ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on disaster studies including the agents of disaster, how natural hazard response has a distinct character amongst other types of response and may contain a military component, and finally the role of preparedness in natural hazard response. It also focuses on humanitarian intervention – both the theory and practice – and how it has evolved from being statist to being driven by human rights norms. Cosmopolitanism, as a political and ethical theory, gives us a helpful perspective in understanding the normative shift toward the primacy of human rights in humanitarian intervention as well as the requirements of disaster ethics. The chapter discusses cosmopolitanism as a theoretical approach to global policy and shows how grounding humanitarian intervention in state-based duties is inaccurate and unnecessary. It explores the case that at the overlap of disaster response, humanitarian intervention and cosmopolitanism, space exists to consider post-natural hazard intervention and the subsequent development of ethical policy.
