The Politics of Disaster: Four Dilemmas

David Alexander is professor of geography at UMass/Amherst. For amplification on this topic, see the Radix-Radical Interpretations of Disaster website at <www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/radix>

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race." --George Bernard Shaw

I believe that this is a time of great uncertainty for disaster researchers. Reading through articles on the current crisis, it is very apparent that we are adept at forming the questions, but we have remarkably few of the answers.

The world situation is complex; information may be superabundant but its quality and incisiveness are insufficient. All one can do is struggle to highlight some of the difficulties of providing reliable interpretations capable of shedding light on the situation. Any attempt to provide the answers is liable to be proved wrong by the history that is in the making right now. Here are four dilemmas. In some ways each one appears more like a paradox than a dilemma, but the former begets the latter.

Dilemma #1: Hazards models do not fit the current situation.

Many academics, myself included, have spent years studying disasters, with particular emphasis on natural catastrophes (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and so on) and technological ones (factory explosions, toxic spills, transportation crashes due to error or malfunction, etc.). Terrorism is different from these sorts of hazards in the following ways:

• it stems from deliberate human malevolence rather than the impartiality of nature or the relative impartiality of human error;
• the threat may be designed to be unpredictable;
• the causal chain may be longer and more complex; and
• there are deep contradictions in the motives and motivations of the perpetrators and those who support them.

Morally, terrorism is indefensible, though, of course, the division is sometimes unclear between direct action inspired by just causes and the creation of mayhem and terror without adequate moral justification. This leads one onto difficult ground when dealing with the proposition that the end justifies the means. There are some who argue that at times it seems to, though the wanton--and random--sacrifice of innocent lives is certainly not adequate support for such strategies. In contrast, natural and technological hazards pose few moral dilemmas, though failure to reduce vulnerability and to prepare may be morally reprehensible. Nevertheless, a hurricane or a volcanic eruption is a conveniently neutral sort of ill: all factions of society can band together to tackle the problems it causes. But terrorism pits one faction against another.

The term terrorism encompasses a wide variety of behaviours, including:-

• sabotage and material destruction;
• hijacking and commandeering;
• hostage taking; and
• deliberate wounding or taking of lives.

These tactics can of course be used separately or in combination. Targets, including human ones, may be specific or random. When compared to natural and technological hazards, there are differences of cause, function, and purpose. Hence, if the roots of the problem are different, so should be the diagnosis.

So our models, derived as they are from morally neutral events, do not fit. It is extremely difficult to predict how recovery will take place. The standard models rely on symbolism as much as on socio-economic realities. In the 1970s geographers Robert W. Kates and David J. Pijawka formulated a post-earthquake reconstruction model which saw places such as Lisbon (1755-75) and San Francisco (1906-29) not merely reconstructing lost accommodation, but building monumentally to signify that the tragedy had been overcome and the destruction that lay all around had been vanquished. But will it be the same this time, as the symbol itself was the subject of the attack? Perhaps the model has been inverted: this time there will be no "damnedest fine ruins ever seen," as San Franciscans described their city when it had been ravaged by earthquake and fire.

Dilemma #2: Even after a terrible outrage there are still other valid points of view.

The tragedies of September 11th may force us to revisit persistent vexing issues, such as explanations of choice, that pit material considerations against the power of ideas. From one viewpoint, we see attempts to reassert the power of democracy and individual freedom against cruelly arbitrary forms of aggression. From another angle, the same impulses appear as attempts to reassert the power of materialism and libertarianism over asceticism and sacrifice.

Disasters are about democracy--in both a positive sense, as they lead to new forms of social participation (social scientists call them the "therapeutic community"), and a negative one, as they can easily pervert or negate it.

In the Western world of representative democracy, powerful industries exist to form and manipulate public opinion and each day vast sums of money are spent on doing so. We live under the fiction of a politics that responds to spontaneous manifestations of popular will. Instead, public opinion more commonly responds to the will of oligarchies.

Nevertheless, the tragedies of September 11th led to outpourings of solidarity and expressions of the need for a more human sense of community and a more humane society. The shock of the events gave rise to a genuine consensus, an authentic form of participatory democracy. The mass media transformed this into a rather flat series of human interest stories uniformly designed to show the spirit of a people bloodied but unbowed.

In reality, what has emerged is one of the largest outbreaks of cognitive dissonance in recent history, one that dwarfs the long-held ambiguity of San Franciscans regarding the earthquake threat to their city. Why so much enmity towards the US? Surely it can't all be envy? The news media are doing a good job of reporting the foreign opposition, but by and large they are doing a very poor one of explaining it.

Dilemma #3: Consensus can be both spontaneous and manufactured.

The success of the opinion formers in Western representative democracy depends on three things: a selective approach to facts, an even more selective approach to history, and the shortness of public memory. Foreign policy depends, as George Washington said in 1796, on "steering clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world." What a fortunate coincidence! When yesterday's freedom fighters become today's sponsors of terrorism, few people remember enough to ask the uncomfortable questions about who has sponsored whom, and few people are interested in searching for complex answers.

Dilemma #4: While it seemed essential that there be a quick, decisive response to September 11th, regardless of whether positive or negative, quick, decisive results are virtually impossible to achieve.

I began writing this soon after the opening salvo of 50 cruise missiles was launched upon the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They fell on a geographical unit that hardly fits the definition of a state, with a capital city that hardly fits the definition of an administrative centre, and a government that hardly fits the definition of an administration. Recently in Afghanistan, in times of relative peace, the largest monetary statistic (except for the US$5.4 billion national debt) referred to imports of manufactured goods from the USA. These were valued at 35.8 times total government revenue, and 43% of them were officially classified as armaments and munitions. US military aid to the Mojaheddin (of which the Taleban are, or were, part) has amounted to $2.8 billion since the 1979 invasion of the Russians.

On the other side of the coin, the country's most valuable export to the West (it does not appear in the statistics) was the 4500 tons of heroin produced annually, constituting about 80% of world supply, for which demand has been insatiable. In May 2001 the current US administration allotted $43 million to the Taleban in the hope that it would induce them to spend it on alternatives to the heroin production, which they had been informally taxing in order to pay for armaments and military activities. Despite their despicable human rights record the Taleban were not at the time designated as terrorists.

In Afghanistan the last available statistics on food supply suggest that only 62% of the recommended minimum daily requirement was available. Since then the situation has worsened considerably. Some 3.2 million people have been affected by disaster over the last ten years, 2.6 million of them in the year 2000 alone. There may now be five million refugees out of a total population of 23.5 million. Already at the end of August, Afghanis constituted the largest per capita international refugee population in the world.

In the first week of the military campaign it was estimated that 600 civilians died of starvation. This may shock us, but it should not surprise. Since 1945 more than 150 local and regional wars have broken out. While the first half of the 20th century saw war globalized, the second half saw it made vastly more efficient by advances in technology and the rate of production of armaments. This leads, by the way to some oddly ironic contrasts. A glance through Jane's Weapons Systems reveals that it is full of advertisements for canonry that will pierce the best available defenses and armor that will resist the most powerful canonry. One cannot have it both ways. The sheer intensity of technological, economic, social, and political investment in warfare means, not only that wars often persist for decades without conclusion, but that total warfare is a much more common phenomenon than ever before. Some 90% of the victims of war in these last 50 years have been civilians, not soldiers, and more than 50% have been women and children.

In 1840 12,000 members of a well-equipped British Army and 18,000 followers (servants, women, and children) were defeated at Kabul and systematically massacred by small bands of irregulars. Only one survivor made it back to the British garrison at Jalalabad. No outside force has successfully conquered the area of the Hindu Kush and the Kabul valley since my namesake did so in 326 B.C., and his tenure in Afghanistan was fleeting.

These facts do not instantly reveal their mutual connections, but they add up to one of the largest complex emergencies in decades (the other is the "disaster the world forgot" in Chechnya).

There obviously had to be a response to the outrages in Washington and New York, and it obviously had to be a highly visible one. But like Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and Nagorno-Karabakh, Afghanistan is a buffer state. Wars in such terrain tend to be inconclusive and protracted. Moreover, Afghanistan is virtually the cradle of guerrilla warfare, which for two centuries has acted so spectacularly to the detriment of regular armies. Precision bombing has no meaning in such circumstances and in such terrain. In this respect, it is interesting that General Colin Powell was already talking about collateral damage when he was interviewed on September 12th concerning a possible US-led response to the previous day's outrages.

Will the West's combination of money, technology, firepower, humanitarian aid, and diplomatic muscle succeed in solving the problem? It may be decades before we know: a century and a half ago the British grappled with the Afghan problem unsuccessfully through three successive wars. Much further back in time, in the early 1200s, Temuejin, better known as Genghis Kahn, thought it best to slaughter the Afghans, for he could not bring them to heel.

15 Previous Article      Next Article