Disasters最新文献

This article explores longstanding conflict between Turkana and Pokot pastoralist communities in northern Kenya, close to the country's border with Uganda. Conflict in this region has consistently defied interventions by both governments and development organisations. While numerous studies have emphasised the worsening situation, often in relation to climate change and ensuing forms of resource scarcity, few have illuminated the intricate connections between the commercialisation of livestock theft and other forms of politically motivated, territorial resource-based violence. To address this gap in existing analyses of conflict in the pastoral borderlands, the article draws on four years of fieldwork, employing mixed-method approaches, including participatory community videos, to understand the dynamics of conflict. By situating shifting patterns of violence within the context of northern Kenya's reconfiguration as a frontier of anticipation, the article underscores the complexity and the multidimensional nature of this violence, arguing that solutions must be more attuned to the evolving realities of the borderlands.

In the Inner Niger Delta, socio-spatial transformations have profoundly reshaped relationships between communities and natural resources, intensifying tensions around access and management. In this context, local conventions (LCs) have emerged as essential instruments of social and environmental regulation in response to resource degradation, climate variability, competition over land, water, and pastures, and persistent insecurity. This study investigates the role of LCs in enhancing natural resource governance and peacebuilding. Using qualitative methods, the research involved 7 focus-group discussions and 11 interviews across three communes in the Mopti Region, Mali. The findings highlight how LCs, developed through a participatory and inclusive process anchored in Mali's decentralisation legal framework, facilitate dialogue among diverse stakeholders and establish negotiated rules for access to and use of natural resources, thereby reducing tensions over resource use and clarifying the rights and responsibilities of different user groups. Yet, challenges remain, such as dependence on external funding and insufficient local capacities. LCs emerge as vital tools for mitigating conflicts in natural resource management and promoting inclusive governance. Their sustainability depends on strengthening local ownership and capacities while integrating more equitable institutional frameworks to ensure their long-term effectiveness.

The construction of bandals (bamboo walls) is a widely practised climate adaptation initiative in Bangladesh, embodying community agency. This article interrogates how it can also represent locally-led maladaptation—adaptive efforts that inadvertently sustain or exacerbate the very risks they seek to address. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a riparian community, this photo essay examines our initial misinterpretation of a bandal project as successful locally-led adaptation, and our subsequent reinterpretation of it as a configuration of three interrelated forms of responsibility: ‘self-responsibility’, wherein at-risk communities act under constraint; ‘passive responsibility’, manifested through fragmented expert and institutional knowledge; and ‘reactive responsibility’, embedded in public resource distribution patterns reflecting a logic of impact-triggered humanitarian aid that constrains adaptive potential. We argue that, in the absence of active and proactive responsibilities assumed by a range of local actors, self-responsibility is coerced, responsibilising at-risk people and producing maladaptation. Locally-led adaptation, therefore, ought to move beyond a solely community-based framing towards a collectively accountable process.

When are people willing to donate their time or money after a disaster? We investigate the psychological and socio-economic determinants of post-disaster giving in Japan, using a nationally representative panel survey of more than 7,000 respondents, conducted repeatedly from early 2020, including after the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake. We examine how individual characteristics—including past disaster experience, social capital (trust, reciprocity, cooperation), ‘Big-5’ personality traits, and digital behaviours—influence the likelihood of engaging in various forms of post-disaster assistance, from traditional monetary donations to newer digitally-facilitated acts such as online shopping for Noto products. Our analysis finds that prior disaster experience and personal openness are consistent robust predictors of prosocial behaviour. The relationship between social capital and aid activities is more subtle. Trust and cooperation are both positively associated with post-disaster assistance, but this is not the case for reciprocity. These findings emphasise that nuanced conceptualisation of social capital is required and underscore the need for caution in assuming its universal relevance in mobilising disaster aid. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research that more precisely delineate the interplay between social, psychological, and socio-economic factors in shaping post-disaster giving.

Environmental volatility can inflate property values even as it destroys them. To show how, this article pairs a postcolonial micro-state in the Caribbean (Sint Maarten after Hurricane Irma) with a Nordic welfare town (Grindavík in Iceland following volcanic eruptions) because they occupy the opposite ends of the governance capacity spectrum, while sharing certain similarities. Drawing on reports, media archives, 31 ethnographic interviews, and transaction data from 2015–25, it traces four mechanisms that convert danger into a ‘volatility premium’: distressed asset acquisition; symbolic risk branding; risk finance design; and distributive rules. In Sint Maarten, weak regulation permits private capital to aestheticise destruction and profit from speculative rebuilding, while in Grindavík, a universal state buy-out socialises loss and freezes speculation. By combining disaster capitalism, speculative urbanism, and financialisation theory with market evidence, the study argues that turning risk into real estate value is political. The findings strengthen our understanding of climate risk economies and offer practitioners the means for auditing post-crisis property policies.

When world prices of maize and wheat doubled between early 2020 and mid-2022, it was feared the increases would transmit to markets in the Global South, threatening the food security of vulnerable people. We report studies conducted in Mali, northeast Nigeria, Sudan, and northern Uganda to examine changes in the prices of cereals, their consequences, and public responses. From early 2020, the prices of staples in the four countries rose strongly, doubling or more, and remained high up to the time of writing (mid-2025). Price increases resulted largely from domestic factors, above all failed harvests and, in Mali and Sudan, conflict: world prices played only a minor role. People on low incomes economised on food, cut spending on health and education, and tried to cope by finding extra work, selling off assets, and borrowing money—but not always successfully. Public support has been scant: most people have had to manage using the resources of family, neighbours, and local communities.

1974 saw the first—and last—famine in independent Bangladesh. The disaster killed an estimated two per cent of the population and caused a crisis of legitimacy for the leadership of a nation that had won its independence only three years previously. Its catastrophic aftermath saw the emergence of an agreement among ruling elites and citizens that protection against mass starvation was a priority for the legitimation of political rule, or an ‘anti-famine contract’. This article examines the event to revisit theories of the politics of famine at a time when episodes of mass starvation are on the rise. Utilising existing theories of famine politics, it establishes propositions about the conditions under which states have or acquire the political commitment and capacity to prevent or mitigate episodes of famine. The effort at theory building draws specific attention to how to incorporate the geopolitics of famine and humanitarian relief into the analysis of the political reasons why famines occur or are not prevented.

As climate change increases the probability and intensity of major disasters, urgent action is required to prepare for and address the underlying causes of disaster. The disaster risk reduction (DRR) framework was adopted to focus national and international attention on the social production of vulnerability to disaster risk, yet it faces politically mobilised opposition, including from the Evangelical Christian (EC) community. This article suggests that DRR's engagement with traditional, Indigenous, and local knowledge is ill suited to deal with such challenges and explores the concept of pluriversality as a way to create points of interconnection and pragmatic engagement between DRR advocates and ECs. The paper argues that pluriversality provides a standard for inclusion of radical difference without embracing epistemic relativism or modernist domination. Rather than insisting on modernist terms of engagement and the rejection of religious narratives of disaster, this paper argues that recognising value in different narratives of nature and disaster is necessary to contest fatalist and scapegoating narratives that underpin EC opposition to DRR and to spur pragmatic action on DRR.

Populations in conflict-affected contexts face overlapping drivers of disaster risk. This article explores the intersection of disasters and armed conflict through an analysis of the role of non-state armed groups, focusing on the Arakan Army (AA)'s response to Cyclone Mocha in Myanmar's Rakhine State in 2023. Using the process tracing method and drawing on interviews and secondary sources, the study finds that the AA's fragmented territorial control and parallel governance structures nonetheless enabled extensive humanitarian operations through collaboration with civil society and volunteer networks. While the military junta's response was limited, the AA led local relief and recovery, avoiding civilian defection and preserving its military capacity. Although the cyclone temporarily delayed conflict escalation, the AA's relief efforts also served as strategic investments for a planned military offensive. The response enhanced the AA's legitimacy among ethnic Rakhine communities while undermining the regime's authority. The findings underscore the complexities of disaster response by illustrating how such activities in conflict zones can simultaneously alleviate suffering and reshape power relations.