Opps, I forgot to attach the epilogue I referred to in my message responding to James. Here it is.
All the best, BEN
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 6:18 PM, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Greetings, James,
You raise some excellent questions. At 69 years of age and having worked in this area since 1966, published quite enough, taught, trained, and, now in retirement, still teaching, training and researching, my motivation and vision is not primarily research when it comes to religion and disaster risk reduction. I have to repeat, however, that IF this were a call to do research, then your questions would also be top of my list (and I would love to see the rest of your list!).
The brute fact is that faith communities already are involved deeply in disaster recovery, in conflict resolution, and livelihood enhancement, MDG implementation and environmental sustainability. I have written a bit about this in an epilogue to a theme issue of the journal Religions dealing with faith perceptions of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (see ). So if, in fact, faith communities all over the world are engaged in all this (to one degree or another), willy nilly, then why should they not also have a role in disaster risk reduction (prevention/ mitigation) and in lobbying for those policies at national and international scales?
One might think it naive of me to take the good with the bad as regards the long history of institutional religion among the sentient beings of Planet Earth. So be it. Given the sensitivities and suspicions that exist in a multiply polarised world, one has to approach All faith communities even handedly, focusing precisely on several preliminary questions: (1) Are your places of worship and schools safe places? Are they outfitted in a way that they could accommodate people displaced by a disaster in healthy conditions for several weeks? (2) Do your co-religionists understand what to do to protect themselves, their children and their assets in the event of the hazard events that are most common in your region/ locality?
Where the work goes after than is an open question. It also the point where research would probably also have to accompany action as to evaluate action and improve it.
In short, yes, there are very important methodological and conceptual issues that need to be sorted out. Will you help?
All the best,
BEN
Dr. Ben Wisner
Aon-Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London
-----Original Message-----
From: James Cohen
Sent: Nov 27, 2012 9:02 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Religion and Disaster Reduction -- A Call for collaboration and action!
Ben et al,
Please clarify.
Are you proposing the research on the premise that religious input is beneficial or that this is a hypothesis that needs to be proven? Does the research include a hypothesis regarding the relative merits of religious versus sectarian response?
Is it intended that equal effort will be expended into the negative aspects of religious versus sectarian response - a hypothetical to be proven - and will there be a concurrent effort to differentiate government sponsored versus private sponsored versus multi-national sponsored religious / sectarian responses? To say that response type "A" is "good" will not reflect relative worth.
What about positive and negative aspects of cooperation of several groups at a single disaster, exploring actual events?
Will you be including the other agendas behind disaster response, whether for political, financial or religious gain and how this relates to non-denominational and non-partisan definitions of "success" and how or if these other agendas impact on the effectiveness of any "success"?
To what extent will case studies be included, and, how will these be selected?
Not least, how will it be funded? The nature of the proposed research lends itself to bias or perceived bias almost regardless of funding source.
I have several other questions on the proposed research, but these are at the top of my list.
James Cohen
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