Disaster and Resilience: Some Observations for Living Well from the Vantage Point of the Social Sciences

Abstract During the past five decades, the terms disaster and resilience have undergone significant transformations in the ways they are defined in the social sciences and disaster management. In this period, disaster has been redefined from an unavoidable and temporally limited impact of “nature” on society to a temporally prolonged politico-ecological process. At the same time, resilience was adopted from materials science and systems ecology to denote a community’s ability to recover (and even thrive) in the aftermath of a hazard impact. This chapter reviews the contributions anthropology and other social sciences have made towards the understanding of disaster and resilience. In the case of the former concept, these contributions have proposed (a) the understanding of disaster as a process that is not solely natural in which human practices play a key role in giving it shape and magnitude and can therefore be mitigated and (b) the recognition of power and political economic relations at global, regional, national, and local levels in the making of disasters. In the case of the latter concept, social scientists have expressed concern that use of the resilience concept has drawn attention from disaster risk reduction as it assumes disasters are unavoidable and that it has also been deployed alongside neoliberal discourse and policy, removing disaster risk reduction responsibilities from government agencies.