Item type | Current location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Books | 363.348 BAN (Browse shelf) | Available | 032920 |
No cover image available | No cover image available | |||||||
363.34095472 JAY Punarvasan : a document on reconstruction in post-earthquake Marathwada | 363.346 KRU Cultures and disasters : understanding cultural framings in disaster risk reduction | 363.347 ISH Risk and crisis management : 101 cases | 363.348 BAN All is well : catastrophe and the making of the normal state | 363.348 GRE Confronting catastrophe: A GIS handbook | 363.3480954 SAH Disaster risk reduction in South Asia | 363.3490954 AGA Wrath of Nature |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
All Is Well attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility. By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past.
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