Introduction

Disasters are a frequent occurrence across the globe and, despite organized efforts to reduce disaster losses, those losses continue to grow. Between 1996 and 2005, an estimated 1.5 million people were killed in disasters worldwide, and many more were affected by injuries, disaster-related illness, homelessness, and economic loss. Deaths and injuries are more common in low- and middle-income countries by several orders of magnitude, while economic losses are significantly higher in wealthier nations (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) 2016). According to studies carried out by Munich Reinsurance, worldwide disaster losses for 2017 totaled $330 billion, only half of that amount being covered by insurance. A significant share of those losses is attributable to three major hurricanes that struck the United States in 2017—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—making 2017 the second-highest year for overall losses, after 2011, when losses amounted to approximately $354 billion in current dollars.

In addition to causing deaths, injuries, and economic losses, disasters have other profound social impacts that we will explore in this volume. According to a recent report by the World Bank Group (2017), disasters are a key factor in driving people into poverty and keeping them there. Disasters can lead to short- and long(er)-term mental health problems as well as to threats to physical health. Experiencing a disaster can be a major stressor for households and business owners. The extensive damage and disruption that disasters cause can result in the breakup of neighborhoods and in the loss of significant sources of social support for disaster survivors, some of whom may never be able to return to their homes, while others will never recover from these experiences. Many who survive disaster may find themselves living in temporary accommodations for months or even years, their daily routines disrupted and their plans for recovery stalled. After disasters, children’s development may suffer as a result of interruptions in schooling, residential dislocation, and parental stress.

Key societal institutions also experience difficulties in the aftermath of disasters, as schools, churches, charitable organizations, and agencies that provide health and welfare services see their burdens increase. Communities face challenges associated with the disruption and restoration of key lifelines such as water, electrical power, transportation, and other critical infrastructure systems. Local jurisdictions may experience population decline and tax losses. A disaster is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most communities, and they often struggle to understand what they need to do to respond and recover.

Large economies, such as those of the United States and other developed countries, experience temporary economic setbacks in the aftermath of disasters, but there is little evidence to date that disasters cause significant economic downturns in more developed nations. However, this is not the case for smaller, less developed countries; in those cases, disasters can have significant economic impacts, particularly when they affect key sectors of those economies. For a nation seeking to improve its level of economic development, a disaster can be a major setback. In both large and small countries, the need to respond to and recover from disasters drains financial resources that could otherwise be employed more productively. In the United States, as billion- and multibillion-dollar disasters continue to occur with alarming frequency, taxpayers, insurance companies, and disaster survivors themselves are forced to foot the bill. For households and businesses, disasters can result in increased debt and an inability to take advantage of opportunities for financial advancement. In many instances, particularly of catastrophic and near-catastrophic disasters, it can take years or even decades for social and economic recovery to take place, as communities, families, and businesses struggle to cope over the long term.

As we will see throughout this volume, disaster impacts and losses are not random, nor are the burdens of disasters borne equally by all members of affected populations. Rather, the impacts of disasters often fall most heavily on those who are most vulnerable: the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and other marginalized groups. Many current inquiries in the sociological study of disasters center on how various axes of inequality such as class, race, gender, and other aspects of social stratification contribute to shaping the patterns of disaster victimization and recovery.

Media attention typically focuses on the immediate impacts of disasters and fades away in days or weeks. As a result, the public is generally unaware of the cascading effects of disasters and of the struggles that survivors endure over time. In Hurricane Harvey in 2017, floodwaters surged over many facilities that contained toxins, such as landfills and agricultural and petrochemical plants. Those waters, too, contained biological hazards, for example fecal matter, E. coli bacteria, shigella, and even Vibrio vulnificus, a deadly bacterium. When Hurricane Maria struck the US territory of Puerto Rico that same year, the island’s electric power infrastructure was essentially destroyed. Among other impacts, the loss of power threatened the lives of those who were dependent on kidney dialysis treatments and on medical devices that required a supply of electricity. Wildfires denude landscapes and set the stage for flooding and landslides later, when it rains, as happened for example in 2017, when major fires in central California were followed by deadly debris flows. After the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Nepalese troops providing relief under the auspices of the United Nations brought cholera to the island. As of 2016, an estimated 770,000 people, or about 8 percent of the population, have been infected with cholera and over 9,000 people have died—and those numbers are thought to be underestimates (Knox 2016). In 2011 in Japan, when the Great Tohoku earthquake triggered a deadly tsunami that caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the media covered that sensational story, but now there is little coverage of the ongoing effects of the large-scale population displacement and long-term nuclear contamination that this massive disaster caused.

Also neglected are the ways in which hazards and disasters can erode the sense of community and the sense of place, and also lead to conflict among those who are affected. Disasters can result in the loss of important cultural assets, as happens for example when historic structures are destroyed and traditional livelihoods are disrupted. Decades ago sociologist Kai Erikson (1976) showed how a flash flood that occurred in 1972 in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia as a result of negligence on the part of a coal company that failed to maintain a dam effectively destroyed community cohesion and triggered widespread mental health problems in the affected communities. In a subsequent book entitled A New Species of Trouble, Erikson (1995) documented how technological disasters and toxic threats can cause collective trauma for Native Americans and other disadvantaged groups. As the title suggests, technological advances achieved in contemporary societies have a dark side, which manifests itself in the form of heretofore unacknowledged hazards. Other research illustrates how such threats and the lawsuits they often engender can lead to the formation of contentious factions and to decline in social connectedness and trust.

Disasters can also provoke challenges to the legitimacy and competence of governments and institutions. In one historic example, the dictatorial government of Nicaragua appropriated and mishandled international aid after the 1972 Managua earthquake and subsequently fell from power seven years later, largely as a result of public indignation. The 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which originated in China, created a legitimacy crisis for the ruling Communist Party, which had attempted to cover up the outbreak even as it spread worldwide. In 2005 the response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe was so inexcusably inept that it permanently tarnished the record of the Bush administration. In the aftermath of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy, six scientists and one public official were found guilty of manslaughter for not adequately informing the public, in the days leading up to the disaster, about the impending danger—an episode that bears evidence of the eroding confidence in science and government in the face of disaster. Governments that depend on international aid in order to respond to and recover from disasters may find their countries overrun and their authority bypassed by outside entities that pursue their donors’ interests rather than the needs of disaster victims. The provision of large amounts of disaster aid also tends to breed and feed corruption, particularly in already corrupt societies, and this leads to public distrust and disillusionment.

The impacts of disasters, and in many cases their likelihood, are amplified by ongoing global trends. Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization and intensified development in hazardous areas put ever larger populations at risk. The proliferation of global supply chains means that disasters that affect suppliers in one country have ramifications for businesses in distant nations. Climate change leads to ocean warming and sea-level rise, which in turn result in more extreme atmospheric events and greater impacts from those events in coastal areas. As climate change progresses, societies around the world will be forced to grapple with more frequent heat waves, the spread of infectious disease agents, land loss in coastal areas, and a host of other climate change-induced effects.

Given the societal significance of disasters, it is not difficult to see why sociologists and other social scientists find these events and the efforts to reduce their impacts endlessly fascinating. As we have already seen, disasters have economic, political and policy, health and mental health dimensions. They frequently bring to the fore issues of inequality and social justice, shining a light on the problems experienced by marginalized and vulnerable populations. At the same time, social behavior in disasters also reveals the human capacity for altruism and creativity. We will explore together these and other themes in the chapters that follow.

Key Concepts and Definitions in the Study of Disasters

To ensure that we are working from a common set of definitions in the discussion that follow, in this section I introduce concepts that are commonly used in the sociological study of disasters and that will be employed in later chapters. Obviously one key concept is the idea of disaster itself. An important takeaway point is that disasters are by their nature social events, not merely physical ones. If a major volcanic eruption were to occur in an area where human settlements did not exist or remained unaffected, that eruption would be a significant geophysical event, but not a disaster. In keeping with sociological conceptualizations, disasters involve the juxtaposition of physical forces—geological, atmospheric, technological, and other forces—and vulnerable human communities. The severity of a disaster is measured not by the magnitude of the physical forces involved, but rather by the magnitude of its societal impacts.

As subsequent discussions will show, disasters were previously seen as discrete events, concentrated in time and space, that disrupt the social order and interfere with the ability of a community or society to continue to operate, for example by interfering with governmental functions, economic activities, utility services, education, transportation, telecommunications, and housing. While acknowledging such impacts, more recent social science formulations see disasters as arising not so much from the physical forces that trigger them at specific times as from longer-term global and societal processes, which in turn result in an increase of the potential for loss. Much of the discussion that follows will focus on those processes, making the point that the potential for disasters and disaster victimization builds up over long time periods.

While media accounts and commonsense views of disaster tend to gloss over differences in event severity in a search for commonalities among events, sociological formulations are attentive to such differences because of their social implications. Sociologists typically classify events into emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes (see Quarantelli 1996). As shown in Table 1.1, these different types of occurrences are associated, among other things, with differences in spatial scope, the severity of their impacts, which entities respond and how, the degree of public participation in providing assistance, and recovery challenges. Emergencies include events such as multi-vehicle traffic accidents, large structure fires, and minor industrial accidents—incidents that may cause deaths and injuries but that are localized, do not create large-scale disruption, and are typically handled by public safety agencies such as fire and police departments. Emergencies are more or less everyday occurrences in large urban areas. Disasters are much less common and much more serious; they have severe consequences that include deaths, injuries, and large-scale social disruption. In disasters, members of the public join responding organizations in dealing with these and other effects. Unlike emergencies, disasters can damage and degrade the very resources that are meant to respond to them. Catastrophes are larger still; they involve massive repercussions, which greatly exceed the capacity of stricken communities to respond—including long-lasting impacts that require protracted recovery efforts. Examples of catastrophes include the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the triple catastrophe that struck Japan in 2011. In its history, the United States has experienced only four true catastrophes: the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Great Mississippi flood of 1927, and Katrina. As indicated in the table, emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes are qualitatively different. A disaster is not just a big emergency, and a catastrophe is not just a big disaster; rather the three occurrences are accompanied by differing effects, response patterns, and challenges.

The term extreme event is sometimes used interchangeably with disaster. Here the reference is to events that are out of the ordinary or outside the norm—that is, rare or unlikely. The term is more appropriately applied to physical phenomena such as rainfall or wind speed than to disaster events. This is because disasters can result from events that are technically not extreme in the physical sense, but that nonetheless overwhelm a community’s or society’s capacity to cope. The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction recently developed a consensus set of terms and definitions that are meant to be applied to disaster-related phenomena. Extreme event was not among them. I mention it here because it is a term that is commonly in use in some scientific circles.

The term hazard refers to an ongoing condition that has the potential for causing a disaster. Many regions around the world are exposed to earthquake hazards; many coastal areas are exposed to hurricanes and coastal flooding; flood hazards exist along rivers and streams; areas adjacent to nuclear and chemical facilities are exposed to those technological hazards; and so on. The terms hazard and disaster are not interchangeable. The former refers to the potential for a disruptive event to occur, while the latter refers to what happens when that potential is actualized. Various scientific disciplines—geology, seismology, atmospheric science, and others—conduct research to better understand and characterize hazards, and communities and societies worldwide seek to use that knowledge to improve their understanding of the hazards to which they are exposed and the ways they can respond to such threats.

The concept of vulnerability refers to the potential for experiencing adverse impacts from disasters and having poorer outcomes after the occurrence of disasters. The concept is applied to both physical systems and individuals and social groups. For physical systems such as buildings, transportation networks, dams, and utility services, vulnerability consists of the potential for destruction, damage, or loss of function. For individuals and groups, it represents the potential for dying, being injured, losing property, being displaced, and experiencing other negative disaster impacts, as well as for having difficulty recovering after disasters. Like the term hazard, vulnerability relates to the potential for the occurrence of adverse experiences and outcomes—a potential that may or may not be realized in any particular disaster. Like hazards, vulnerabilities can be assessed in non-disaster contexts; the field of vulnerability science is devoted to improving such measurements.

Disaster resilience is a concept that has risen to prominence over the past twenty years and that will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7. Based as it is on ideas from fields as diverse as engineering, psychology, and ecology, the concept refers to the ability of social units at different scales (e.g., societies, communities, households, and organizations) to absorb disaster shocks, to cope with disaster impacts, and successfully to adapt and in some cases even improve their functioning in the aftermath of disasters. Research has revealed significant differences in disaster resilience at various levels of analysis, and here again poverty and marginality are often (though not necessarily) associated with low capacities.

Risk is a term that is also used extensively in the study of disasters. Risk has been defined as “a situation or event in which something of human value (including humans themselves) has been put at stake and where the outcome is uncertain” (Jaeger, Renn, Rosa, and Webler 2001: 17). The idea that entities that have human value are “at stake” means that losses may occur. Although the term is commonly used to refer to the possibility of losses, the concept also includes the potential for positive outcomes. People risk their money when they play the stock market, which has the potential for yielding gains as well as losses. People also engage in risky activities such as skydiving and extreme sports because, even though these are dangerous, they hold the possibility of rewards such as excitement and a sense of accomplishment. As the definition indicates, risk is always accompanied by uncertainty. We know that losses may result from taking risks, but we can only estimate their likelihood. The fields of risk analysis and risk management focus on clarifying those probabilities to the greatest extent possible and on taking steps to reduce the risks.

Emergence is a concept used to refer to new patterns of individual, group, and organizational behavior that are formed during and after the occurrence of disasters. Disasters are occasions that call into being novel social groupings and collaboration and coordination networks whose structures grow and change in response to newly identified needs. Disasters and catastrophes always contain an element of surprise—occurrences that were not, even could not, have been foreseen. Essentially, if an event does not produce surprises, it is not a disaster; it is merely a small or larger emergency. Emergence is common in disaster situations because so much of what happens in disasters is unanticipated.

At different points in this book I will use the term disaster agent. A disaster agent is a physical force that leads to the occurrence of a disaster. Here again, the agent and the disaster are not the same thing; a disaster occurs when an agent damages and disrupts human societies and the sorts of things that humans value. A partial list of disaster agents includes hurricanes or tropical cyclones, riverine and flash floods, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, and various types of chemical or nuclear agents that can be released as a result of facility accidents or as a result of impacts caused by other disaster agents—as happened in the 2011 Japan triple disaster, where, as noted earlier, an earthquake triggered a tsunami, which in turn caused core meltdowns in nuclear facilities.

Historically, researchers have distinguished disaster agents along several dimensions: whether they occur with or without warning; how long a warning period they allow for; the duration of impact; the scope of impact (localized disasters vs. disasters with broader impact areas); whether impacts are singular or repetitive; and whether the agent is familiar or unfamiliar and exotic. Using these distinctions, an earthquake is characterized as a disaster agent that creates impacts without warning,¹ is relatively brief in duration, lasting seconds or minutes, typically has a large geographic scope of impact, and carries the potential for repetitive impacts in the form of aftershocks. Earthquake hazards are familiar and well understood in many regions of the world, and many major earthquake faults have been mapped, but earthquakes also occur unexpectedly, on unmapped faults and in places where residents are not aware of the hazard. These features make this particular disaster agent challenging in terms of societal and community ability to respond. Other types of disaster agents also present distinctive challenges. Droughts are slow-onset occurrences, and often drought conditions and their adverse impacts are not recognized until a drought is well advanced, deaths begin to occur, and livelihoods are disrupted. Chemical and nuclear incidents may be so unfamiliar that members of the public may not know what risks they pose or how to protect themselves. In the presence of those kinds of agents the public will be especially reliant on authorities to communicate effectively regarding what they need to do to avoid danger.

Some disaster agents are able to produce very severe and widespread impacts and thus can be more likely to lead to catastrophes, particularly when vulnerability is high in the affected areas. In this century, for example, a number of catastrophes and near-catastrophes have resulted in the death of tens to hundreds of thousands of people. Examples include the 2001 Gujurat earthquake in India (over 20,000 fatalities), the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (over 200,000 deaths), an earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 2005 (over 73,000 fatalities), Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 (more than 130,000 killed); the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China (nearly 88,000 deaths), the 2010 Haiti earthquake (an estimated 220,000 killed), and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan (approximately 20,000 deaths). Earthquakes and tropical storms are not the only disaster agents that have brought about high mortality in this century; in the summer of 2003 a heatwave that struck Europe resulted in the deaths of an estimated 70,000 people. (All statistics are based on CRED 2016.) Note that, with the exception of the 2003 heat wave and the 2011 Japan disaster, all the events listed here took place in less developed countries. In this volume I will explore why death tolls are so high in those kinds of societal settings.

Climate change is a hazard that stands virtually in a category of its own. Outside scientific and policy circles, its characteristics and effects are largely unfamiliar. Its onset has been and continues to be relatively slow and, for many people, its effects to date have remained unseen, while other people are already experiencing them. It currently affects nations and communities around the world primarily through its interaction with other hazards and through its influence on the likelihood and severity of certain disaster agents. Although scientists note that it is difficult to attribute specific disaster events to climate change, it is widely recognized that, when climate change causes sea-level rise, this makes the storm surges associated with hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons larger and that, when it increases ocean temperatures, it contributes to more intense rainfall events. With climate change, we will see more periods of extreme heat, which can contribute to the occurrence of deadly heat waves and wildfires. Climate change will be discussed throughout this volume, but especially in Chapter 8.

At various points in the book, I will also use the term hazards cycle, which refers to activities that can be undertaken before disasters, during and immediately after disaster impact, and during the longer-term recovery period to reduce losses and hasten recovery. The hazards cycle consists of four elements: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Mitigation refers to measures that can be taken in advance of disasters, with a view to reducing their impacts.² Such measures include planning and zoning activities that direct development away from hazardous areas; building codes that require disaster-resistant construction; and strategies for retrofitting structures, so that they can resist being damaged when disasters strike. These types of measures are typically undertaken either by governments or as part of governmental requirements. Another important aspect of mitigation involves strengthening the natural defenses that reduce the impacts of disaster agents, for example restoring wetlands so that can they absorb hurricane-force winds. Private property owners often engage in disaster mitigation activities on their own—for example, when homeowners in earthquake country bolt their homes to their foundations so that those structures would not slip off their foundations when an earthquake strikes.

Insurance is sometimes considered a mitigation measure, but that is not entirely accurate. Insurance does not so much reduce risk as identify other parties (insurance and reinsurance companies) that will pay for damages in the event of a disaster. Insurance can be used to spur mitigation actions, however, as happens when insurance coverage is tied to the implementation of mitigation measures. In the US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), for example, flood insurance premiums paid by property owners are lower if the communities where those property owners live undertake flood control projects. Following the NFIP’s Community Rating System, the more the communities do to reduce flood hazards, the less property owners have to pay.

The second stage in the cycle, preparedness, consists of activities taken in advance of disasters that strengthen the ability of communities, households, and individuals to respond effectively when disaster strikes. Preparedness measures cover the development of disaster plans at various governmental levels, ranging from local to national and international, as well as household and business disaster planning. Such measures also include knowing what to do when a disaster threatens or strikes—for example, being aware of evacuation routes and knowing what self-protective measures to carry out in the event of a chemical or nuclear accident or other type of disaster. Drills and exercises are other common preparedness activities that are undertaken by emergency responders to ensure disaster readiness, as well as by institutions such as schools and hospitals and by private sector organizations. Governmental agencies seek to improve public preparedness through various forms of messaging, such as by communicating with the public about hazards and risks through a range of media or by educating the public about what to do in the event of a disaster. Other kinds of preparedness activities are developing disaster-warning systems, marking evacuation routes and providing evacuation maps, providing training experiences for members of at-risk populations so that they can assist in the event of a disaster, and integrating hazards knowledge into school curricula.

Response, the third stage of the hazards cycle, takes place when disasters occur and consists of activities undertaken by individuals, households, businesses, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations and aimed at coping with the impacts of disaster. Response activities are multifaceted; examples include implementing expedient self-protective measures such as evacuating and seeking emergency shelter; activating disaster plans; searching for and rescuing persons in distress; caring for the injured and making arrangements for those who have been killed; containing immediate threats associated with cascading disaster effects, such as agent-induced fires and hazardous materials releases; and taking additional measures to ensure public safety, such as issuing information about particularly hazardous areas and evolving threats. As discussed earlier in this chapter, as disasters unfold, new dangers emerge, and part of the response to disasters consists of informing the public about those dangers. Entities that respond to disasters encounter challenges of their own. For example, they must be able to assess the disaster situation and identify and prioritize critical needs. They also must be able to communicate and coordinate their activities.

As we will see later, particularly in Chapters 4 and 7, responding to disasters involves implementing disaster plans—but other measures as well. Response activities include improvising in various ways when plans fail to anticipate realities on the ground. While we tend to think that disaster response consists of the activities of so-called “first responders”—such as fire services, police, and emergency management personnel—actual disaster responses are diffuse and decentralized, as members of the public and entities that had not been included in planning activities spur into action and new groups emerge to address pressing needs. Sometimes such public-based responses are well coordinated with those of official entities; other times they are not. Viewing disaster response as “what first responders do” misses the point that, as noted earlier in Table 1.1 and the discussion around it, the public is, typically, extensively involved in a range of response activities in the aftermath of disasters and catastrophic events. It is only in emergency incidents that public safety agencies are the main ones to handle response activities.

Finally, disaster recovery consists of all the activities that encompass efforts on the part of those affected by disasters to overcome disaster disruption and continue to thrive. Here again, recovery activities take place at different levels: individuals, households, businesses, communities, regions, and in some cases entire societies. Recent scholarship and practice emphasize the idea that recovery activities can be planned even before disasters occur, in order to smooth the recovery process.

Disaster recovery is often incorrectly equated with restoring and reconstructing the built environment. However, as we will see in more detail later, many other processes unfold during post-disaster recovery, for example processes associated with recovering from trauma, reestablishing disrupted livelihoods and economic activity, and regaining a sense of community. Too often after disasters governments hasten to reconstruct and rebuild, but without attending to other, less tangible but still essential aspects of recovery. As a result, communities are left with rebuilt and often attractive physical spaces that fail to meet their social and cultural needs.

In keeping with the disaster cycle concept, recovery activities should, and often do, incorporate new mitigation measures, bringing the cycle full circle.

Chapter Themes

This book provides an introduction to the sociology of disasters and at the same time seeks to advance the field, particularly with respect to theories concerning the causes of disasters. Many of the issues discussed in this volume are covered in greater detail in more specialized publications that deal, for example, with topics such as disaster vulnerability and resilience. In those cases, my task is to present an overview of the current scholarship and point readers to those additional sources for more in-depth analyses. In addition and perhaps more importantly, what I hope to do in this volume is advance new ideas about the societal origins of disasters. Much of the discussion in the chapters that follow delves more deeply into ideas that I began to develop in an earlier book, The Social Roots of Risk (Tierney 2014). As that title suggests, disasters and their impacts are produced to a much greater extent through the workings of social forces than of natural or technological ones. Put more directly, the arguments I make here show that disasters are socially produced, not produced by natural or technological forces external to society, and that those societal forces constitute the means by which disasters take their toll on human lives and livelihoods. The root causes of disasters are to be found in the social order itself—that is, in social arrangements that contribute to the buildup of risk and vulnerability. As subsequent chapters will show, those interacting and mutually reinforcing arrangements include processes that operate within the global political economy, actions undertaken by state actors for their own purposes that ignore and increase hazards and risks, processes that contribute to social vulnerability by further marginalizing disadvantaged social groups, and local growth-machine politics that elevate so-called “economic development” as a major priority while ignoring increasing risks.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the history of disaster research in sociology and other social sciences. It shows how systems thinking in sociology and the idea of “adjustments” to hazards in geography formed the basis for early research in the field. In Chapter 2 we also see how both theory and research on disasters have changed over time. New theoretical approaches such as the pressure and release (PAR) model have come to the fore that place greater emphasis on the social production of disaster vulnerability than on the physical events that cause societal disruption. While the early tradition in disaster research focused mainly on the impact and response periods of disasters, later research has begun to concentrate on other phases of the hazards cycle, including mitigation and recovery.

The boundaries around what constitutes the sociology of disasters are fuzzy; other social science disciplines have made significant contributions to the sociological understanding of disasters, their causes, and their impacts. In Chapter 3 I focus on some of the most important contributions from fields such as economics, geography, psychology, and mental health.

In Chapter 4 I present an overview of general theoretical perspectives that can be applied to better understand disasters, as well as middle-range theories that explain different aspects of disaster-related phenomena. The chapter shows how perspectives such as that of world systems theory, along with insights from environmental sociology, reveal the social roots of disasters, as well as how constructivist perspectives help us understand what shapes our thinking on disasters—and what shapes our ignorance of hazards. Also discussed are theoretical perspectives that help explain phenomena such as self-protective behaviors and group and network emergence.

Chapter 5 provides an overview of disaster research methods. This chapter is not intended to be a primer on research methods, or even on all the methods that disaster researchers employ. Rather the discussion centers on what is distinctive about conducting research in disaster settings, including challenges to applying conventional research approaches in disrupted social environments. This chapter also focuses on the special operational and ethical challenges that accompany the efforts to carry out research in disaster contexts. For example, unlike researchers who plan their studies over months and even years, those who study disaster response activities may be required to mobilize—which often means going to unfamiliar places—at very short notice. Ethical issues always arise in research involving human subjects, but are those issues the same or different in disasters? Do disaster survivors warrant special ethical protections? We will explore these and similar questions in Chapter 5.

The concept of disaster vulnerability is discussed in many places in this volume, but Chapter 6 delves more deeply into it, focusing on global and historical trends that make particular populations and groups more vulnerable than others and on the intersectional nature of vulnerability, given that factors such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender combine to produce differential levels of vulnerability. Age and disability are among other factors explored as sources of vulnerability, as are citizenship and linguistic competence. A key point emphasized in this chapter, and indeed throughout the volume, is that individuals and groups are not born vulnerable: they are rendered vulnerable through processes of social marginalization and exclusion. This chapter also reviews efforts to measure disaster vulnerability.

Chapter 7 focuses on disaster resilience: what it is, what factors contribute to it, and why it is relevant to our understanding of why some segments of society are able to cope successfully with disasters while others are not. Discussions in this chapter focus a good deal on the concept of social capital as it relates to disaster resilience. Like Chapter 6, this chapter provides an overview of efforts to measure resilience as well as to improve it by reducing disaster vulnerability (among other strategies). Although the concept of resilience is ubiquitous in disaster research and practice, it is also contested, and in this chapter we will review critiques of it.

Chapter 8 offers ideas about what we can expect in the future in the way of future disasters, as processes of global environmental change inexorably proceed. New threats are emerging, including threats associated with our growing dependence on an increasingly vulnerable power grid and cyber-infrastructure.