ABSTRACT
From the 1970s, disaster studies became increasingly concerned with socially manufactured vulnerability, dangers and damages arising mostly from socio-economic pre-conditions in communities at risk. Generally, disasters have disproportionate losses for already deprived and defenceless people. This awareness has been reinforced by the upsurge of work on precarious living associated with poverty, inequities related to gender, ethnicity, age, class, race and among marginalised people. After a relatively favourable summary of that earlier work, the chapter looks at certain challenges now reshaping a ‘post-vulnerability’ disaster terrain. In particular, the nature of contemporary labour and employment is revisited, as well as the growing violence and disasters of armed force, especially lessons from the aerial bombardment of cities. They are seen primarily as moral crises magnified by attacks on and failure to look after the ‘protected persons’ of International Humanitarian Law and highlight the need for non-violent measures. Meanwhile, a special link is made with wartime civil defence, especially for ‘Homeland Security’ and an emergent ‘Disaster Industrial Complex’. In combination, precarity and the modern security state are major constraints in disaster responses. Their huge scope and the state resources involved, hitherto relatively neglected by DRR, make them seem ‘elephants in the room’.
