ISCI is a cross-disciplinary research centre working to further our understanding of state crime: organisational deviance violating human rights

A Critical Introduction to Natural Disasters

The consequences of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, drought and floods are increasingly important subjects for scholars of state crimes but they remain underexplored within the discipline, not least because of their problematic characterization as natural disasters. It is not the climatic or geophysical hazard which kills rather it is the political, economic and social structures which determine population vulnerability that bear responsibility (Blaikie et al 1994; Coburn and Spence 1992; Hewitt 1983; de Waal 1997; Davis 2005). When Haiti was struck by an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 on January 24th, 2010 almost a quarter of a million people lost their lives; 3,000 were injured and one million people were made homeless. Haiti was devastated. Just one month later on February 27th a much more powerful earthquake of magnitude 8.8 struck the coastal region of Maule in Chile; this time fewer than 500 people were killed. The difference in the catastrophic magnitude of these 2 earthquakes is, as Watts has argued in relation to famine, largely explained by historically situated inequalities that limit access of some to secure housing, adequate incomes, food supplies and legal rights (Watts, 1991).

Haiti is a desperately impoverished country in which political corruption, enormous disparities between rich and poor, environmental degradation, torture and extrajudicial killings, instability and dictatorship have, over decades, drastically limited the life chances of its population. By contrast Chile is a prosperous and stable democracy with a mature civil society and an independent media (BBC 2010). An analysis of the disasters literature reveal three fundamental conditions which enhance a populations vulnerability to natural disasters: poverty, corruption and political authoritarianism (Green and Ward 2004). These three conditionsoften, although not always, mediated by race, gender, age, culture and ethnicityemerge throughout the literature on disasters as causally integral to large-scale catastrophe. Without question, these conditions locate natural disasters within the subject frame of state crime. While the UN (2001) interprets the increased vulnerability of people who live in the developing world as induced by current and human determined paths of development, the reality is, that it is states, international organisations such as the World Bank and IMF, and multi-national corporations which play the primary role in determining these paths. This notion of vulnerability is crucial to understanding disaster as a form of state crime and plays a central analytical role in the examination of state responsibility and culpability.

Paradigmatically natural disasters constitute state crime when, in addition to violating human rights, those violations result from a form of state organisational deviance. Earthquakes famines, cyclones, floods, fires or volcanoes result in death and injury on a mass scale. In addition, they deprive people of other basic needs such as shelter, food and sanitation. Clearly, the geophysical hazard or climatic extreme has not violated those rights because such violation requires human agency. The form of agency that concerns us when dealing with disaster is that of state organisational deviance. The types of state organisational state deviance which emerge from the literature on natural disasters may be summarised as follows: systemic corruption; state-corporate crime involving the collusion of governments in illegal and dangerous acts by private corporations; the collusion of governments in illegal acts by members of the governing elite itself, including illegal deforestation leading to floods and landslides; war crimes as a cause of famine, and negligence, such as the gross failure of state agencies to pursue effectively their publicly-proclaimed goals, or to follow generally accepted professional standards, for example, in civil engineering. Examples of such negligence include wilfully ignoring scientific warnings; failing to develop national systems of quality assurance or regulation in industries like construction; failing to install early warning systems in areas prone to cyclones or hurricanes, and encouraging or forcing land settlements in hazardous zones. Also to be considered are post-disaster cover-ups and concealment of evidence, indicating governments fear of censure if the true consequences of their acts and omissions become known (Green 2005).

References

Blaikie, P, Canon T, Davis, I, and Wisner, B (1994) At Risk: Natural Hazards, Peoples Vulnerability and Disasters (London, Routledge).

BBC Country Profile: Haiti (2010) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/country_profiles/1202772.stm

BBC Country Profile: Chile (2010) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/country_profiles/1222764.stm

Green, P. (2005) Disasters by Design: corruption, construction and catastrophe British Journal of Criminology, Spring 45/4, pp.528-547

Green, P. and Ward, T. (2004 )State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, London:Pluto Press

Watts, M. (1991) Entitlements or Empowerment? Famine and Starvation in Africa Review of African Political Economy, No. 51, The Struggle for Resources in Africa (Jul., 1991), pp. 9-26

De Waal, Alex (1997) Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, ARIAI, James Curry, Indiana University Press: Oxford, Bloomington.

Davis, M 2005 Catastrophic Economics: The Predators of New Orleans http://www.mltoday.com/Pages/Commentary/Davis-Catastrophic.html

Keith Hewitt 1983 The Idea of Calamity in the Technocratic Age in, Interpretations of Calamity:from the viewpoint of human ecology, London: Allen and Unwin

Coburn, A. and Spence, R. 1992 Earthquake Chichester :John Wiley and Sons

Blaikie, P. Cannon, T., Davis, I. and Wisner, B. 1994 At Risk: natural hazards, peoples vulnerability, and disasters London: Routledge

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 2001 Disaster Profiles of the Least Developed Countries. May 2001 Geneva:UNDP

Further information: The RADIX site contains a range of critical material on natural disasters: http://www.radixonline.org

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