Disaster and conflict during crisis

Disasters, conflicts and other crises represent major challenges to peoples’ lives and livelihoods. While their ‘shock value’ routinely occupies news headlines, their embeddedness in longstanding patterns of social change, marginalisation, and reorganisation, requires much deeper analysis and context which we are committed to contribute to.

We study the lives, livelihoods and environments of people affected by disasters, hazards, and conflicts, including their politics, foundations, and aftermaths. Understanding the impact of such crises in immediate or more sustained forms requires research into relevant politics, institutions and communities, to see if and how they shift under duress. We see conflicts and socio-environmental disasters as complex processes of reordering with historical, present and future dimensions, rather than unproblematized routines of ‘disaster risk reduction’, ‘relief’ and ‘reconstruction’ that suggest easy manageability.