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Introduction: The Challenge of Crisis and Catastrophe in Law and Politics
- University of Massachusetts Press
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Introduction The Challenge of Crisis and Catastrophe in Law and Politics Austin Sarat Javier Lezaun From the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the Darfur tragedy to the Minnesota bridge collapse, ours is an “age of catastrophe.” In this era, catastrophic events seem to have a revelatory quality: they offer powerful reminders of the fragility of our social and institutional architectures, making painfully evident vulnerabilities in our social organization that were otherwise invisible. By disrupting the operation of fundamental mechanisms and infrastructures of our social order, they lay bare the conditions that make our sense of normalcy possible. A catastrophe is thus a moment of manifestation, an opportunity to take in and discern what had previously been veiled. This opportunity is also a challenge, a challenge to human resilience and optimism in the face of disaster. Legal, political, and humanitarian responses are premised on the deep-rooted assumption that we can at least decipher the meanings of disaster, at best correct its causes and prevent future occurrences. Whatever explanatory theory one holds, whether the devastation is attributed to God, nature, or society, catastrophic events test our legal, political, and humanitarian resolve and resourcefulness. This testing is particularly salient with respect to the law. That is the case not only because the breakdown of legal order is one of the clearest signs of a catastrophic disruption, but, more importantly, because the law plays a crucial role in drawing lessons from disaster, in providing relief and redress to victims, and in correcting the vulnerabilities that caused or compounded the destruction. Catastrophes, in other words, put the law to the test of demonstrating its capacity to mitigate or reduce human suffering. introduction At a time when our societies are directing an unprecedented level of resources and ingenuity to anticipating and mitigating catastrophic events, this book, Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse, examines the tests that catastrophe poses to politics and humanitarianism as well as to law. We want to explore legal, political, and humanitarian responses during times when the sudden, discontinuous, and disastrous event has become, perhaps paradoxically, a structural component of our political imagination. We understand our present condition as irredeemably shaped by past catastrophes, and we expect a future punctuated, if not profoundly affected, by disasters yet to come and barely imagined. We want to analyze whether law, politics, and humanitarianism live up to the challenges posed by disaster as well as the role each plays in creating a more resilient world. Catastrophic Politics The study of catastrophes and their political and legal significance has undergone a series of significant changes and turns over the past several decades. As a backdrop to the chapters that follow, let us take stock of some of the elements of this transition. From natural disasters to manufactured risks Any survey of the social-scientific literature on catastrophes and disasters will note a progressive shift of emphasis, from a consideration of natural disasters as “acts of God”—unpreventable and largely unforeseeable events that allow no useful preparation and produce no liability—to a growing perception of catastrophes as human-made affairs.1 Perhaps not all the links in the causal chain that brings about a catastrophe can be attributed to human action (or inaction), but the patterns of damage and suffering that disasters generate follow fault lines with a distinctive social history.2 In parallel, there has been an evolution from approaches that emphasized , to the point of exclusivity, engineering solutions to natural hazards toward perspectives better attuned to the role that law and policy do play in reducing, or increasing, social vulnerability to disaster.3 The socialscientific literature on risk illustrates this transition well. The “risk society ” thesis argues, for instance, that we live in a world dominated by “manufactured risks” in which differential exposure to man-made hazards constitutes a new principle of social inequality.4 [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:51 GMT) introduction Disasters have thus been denaturalized, at least in the academic literature , less so in the assumptions and criteria of policy organizations.5 Catastrophic events might introduce a radical level of discontinuity in everyday life, but the trajectory of their effect responds to the patterns and configurations of our social organization. If we accept that disasters have institutional and political genealogies, often with a distinctive national character,6 and that there is thus a social distribution of the exposure, vulnerability, and suffering associated with catastrophes, we must necessarily highlight the significance of...