ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes that the role of the military in humanitarian action continues to evolve and move beyond purely operational assistance. It reflects geo-political and cultural distinctions between militaries in the West and in the East when it comes to humanitarian planning and action. The chapter shows that the global community is faced with a humanitarian capacities challenge. The interface between technology, natural hazards, demographic patterns and societal choice will, in other words, be a feature of more and more humanitarian crisis drivers and humanitarian crises. In that sense there is a spectrum of catastrophic risks, from those that are recognised as risks to those that seem relatively implausible, or unknown. The importance of the military as principal providers had been recognised in India and China and in many other parts of South and South-East Asia and the Far East for many decades. The structural and systemic challenges that emerge when dealing with catastrophic risks are varied but very familiar.