Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast in 2005, leaving an unparalleled trail of physical destruction. In addition to that damage, the storm wrought massive psychological and cultural trauma on Gulf Coast residents and on America as a whole. Details of the devastation were quickly reported-and misreported-by media outlets, and a slew of articles and books followed, offering a spectrum of socio-political commentaries and analyses. But beyond the reportage and the commentary, a series of fictional and creative accounts of the Katrina-experience have emerged in various mediums: novels, plays, films, television shows, songs, graphic novels, collections of photographs, and works of creative non-fiction that blur the lines between reportage, memoir, and poetry. The creative outpouring brings to mind Salman Rushdie's observation that, "Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that tells itself stories to understand what kind of creature it is." This book accepts the urge behind Rushdie's formula: humans tell stories in order to understand ourselves, our world, and our place in it. Indeed, the creative output on Katrina represents efforts to construct a cohesive narrative out of the wreckage of a cataclysmic event. However, this book goes further than merely cataloguing the ways that Katrina narratives support Rushdie's rich claim. This collection represents a concentrated attempt to chart the effects of Katrina on our cultural identity; it seeks to not merely catalogue the trauma of the event but to explore the ways that such an event functions in and on the literature that represents it. The body of work that sprung out of Katrina offers a unique critical opportunity to better understand the genres that structure our stories and the ways stories reflect and produce culture and identity. These essays raise new questions about the representative genres themselves. The stories are efforts to represent and understand the human condition, but so are the organizing principles that communicate the stories. That is, Katrina-narratives present an opportunity to interrogate the ways that specific narrative structures inform our understanding and develop our cultural identity. This book offers a critical processing of the newly emerging and diverse canon of Katrina texts.

Free World? is a major contribution to the transnational history of humanitarianism in the postwar world. Peter Gatrell shows how and why the UN, NGOs, governments and individuals embarked on a unique campaign, World Refugee Year (1959-60), in response to global refugee crises, particularly in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. Adopted by nearly one hundred countries, the campaign galvanised public opinion and raised money by enlisting celebrities, using the mass media, and recreating 'refugee camps' in the affluent West. Free World? assesses the causes and consequences of the refugee crises, locates the campaign in the broader geopolitical context of the Cold War and decolonisation and shows how it helped to inspire subsequent campaigns such as Amnesty International and Freedom from Hunger. Ultimately, the book asks how those who are in a more privileged position might better reflect on their responsibilities towards refugees in the modern world.

Disasters can strike often and with unexpected fury, resulting in devastating consequences for local populations that are insufficiently prepared and largely dependent upon foreign aid in the wake of such catastrophes. International law can play a significant role in the recovery after inevitable natural disasters; however, without clear legal frameworks, aid may be stopped, delayed, or even hijacked placing the intended suffering recipients in critical condition. This edited volume brings together experts, emerging scholars, and practitioners in the field of international disaster law from North America, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia to analyze the evolution of international disaster law as a field that encompasses new ideas about human rights, sovereignty, and technology. Chapters focus on specific natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Cyclone Nargis, and Typhoon Hainan in addition to volcanic and earthquake activity, wildfires, and desertification. This book begins a dialogue on the profound implications of the evolution of international law as a tool for disaster response."

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In recent years, typhoons have struck the Philippines and Vanuatu; earthquakes have rocked Haiti, Pakistan, and Nepal; floods have swept through Pakistan and Mozambique; droughts have hit Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia; and more. All led to loss of life and loss of livelihoods, and recovery will take years. One of the likely effects of climate change is to increase the likelihood of the type of extreme weather events that seems to cause these disasters. But do extreme events have to turn into disasters with huge loss of life and suffering? Dull Disasters? harnesses lessons from finance, political science, economics, psychology, and the natural sciences to show how countries and their partners can be far better prepared to deal with disasters. The insights can lead to practical ways in which governments, civil society, private firms, and international organizations can work together to reduce the risks to people and economies when a disaster looms. Responses to disasters then become less emotional, less political, less headline-grabbing, and more business as usual and effective. The book takes the reader through a range of solutions that have been implemented around the world to respond to disasters. It gives an overview of the evidence on what works and what doesn't and it examines the crucial issue of disaster risk financing. Building on the latest evidence, it presents a set of lessons and principles to guide future thinking, research, and practice in this area.

With growing awareness of the devastation caused by major natural disasters, alongside integration of governance and technology networks, the parameters of humanitarian aid are becoming more global. At the same time, humanitarian instruments are increasingly recognizing the centrality of local participation. Drawing on six case studies and a survey of sixty-nine members of the relief sector, this book suggests that the key to the efficacy of post-disaster recovery is the primacy given to local actors in the management, direction and design of relief programs. Where local partnership and knowledge generation and application is ongoing, cohesive, meaningful and inclusive, disaster relief efforts are more targeted, cost-effective, efficient and timely. Governing Disasters: Engaging Local Populations in Humanitarian Relief examines the interplay between law, governance and collaborative decision making with international, state, private sector and community actors in order to understand the dynamics of a global decentralized yet coordinated process of post-disaster humanitarian assistance.

International organizations do not always live up to the expectations and mandates of their member countries. One of the best examples of this gap is the environmental performance of multilateral development banks, which are tasked with allocating and managing approximately half of all development assistance worldwide. In the 1980s and 1990s, the multilateral development banks came under severe criticism for financing projects that caused extensive deforestation, polluted large urban areas, displaced millions of people, and destroyed valuable natural resources. In response to significant and public failures, member countries established or strengthened administrative procedures, citizen complaint mechanisms, project evaluation, and strategic planning processes. All of these reforms intended to close the gap between the mandates and performance of the multilateral development banks by shaping the way projects are approved. Giving Aid Effectively provides a systematic examination of whether these efforts have succeeded in aligning allocation decisions with performance. Mark T. Buntaine argues that the most important way to give aid effectively is selectivity - moving towards projects with a record of success and away from projects with a record of failure for individual recipient countries. This book shows that under certain circumstances, the control mechanisms established to close the gap between mandate and performance have achieved selectivity. Member countries prompt the multilateral development banks to give aid more effectively when they generate information about the outcomes of past operations and use that information to make less successful projects harder to approve or more successful projects easier to approve. This argument is substantiated with the most extensive analysis of evaluations across four multilateral development banks ever completed, together with in-depth case studies and dozens of interviews. More generally, Giving Aid Effectively demonstrates that member countries have a number of mechanisms that allow them to manage international organizations for results.

Providing a detailed and comparative assessment of the humanitarian responses to a series of major disasters in Asia over the past two decades, including massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, this book explores complex and changing understandings and practices of relief, recovery, and reconstruction. These critical investigations raise questions about the position and responsibilities of a growing range of stakeholders, and provide in-depth explorations of the ways in which local communities are transformed on multiple levels - not only by the impact of disaster events, but also by the experiences of rebuilding. This timely volume highlights how the experiences of Asia can contribute towards post-disaster responses globally, to safeguard future communities and reduce vulnerabilities. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers interested in post-disaster transformations and development studies, practitioners in NGOs, and government officials dealing with disaster response and disaster risk reduction.

Current foreign aid programs are failing because they are based upon flawed assumptions about how countries develop. They attempt to achieve development without first achieving good governance and security, which are essential prerequisites for sustainable development. In focusing on the poorer members of society, they neglect the elites upon whose leadership the quality of governance and security depends. By downplaying the relevance of cultural factors to development, they avoid altering cultural characteristics that account for most of the weaknesses of elites in poor nations. Drawing on a wealth of examples from around the world, the author shows that foreign aid can be made much more effective by focusing it on human capital development. Training, education, and other forms of assistance can confer both skills and cultural attributes on current and future leaders, especially those responsible for security and governance.

How should the international community react when a government transgresses humanitarian norms and violates the human rights of its own nationals? And where does the responsibility lie to protect people from such acts of violation? In this profound study, Fabian Klose unites a team of leading scholars to investigate some of the most complex and controversial debates regarding the legitimacy of protecting humanitarian norms and universal human rights by non-violent and violent means. Charting the development of humanitarian intervention from its origins in the nineteenth century through to the present day, the book surveys the philosophical and legal rationales of enforcing humanitarian norms by military means, and how attitudes to military intervention on humanitarian grounds have changed over the course of three centuries. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, the authors lend a fresh perspective to contemporary dilemmas using case studies from Europe, the United States, Africa and Asia.

A COMPLETE, STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO PREPARING YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY TO AID FIRST RESPONDERS DURING A DISASTER SITUATION Nothing brings out the best in neighbors more than facing a catastrophe together. But don't wait till the disaster is upon you. This book shows how you can work together today to protect the lives and homes of all the families in your neighborhood tomorrow. With guidance on how you can take a leadership role, this helpful handbook details everything your community needs to be fully prepared for any natural disaster. * Creating event-specific disaster kits for yourself and your family * Learning about basic fire safety and fire fighting * Establishing triage centers in the event that first responders can't reach you * Stabilizing disaster victims through need-to-know first aid * Creating your own neighborhood emergency response team to keep your neighborhood safe and save lives should the worst occur

It was almost November 2012 when Hurricane Sandy, a late arrival in an otherwise quiet tropical season, slammed into the Mid-Atlantic US coastline. Millions of residents were plunged into darkness and billions of dollars in property and infrastructure were flooded or washed away in surging waters. Blizzard conditions struck the Appalachians as the hybrid Halloween monster moved inland. Savage Sand and Surf: The Hurricane Sandy Disaster is multi-faceted examination into one of the most recent natural disasters in the United States. Scholars from multiple disciplines address a wide range of important aspects of this event, including unique meteorological and social impacts of Sandy, Sandy's intersection with vulnerable social groups in society, and social institutions' adaptations to the disaster. Also, different theoretical models of disasters are explored and applied to better understand and prepare for similar events in the future.

Aid workers commonly bemoan that the experience of working in the field sits uneasily with the goals they've signed up to: visiting project sites in air-conditioned Land Cruisers while the intended beneficiaries walk barefoot through the heat, or checking emails from within gated compounds while surrounding communities have no running water. Spaces of Aid provides the first book-length analysis of what has colloquially been referred to as Aid Land. It explores in depth two high-profile case studies, the Aceh tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, in order to uncover a fascinating history of the objects and spaces that have become an endemic yet unexamined part of the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Rethinking Disaster Recovery focuses attention on the social inequalities that existed on the Gulf Coast before Hurricane Katrina and how they have been magnified or altered since the storm. With a focus on social axes of power such as gender, sexuality, race, and class, this book tells new and personalized stories of recovery that help to deepen our understanding of the disaster. Specifically, the volume examines ways in which gender and sexuality issues have been largely ignored in the emerging post-Katrina literature. The voices of young racial and ethnic minorities growing up in post-Katrina New Orleans also rise to the surface as they discuss their outlook on future employment. Environmental inequities and the slow pace of recovery for many parts of the city are revealed through narrative accounts from volunteers helping to rebuild. Scholars, who were themselves impacted, tell personal stories of trauma, displacement, and recovery as they connect their biographies to a larger social context. These insights into the day-to-day lives of survivors over the past ten years help illuminate the complex disaster recovery process and provide key lessons for all-too-likely future disasters. How do experiences of recovery vary along several axes of difference? Why are some able to recover quickly while others struggle? What is it like to live in a city recovering from catastrophe and what are the prospects for the future? Through on-the-ground observation and keen sociological analysis, Rethinking Disaster Recovery answers some of these questions and suggests interesting new avenues for research.

In December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions of Sri Lanka. Six months later, Michele Ruth Gamburd returned to the village where she had been conducting research for many years and began collecting residents' stories of the disaster and its aftermath: the chaos and loss of the flood itself; the sense of community and leveling of social distinctions as people worked together to recover and regroup; and the local and national politics of foreign aid as the country began to rebuild. In The Golden Wave, Gamburd describes how the catastrophe changed social identities, economic dynamics, and political structures.

Minutes before supertanker "Exxon Valdez" ran aground on Bligh Reef, before rocks ripped a huge hole in her hull and a geyser of crude oil darkened the pristine waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound, the ship's lookout burst through the chart room door. "That light, sir, it's still on the starboard side. It should be to port, sir." Her frantic words were merely the last in a litany of futile warnings.

"Red Light to Starboard" documents an event that stunned the world-- recounting how futile warnings, regional and national history, as well as failed governmental and public policy decisions led to disastrous environmental consequences for a spectacular, fragile ecosystem. Cordova native Bobby Day's intimate story lends a local fisherman's perspective and conveys the damage suffered by individuals, communities, and the fishing industry.

Neither government programs nor massive charitable efforts responded adequately to the human crisis that was Hurricane Katrina. In this study, the authors use extensive interviews with Katrina evacuees and reports from service providers to identify what helped or hindered the reestablishment of the lives of hurricane survivors who relocated to Austin, Texas. Drawing on social capital and social network theory, the authors assess the complementary, and often conflicting, roles of FEMA, other governmental agencies and a range of non-governmental organizations in addressing survivors' short- and longer-term needs. While these organizations came together to assist with immediate emergency needs, even collectively they could not deal with survivors' long-term needs for employment, affordable housing and personal records necessary to rebuild lives. Community Lost provides empirical evidence that civil society organizations cannot substitute for an efficient and benevolent state, which is necessary for society to function.

Disaster can strike without notice. In a split-second the forces of nature, human intervention, or a simple twist of fate can place lives in jeopardy. A ship sinks, a plane crashes, a child wanders deep into the forest. Death is imminent, except for the bravery and persistence of small groups of men and women who enter these dark frontiers as rescuers. They fail sometimes. But often they return with the near dead, plucking them from the hungry jaws of disaster. Written by veteran newsman Dean Beeby, "Deadly Frontiers: Disaster and Rescue on Canada's Atlantic Seaboard" tells the stories of real-life heroes, and of the bureaucracy and bungling that threaten their lives and those they have sworn to save.

In "Deadly Frontiers," Dean Beeby deals with the chilling question of Canada's preparedness for disaster, as he investigates the most significant events in the contemporary history of search and rescue. Canada occupies a unique position in the rarified world of search and rescue. The second-largest country on the planet, Canada has three jagged coastlines, an immense internal wilderness, and a vast Arctic to swallow hapless travellers. Since the Second World War, Canada's East Coast has been the crucible for modern search-and-rescue techniques and equipment. This hard-won experience has been driven mostly by disaster, from the 1982 sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig off Newfoundland to numerous cargo-vessel disappearances in the 1990s, including the "Protektor, Gold Bond Conveyor, Marika," and "Vanessa." Ground search and rescue, a special branch of this culture, was reborn in 1986 during the protracted search for a lost child in the forests north of Halifax. Swissair Flight 111 plunged into waters off Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia in 1998, triggering a massive search-and-recovery effort, as well as a fundamental rethinking of emergency response. The worst disaster within the search-and-rescue community itself was the 1998 crash in Quebec of a Labrador helicopter from Greenwood, Nova Scotia, leaving six rescue specialists dead among the charred wreckage.

In "Deadly Frontiers," author Dean Beeby examines official documents, forensic evidence, and the personal histories of those involved in these cases and more. His book is a frank examination of how Canada's tragedies and triumphs have helped forge a professional search-and-rescue culture that is second to none.

The growth and spread of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at local and international levels has attracted considerable interest and attention from policy-makers, development practitioners, academics and activists around the world. But how has this phenomenon impacted on struggles for social and environmental justice? How has it challenged - or reinforced - the forces of capitalism and colonialism? And what political, economic, social and cultural interests does this serve? NGOization - the professionalization and institutionalization of social action - has long been a hotly contested issue in grassroots social movements and communities of resistance. 'NGO-ization' pulls together for the first time unique perspectives of social struggles and critically-engaged scholars from wide range of geographical and political contexts, to offer a evidence-based insight into the tensions and challenges of the NGO model while considering the feasibility of alternatives.

Disasters, both natural and man-made, are on the rise. Indeed, a catastrophe of one sort or another seems always to be unfolding somewhere on this planet. We have entered into a veritable Age of Catastrophes which, in the 20th century, grew both larger and more complex, to the point where disasters are now routinely planetary in scale and scope. The old days of the geographically isolated industrial accidents, of the sinking of a Titanic or the explosion of a Hindenburg, together with their isolated causes and limited effects, is over. Now, disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill or the Japan tsunami and nuclear reactor accident, threaten to engulf the very order of civilization. This book analyzes the efforts of Westerners to keep the catastrophes outside, while maintaining order on the inside of society. These efforts are presently breaking down, as Nature and Civilization have become so intertwined they can no longer be clearly separated. Catastrophe is everywhere, and natural disasters, moreover, are becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate from ""man-made.

This book examines the local and regional procurement for U.S. international emergency food aid. Using federally appropriated funds to procure commodities for international food aid in countries with emergency needs or in nearby countries is a controversial issue. In budget submissions for 2006-2009, the Bush Administration proposed allocating up to 25% of the funds available for U.S. food aid to local or regional procurement (LRP) of food aid commodities. However, each time Congress rejected the proposal. The Administration argued that LRP would increase the timeliness and effectiveness of the U.S. response to overseas food emergencies by eliminating the need to transport commodities by ocean carriers. Congressional and other critics of the local procurement proposal maintain that allowing non-U.S. commodities to be purchased would undermine the coalition of commodity groups, agribusinesses, private voluntary organisations, and shippers that participate in and support the U.S. food aid program and would reduce the volume of U.S. commodities provided as aid.

This title is previously released in eBook format, now available as a paperback due to popular demand. Based on archival and secondary sources, counterpoising firsthand accounts with rigorous historical research and short pithy biographical sketches, to bring modern readers into the world of 1920s humanitarian aid "Embroidering History: An Englishwoman's Experience as a Humanitarian Aid Volunteer in Post-War Poland, 1924-1925" provides a glimpse inside the inner workings of an early humanitarian aid project through the lively letters of a middle class English woman who steps out of her depth into rural village life in post-war Poland of 1925. She leaves teaching to volunteer with a Quaker project providing income generating work for refugee peasant women. Along the way she encounters recalcitrant Belarusian peasants, manipulative local government officials, excitable bourgeois Poles, and altruistic American Quakers. And few of them really meet her British expectations of how things ought to be done. Margaret Tregear's prose remains crisp and immediate, and her frank letters take the reader into a world where her frustrations are balanced with an intense curiosity, and a desire to explain her experiences to her friends across Europe. A carefully researched introduction places the project in the wider context of humanitarian aid provision in the aftermath of WWI, and explores how the different motives and expectations of the people involved - international staff, local staff, project beneficiaries, and local power brokers - shape the projects outcomes, and reveal conflicts rooted in culture and power that will resonate with anyone interested in international aid today. Embroidering History brings typed letters from the 1920s into the e-reader of the 21st century, bridging time and technology to make history accessible and relevant to history buffs and modern aid workers alike.

After almost forty years of development aid most commentators agree that aid as we know it has not worked. Aid fatigue is suffered on both the donor and recipient sides, with a wide divergence between those who call for a radical overhaul of aid delivery methods, those who advocate a complete end to development aid and those who continually demand significant increases in aid flows. David Fee provides a refreshing, insightful and comprehensive analysis of how an exit may actually be possible - drawing on real experience and as such supplying a simple summary of recommended policy steps. The author thoroughly reviews aid for trade, regional integration and microfinance and a host of other solutions that have been proposed - arguing that an exit strategy for both donors and the least developed countries will have to consider the optimal combination of these specific initiatives to best satisfy the necessity of development and at the same time solve the problems of conventional aid.

In Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence, James W. Messerschmidt unravels some of the mysteries of teenage violence. Written by one of the most respected scholars on the subject of gendered crime, this book provides a fascinating account of the connections among adolescent masculinities and femininities, bullying in schools, the body, heterosexuality, and violence and nonviolence. After an introduction that lays out key concepts, including a revised structured action theory, Messerschmidt shares six compelling life-histories of white working-class boys and girls who have all been victims of severe forms of bullying at school. The book is unique in its comparative approach between violent and nonviolent youth, between boys and girls as offenders and non-offenders, between assaultive and sexual violence, and among a variety of masculinities and femininities. It also addresses how heterosexuality is related to sex, gender, and certain forms of violence or non-violence. The penetrating life histories are partially drawn from Messerschmid's previous books Nine Lives and Flesh and Blood, as well as several completely new life-history interviews. The book's cutting-edge conceptualization of these life histories provides novel insight into the vexing question of youth violence.

In Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence, James W. Messerschmidt unravels some of the mysteries of teenage violence. Written by one of the most respected scholars on the subject of gendered crime, this book provides a fascinating account of the connections among adolescent masculinities and femininities, bullying in schools, the body, heterosexuality, and violence and nonviolence. After an introduction that lays out key concepts, including a revised structured action theory, Messerschmidt shares six compelling life-histories of white working-class boys and girls who have all been victims of severe forms of bullying at school. The book is unique in its comparative approach between violent and nonviolent youth, between boys and girls as offenders and non-offenders, between assaultive and sexual violence, and among a variety of masculinities and femininities. It also addresses how heterosexuality is related to sex, gender, and certain forms of violence or non-violence. The penetrating life histories are partially drawn from Messerschmid's previous books Nine Lives and Flesh and Blood, as well as several completely new life-history interviews. The book's cutting-edge conceptualization of these life histories provides novel insight into the vexing question of youth violence.