ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of dual disasters where crises of conflict meet those of environmental disaster. Dual disasters can be analyzed when they are synchronized but also over time when the repetition of dual disasters in the same place over time may have serious implications for human security and capacity to respond to such emergencies. Dual disasters aim to capture the assemblage of persons, processes, and patterns produced in a given context across economic, political, and social terrains. The case of Somali refugees in Kenyan camps twenty years on represents a clear failure of human security in the face of dual disasters. In Sri Lanka, tsunami aid served to fuel human insecurity, exacerbating ethnonational differences and contributing to the resumption of war. To the extent that human security can refocus its attention on the processes that create vulnerability, rather than on, the vulnerable, it remains a constructive framework for analyzing humanitarian crises, especially dual disasters.
