WORKSHOP: The Politics of Disaster

Florida International University, Miami FL

Investigators

Abstract

0000466 Gawronksi For many years disaster research shied away from explicitly accepting disasters as seriously political occasions. The last few years, however, have seen increasing attention to the deeply political nature of disaster events. Nonetheless, a "politics of disaster" has yet to be fully articulated either conceptually or empirically. A three-day workshop will be held in spring, 2000 in San Jose, Costa Rica to move the disaster research community forward in understanding and analyzing disaster events as political occasions, and to do so at a hemispheric level. The workshop will focus on six topics: (1) theoretical links/alternate models on quantitative relationship between disasters and political /social unrest; (2) additional variables to the disaster-unrest models; (3) case studies or case study-type evidence on how disasters have affected politics in various nations of the hemisphere, including the U.S. and Canada; (4) development and support of politically aware but insulated/protected government institutions capable of effective disaster management, including those which are capable of coordinating civil-military relations; (5) media treatment of disasters and the role of credit-taking and blame-avoidance by public officials; and (6) special problems of corruption in response, recovery, and reconstruction-and the consequent need for transparency strategies.