress on annually.

Disaster studies often make a distinction between natural hazards and disasters to recognise the social nature of disasters. Since the 1980s, disasters have not been regarded as purely physical happenings requiring largely technological solutions but, primarily, as the result of human actions (O'Keefe et al. 1976, Hewitt 1983, Anderson and Woodrow 1989, Wisner et al. 2004). Social processes generate unequal exposure to risk by making some people more prone to disaster than others and these inequalities are largely a function of the power relations operative in every society. This can be understood in terms of the vulnerability of an individual, household, community or society (Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004). Since the 1990s, moreover, even the natural origin of hazards is increasingly questioned. Hazards intensify under the pressures of environmental degradation and climate change, which makes the relation between hazards and society increasingly mutual (Oliver-Smith 1999). The vulnerability angle brings in a different perspective on time and space interpretations of disasters, as their genesis can be traced to long-term, sometimes world-scale, processes.

Different actors ‘see’ disasters as different types of events and as a result they prepare for, manage and record them in very different ways (Bankoff and Hilhorst 2009). What risks are worth considering, what measures will be taken, and who is eligible to their benefits, are questions that constitute the everyday politics of disaster and can have far-reaching effects for people's room for manoeuvre and chances of survival. Contrasting responses to food insecurity in Niger and Malawi can illustrate this point. A food shortage in Niger in 2005 was responded to by massive humanitarian assistance. The response became controversial when many actors, from Niger and internationally, claimed that the so-called crisis in fact concerned a ‘normal’ situation that could have been addressed by minor interventions. The response was aptly labelled by Paul Howe as too-much-too-late (Howe 2009). In contrast, Stephen Devereux (2009) demonstrated convincingly that a food shortage in Malawi in 2002 that genuinely deserved to be treated as a crisis on account of a range of indicators – including excess mortality – remained unrecognised and, as a result, policy responses only made matters worse.

One of the intriguing questions concerns the effect of disaster on processes of social change. Some disasters are remembered for toppling governments, such as the 1975 earthquake in Mexico, or for enabling breaking through a conflict impasse, such as the 1994 tsunami that enhanced the peace process in Aceh. If disasters provide a window for change, the question is: who can effectively reap these opportunities? Pelling and Dill (2009), after reviewing a number of cases, conclude that disaster shocks can be tipping points to open up political space, resulting in the contestation of political power, but more often lead to the opposite: the consolidation of the powers-that-be. Where states do not respond adequately to disaster, this may create opportunities for social and political change. Where states are contested, disaster events can become the platform for contesting parties to gain legitimation and constituency. Power politics, in these cases, easily interfere with disaster response. After the Marmara earthquake in Turkey, for example, displaced residents were provided shelter in camps. A number of these camps were run by the communist party. Within days after the disaster, however, the Turkish government claimed these camps, an act which was generally understood as an attempt to abort possible political gains for the communist party by their camp management. In the Philippines, we found that the government and oppositional non-governmental organisations (NGOs) ran parallel disaster response mechanisms, including programmes for DRR. The two systems did not interact or coordinate, and were basically competing claims to the support of the population (Bankoff and Hilhorst 2009).

Conflict and development

Conflict studies have always been mainly associated with what Kerkvliet calls ‘official politics’ and ‘advocacy politics’. Everyday practices and lived experience of conflict, in comparison, were mainly given attention in domains of literary representations (books and movies), personal interest, solidarity or morality. Recently, we have seen the emergence of conflict theory that accords central importance to everyday practices and politics.

From decolonisation until the early 1990s, conflicts were mainly analysed in terms of Cold War superpower rivalry. Since the 1990s, scholarly attention shifted to the local dynamics of the intra-state wars that broke out after the end of the Cold War (Kaldor 1999). Causes of conflict had to be found within societies: the different status of social groups, historically grown relations between ethnicities and the control over resources. The 1990s saw debate over the generalised root causes of such conflicts. Was greed or grievance dominant in generating conflict? Was conflict the result of resource scarcity or of resource abundance? These debates have given way to a recognition that conflicts are multi-causal and that the roots of specific conflict have to be understood in their own contexts and histories. Kalyvas (2003) points out how conflict plays out locally as ‘convergence between local motives and supra-local imperatives, spanning the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual’. This view places everyday politics in the heart of conflict theory and analysis: conflict comes about and is being played out as the amalgam of these localised dynamics.

Conflict and peace are sometimes clear-cut situations, but more often they are labels that are socially constructed. Violent conflict has an enormous and traumatising impact on people and societies, and people know the difference between war and peace very well. They resent researchers who sanitise their situation and euphemistically speak of conflict, food insecurity and gender-based violence when they really mean war, hunger and rape. But acknowledging the suffering of war does not make the distinction between war and peace easier to draw. Conflict does not operate according to a single logic, and its drivers, interests and practices are redefined by actors creating their own localised and largely unintended conflict dynamics of varying intensity (Kalyvas 2006). This volume's understanding of conflict breaks through the binary of conflict and peace, and focuses instead of the everyday practices by which conflicts and peace are being ‘done’.

Paul Richards (2005) argues that conflict is just one social project among many. Conflict situations are not the negative of peace, and there are many continuities and discontinuities within crisis situations. The transition from normality to crisis and back entails new ways of ordering and disordering of spaces, power, ritual, regulation and interaction. While much has been written, for example, about the economies of war, where the production, mobilisation and allocation of resources are organised to sustain the violence, there is a flip-side of this in the continuation of the normality of economies of production, transactions and distributions that we may call the economies of survival during crises. People hold on to normality as much as they can and continue planting their fields and trading their products. The different kinds of economies are deeply intertwined, and most activities are multi-faceted, creating new forms of economic life (Nordstrom 2004). Such social dynamics are crucial to the ways that conflicts evolve, alter and resolve and they can be unearthed through a focus on everyday practice. By studying everyday practices, it becomes apparent how the logics of violence, survival and reconciliation are renegotiated in their local context and how they work upon one another. It allows us to document these dynamics, explain their contradictions and bring the different stories of local actors' perceptions, interests and concerns to the surface.

Responses to crises

Crisis response often appears to be a matter of science, technology and the appropriate resources. However, under that surface we find that crisis response is social and highly political. It is shaped by the people, institutions and history of the context in which crises happen. Apart from the often controversial questions about whether there is indeed a crisis, what its causes are and what can be done about it, a most pertinent question is: whose crisis is it? Who has the authority to act? Most of the definitions of disaster incorporate the notion that disasters are situations that are too big to be handled by the directly affected (Alexander 1997). We are thus used to defining crisis as requiring extraordinary measures and often outside interventions. Within countries, crisis response is lik...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Disaster, conflict and society Everyday politics of crisis response
• Part I Policy speak and practice
• Part II Institutions and institutional multiplicity
• Part III Arenas of interventions
• Index