Dear David,

 

It is likewise an honour to respond to your rejoinder to my Inside Out commentary for the 40-year anniversary of Disasters. This piece is indeed provocative and I’d be very happy should it contribute to open up a debate on the epistemology and practice of disaster research. Your rejoinder is a first step in this direction and I am therefore very grateful. In fact, I agree with some of your points although I obviously stand by my overall argument.

 

I, in fact, agree that referring to the West as an homogenous entity can be problematic in some instances. It doesn’t reflect the complex reality of the world, indeed, and I obviously struggle with this in several instances in the paper (e.g. the use of OECD as a proxy and the positioning of China and Japan) but I also feel like this short paper wasn’t the appropriate venue to further this complex debate.

 

I rather focus on the core of the argument, which is why, to me, disaster research has not changed as much as it claims it has over the past 40 years. For example, one of my concerns is that most of the concepts that have been structuring disaster studies over the past decades indeed come from Indo-European languages and that these concepts have been rolled out in many other contexts where they do not necessarily make sense, which may have skewed our understanding of disasters (if such events/processes actually exist as we usually understand them) and hence how disaster risk reduction is considered.

 

I also agree that there is no single centre of power at one global level but multiple cores at many different scales. I only mention this in passing in the paper but the processes of marginalisation and unequal power relations between researchers that I discuss at the world scale happen at regional and national levels too, for example between researchers from the capital vs researcher from peripheral/smaller cities, including within wealthy countries of what I call the West. Regardless of the scale of core-periphery relationships in disaster studies these unequal power relations seem to involve consent (in Gramsci’s terms) on the side of those who have less power to make decision. As such, it is definitely a complex relationship that is surely not a one-way process.

 

In essence, it is the processes and relationships more than the actual location of centres of power and peripheries that matter in my argument. This is why I’m not suggesting to ‘emasculate’ researchers from the wealthiest countries/regions/cities/universities (again, in relative terms at different scales). For disaster studies to live up to its ambition I’m rather calling for more dialogue and fair collaboration where local researchers lead and outsiders support, meaning that the latter definitely have their own role to play still.

 

Best wishes,

 

JC

 

 

 

 

I thank J-C for his provocative and stimulating contribution. It is an honour to disagree with him.

 

To be a scientist is to be a colonialist?

 

Why should the search for a set of universal truths be regarded as hegemony?

 

Western science is not 40 years old but stems from the work of thinkers two millennia ago, strongly tempered by their counterparts in the Arab world. [And to mark that fact I made a personal pilgrimage to the tomb of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in Hamadan, western Iran. He bore some responsibility for the hazards paradigm!] Disaster science, born in Canada and Russia, is only 100 years old, but it has taken the same path: a search for universal truths about the human condition.

 

Technology may indeed have been the means of repressing African and Asian peoples, and denying the value of indigenous knowledge, but that is far from the whole story. Asiatic societies have been at least as keen on technological solutions as western ones - indeed, often more so. On the other hand, Asian and African academics have fully embraced the Western model of scholarship - the experimental method of replicability.

 

No one would deny that there is much to learn from local conditions. Western disaster scientists have been investigating them in many contexts, western and eastern, for a century. In this endeavour, there has been no shortage of pluralism. However, much depends on what the researcher makes of local knowledge. Local studies are all very well, but unless they have something to say of a more general nature they have limited utility.

 

In disaster studies at present, the most prolific country is China. There are some particularly Chinese preoccupations (the effect of drought upon crops, seismic landslides) but most Chinese disaster science is perfectly similar to its Western counterpart.

 

One of the most negative aspects of the hazards paradigm has been the way that it has discouraged cultural studies of disaster risk. But rather than being forcibly exported, ‘Western culture’ is an oversimplified concept, a ragbag of many different things (and a good many of them were the product of cross-fertilisation with non-Western influences). Western countries have many different cultures. In response to that, colonialism was practised at home before it was ever exported. Readers of this my detect an inconsistency between the idea of the Western cradle of universal science and the plurality of Western cultures. In fact, science is not ‘Western’, it is the property of all humanity, but what counts is how we use it. And we use it in different ways.

 

The real enemy of inclusiveness is not academic colonialism, but competitivity. This is now truly a global phenomenon. Asian universities are no less competitive than are Western ones. We know that there is a paradox: science is better advanced by collaboration than competition, but global models force us into the competitive model.

 

There is no greater oversimplification than the idea that people who live in North America and Europe are responsible for global phenomena. For this to be true, the mechanism needs to be demonstrated, and it reveals itself to be a gross oversimplification. Global trends are global because they are globally supported. Emasculating Western academics would not lead to sudden flowering of disaster scholarship in the rest of the world. And in any case, this is the Chinese century.

 

David Alexander

 

From: Radix <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Victor Marchezini
Sent: 04 January 2019 21:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Very interesting article "Disaster studies inside out"

 

 

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