China's Great Leap Famine of 1959-61 resulted in 30 million deaths, making it easily the worst famine in human history. Yet unlike the Cultural Revolution - that other massive catastrophe of Mao's rule - the Great Leap Forward has received scant scholarly attention. This is partly because victims of the ensuing famine were inarticulate farmers and partly because many key players in that inglorious era are members of the current elite who tightly guard the archives. Despite these impediments, the author has marshalled an impressive array of historical documents to provide the first comprehensive treatment of the political causes and consequences of the Great Leap Famine. The Famine is important because it furnished the crucial historical motives for dismantling the rural collective institutional structure in post-Mao China two decades later and motivating tens of millions of ordinary Chinese to enact the reforms.

This book deals with both actual and potential terrorist attacks on the United States as well as natural disaster preparedness and management in the current era of global climate change. The topics of preparedness, critical infrastructure investments, and risk assessment are covered in detail. The author takes the reader beyond counterterrorism statistics, better first responder equipment, and a fixation on FEMA grant proposals to a holistic analysis and implementation of mitigation, response, and recovery efforts. The recent Oklahoma tornadoes and West Texas storage tank explosion show the unpredictability of disaster patterns, and the Boston Marathon bombings expose the difficulty in predicting and preventing attacks. Egli makes a compelling case for a culture of resilience by asserting a new focus on interagency collaboration, public-private partnerships, and collective action. Building upon the lessons of the 9/11 attacks, hurricane Katrina, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the basic findings are supported by a creative mix of case studies, which include superstorm Sandy, cascading power outages, GPS and other system vulnerabilities, and Japan's Fukushima disaster with its sobering aftermath. This book will help a new generation of leaders understand the need for smart resilience.

Despite preemptive preparations, disasters can and do occur. Whether natural disasters, catastrophic accidents, or terrorist attacks, the risk cannot be completely eliminated. A carefully prepared response is your best defense. Handbook of Emergency Response: A Human Factors and Systems Engineering Approach presents practical advice and guidelines on how to plan the coordinated execution of emergency response. A useful tool to mitigate logistical problems that often follow disasters or extreme events, the core of this guide is the role of human factors in emergency response project management. The handbook provides a systematic structure for communication, cooperation, and coordination. It highlights what must be done and when, and how to identify the resources required for each effort. The book tackles cutting-edge research in topics such as evacuation planning, chemical agent sensor placement, and riverflow prediction. It offers strategies for establishing an effective training program for first responders and insightful advice in managing waste associated with disasters. Managing a project in the wake of a tragedy is complicated and involves various emotional, sentimental, reactive, and chaotic responses. This is the time that a structured communication model is most needed. Having a guiding model for emergency response can help put things in proper focus. This book provides that model. It guides you through planning for and responding to various emergencies and in overcoming the challenges in these tasks.

Mainstream quantitative analysis and simulations are fraught with difficulties and are intrinsically unable to deal appropriately with long-term macroeconomic effects of disasters. In this new book, J.M. Albala-Bertrand develops the themes introduced in his past book, "The Political Economy of Large Natural Disasters" (Clarendon Press, 1993), to show that societal networking and disaster localization constitute part of an essential framework to understand disaster effects and responses.

The author s last book argued that disasters were a problem "of "development, rather than a problem "for" development. This volume takes the argument forward both in terms of the macroeconomic effects of disaster and development policy, arguing that economy and society are not inert objects, but living organisms. Using a framework based on societal networking and the economic localization of disasters, the author shows that societal functionality (defined as the capacity of a system to survive, reproduce and develop) is unlikely to be impaired by natural disasters.

This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners involved in disaster analysis and response policy, and will also be relevant to students of development economics.

Natural disasters in recent years have brought the study of disaster resiliency to the forefront. The importance of community preparedness and sustainability has been underscored by such calamities as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Japanese tsunami in 2011. Natural disasters will inevitably continue to occur, but by understanding the concept of resiliency as well as the factors that lead to it, communities can minimize their vulnerabilities and increase their resilience.

In this volume, editors Naim Kapucu, Christopher V. Hawkins, and Fernando I. Rivera gather an impressive array of scholars to provide a much needed re-think to the topic disaster resiliency. Previous research on the subject has mainly focused on case studies, but this book offers a more systematic and empirical assessment of resiliency, while at the same time delving into new areas of exploration, including vulnerabilities of mobile home parks, the importance of asset mapping, and the differences between rural and urban locations. Employing a variety of statistical techniques and applying these to disasters in the United States and worldwide, this book examines resiliency through comparative methods which examine public management and policy, community planning and development, and, on the individual level, the ways in which culture, socio-economic status, and social networks contribute to resiliency. The analyses drawn will lead to the development of strategies for community preparation, response, and recovery to natural disasters.

Combining the concept of resiliency, the factors that most account for the resiliency of communities, and the various policies and government operations that can be developed to increase the sustainability of communities in face of disasters, the editors and contributors have assembled an essential resource to scholars in emergency planning, management, and policy, as well as upper-level students studying disaster management and policy.

The extensive literature about averting ecological disasters, nuclear catastrophe, and unsupportable overpopulation typically describes dangers, analyzes their implications, and presses for remedial action. It seems that what is taken as too obvious and well understood to mention, let alone to address seriously, is humanity's failure to give global and human survival top priority. More careful consideration of this irrational, self-destructive sociocultural negligence shows that it is complex, puzzling, and ensconced and perpetuated by pathological societal defenses. This paradox is Averting Global Extinction's subject; Berger argues that if these psychological defenses were reduced, so would be society's indifference to necessary action. The book's clinically informed approach conceptualizes society's self-destructiveness as an analogue to the self-destructive psychopathologies of individuals, identifies society's ubiquitous and destructive psychological defenses (denial, projection, and avoidance) as the chief element in that sociocultural psychopathology, and devises a "sociocultural therapy." This therapy is accomplished by translating a carefully selected individual psychotherapy framework, a subtype of the so-called analysis of defense, into a corresponding societal therapeutic methodology society becomes the "patient." This intervention is intended to complement and facilitate, not replace, the usual recommended approaches to rescuing the globe. Thus, three analogies are deployed between individual and societal: pathology, defenses, and psychotherapy. The book's new and valuable principal contributions are the identification of sociocultural psychopathology as the underlying cause of our near indifference to the threat of global extinction; the recognition of societal defenses as key elements in that pathology; the conceptualization of a therapeutic analogue, applicable at the societal level, to counter that indifference; and the construction of an exemplar of that analogue."

First published in 1989, Chernobyl: The Long Shadow offers a balanced review of what happened there, why and how it happened, and what the main lessons and implications of the accident are. It looks back on events during and after the disaster, in particular reviewing how it and the radiation fallout were dealt with in different countries and looks forward to how the incident might affect the nuclear power industry around the world. The book explores the significance of the accident within the Soviet Union, considers its impact on public confidence in nuclear power, and reviews what improvements are necessary in emergency planning throughout the rest of the world. It is written from an inter-disciplinary perspective; based on detailedscienctific research, which is described in non-specialist terms, it considers themes like attitudes to nuclear power and political reaction to the accident itself. It sets the Chernobyl accident into a proper context. Chernobyl: The Long Shadow will appeal to students and teachers of geography, environmental science, international politics, nuclear physics, and to anyone interested in current affairs and environmental problems.

Pandemic policies have been the focus of fierce lobbying competition by different social and economic interests. In Viral Lobbying a team of expert authors from across the social and natural sciences analyse patterns in and implications of this 'viral lobbying'. Based on elite surveys and focus group interviews with selected groups, the book provides new evidence on the lobbying strategies used during the COVID 19 pandemic, as well as the resulting access to and lobbying influence on public policy. The empirical analyses reach across eight European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom), as well as the EU-level. In particular, the book draws on responses from approximately 1,600 interest organisations in two waves of a cross-country survey (in 2020 and 2021, respectively). This quantitative data is supplemented by qualitative evidence from a series of 12 focus groups with organised interests in Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands conducted in spring 2021.

Through its exploration of the spatial dimension of risk, this book offers a brand new approach to theorizing risk, and significant improvements in how to manage, tolerate and take risks. A broad range of risks are examined, including natural hazards, climate change, political violence, and state failure. Case studies range from the Congo to Central Asia, from tsunami in Japan and civil war affected areas in Sri Lanka to avalanche hazards in Austria. In each of these cases, the authors examine the importance and role of space in the causes and differentiation of risk, in how we can conceptualize risk from a spatial perspective and in the relevance of space and locality for risk governance. This new approach endorsed by Ragnar L fstedt and Ortwin Renn, two of the world's leading and most prolific risk analysts is essential reading for those charged with studying, anticipating and managing risks.

This resource uses primary documents and contextualizing essays to illuminate how America's presidents have responded to major tests of their leadership and approached their role and responsibilities in times of national crisis. Presidents hold the attention of the public like no other political actor. In addition, because of their unique role in the constitutional system, presidents often take immediate, unilateral action in the face of national emergencies. Exploring key events, crises, and disasters through the lens of presidential responsiveness, this text reveals not only the larger historical context but also the authority of presidents in meeting the "felt necessities of the time," deepening readers' understanding of those touchstone events. Comprehensive in temporal and topical scope, the book covers crises and disasters from the presidency of George Washington through Donald Trump's first two years in office. Important events covered include natural disasters, wars, assassinations, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, economic crises, riots, tragedies, and political scandals. Each event is explored through a primary document that reveals key dimensions of the presidential response to the crisis or disaster in question and contextual headnotes and essays that provide additional insights into the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which that event occurred and to which the president responded. Provides readers with an understanding of the dynamics that shaped presidential responses to crises and disasters in American history Allows readers to hear directly from presidents during times of national crisis, uncertainty, and mourning through primary documents Provides important information about the circumstances and settings in which the presidents made their statements to the American people (and the wider world) in contextual headnotes for each primary source Contextualizes the extent and limits of presidential authority and influence in times of national crisis, scandal, disaster, or tragedy in introductory essays from the author

Emerging social media and so-called Web 2.0 technologies will continue to have a great impact on the practice and application of the emergency management function in every public safety sector. Disasters 2.0: The Application of Social Media Systems for Modern Emergency Management prepares emergency managers and first responders to successfully apply social media principles in the operations, logistics, planning, finance, and administrative aspects of any given disaster.

Using real-life examples of domestic and international disasters, the book reveals how social media has quickly become a powerful tool for both providing emergency instruction to the public in real time and allowing responding agencies to communicate among themselves in crisis. A definitive and comprehensive source, the book explores topics such as:

• Social media basics
• Citizen journalism
• Strategic implementation
• Safety and responsibility
• Monitoring and analytics
• Operational implementation
• Geolocation systems
• Crowdsourcing
• Public notification
• Mobile and other emerging technologies

Each chapter begins with a list of objectives and includes a collection of case examples of social media use in past events. Practitioner profiles show real people implementing the technology for real solutions. Demonstrating how to effectively apply social media technology to the next crisis, this is a must-read book for those charged with disaster management and response.

The author's of the award-winning Emotional Labor now go inside the stressful world of suicide, rape, and domestic hotline workers, EMTs, triage nurses, and agency/deparment spokespersons, to provide powerful insights into how emotional labor is actually exerted by public servants who face the gravest challenges.

Wars cannot be fought and sustained without food and this unique collection explores the impact of war on food production, allocation and consumption in Europe in the twentieth century. A comparative perspective which incorporates belligerent, occupied and neutral countries provides new insights into the relationship between food and war. The analysis ranges from military provisioning and systems of food rationing to civilians' survival strategies and the role of war in stimulating innovation and modernization.

This book examines the sociological consequences of disaster relief and recovery, and uncovers its impact on the communities that were affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. It is the most extensive and intensive study of post-disaster community rebuilding yet reported in the literature on the subject. The authors draw on this research to develop a three-phase strategy for moving from quick and effective relief to long-term social recovery work. While there have been many big natural disasters since then, none have affected so many local communities spread over so many nations and none have evoked the same kind of global response. A great deal of post-tsunami recovery work was done in India and Sri Lanka, with more than 500 international aid and humanitarian agencies involved in Sri Lanka alone - many with little experience in long-term community development. This book argues that international aid agencies must work patiently to put in place meaningful partnerships with local, community-based organisations as soon as long-term physical and social planning becomes possible. The authors explain that such an approach could help address some pre-existing vulnerabilities in disaster-affected communities. They argue that it is much easier to rebuild damaged infrastructure than to rebuild shattered lives, and to ensure that traumatised communities are not put under new stresses and strains, the 'fault-lines' within these communities need to be lessened.

When an earthquake hits a war zone or cyclone aid is flown in by an enemy, many ask: Can catastrophe bring peace? Disaster prevention and mitigation provide similar questions. Could setting up a flood warning system bring enemy countries together? Could a regional earthquake building code set the groundwork for wider regional cooperation?
This book examines how and why disaster-related activities do and do not create peace and reduce conflict. Disaster-related activities refer to actions before a disaster such as prevention and mitigation along with actions after a disaster such as emergency response, humanitarian relief, and reconstruction. This volume investigates disaster diplomacy case studies from around the world, in a variety of political and disaster circumstances, from earthquakes in Greece and Turkey affecting these neighbours' bilateral relations to volcanoes and typhoons influencing intra-state conflict in the Philippines. Dictatorships are amongst the case studies, such as Cuba and Burma, along with democracies such as the USA and India. No evidence is found to suggest that disaster diplomacy is a prominent factor in conflict resolution. Instead, disaster-related activities often influence peace processes in the short-term-over weeks and months-provided that a non-disaster-related basis already existed for the reconciliation. That could be secret negotiations between the warring parties or strong trade or cultural links. Over the long-term, disaster-related influences disappear, succumbing to factors such as a leadership change, the usual patterns of political enmity, or belief that an historical grievance should take precedence over disaster-related bonds.
This is the first book on disaster diplomacy. Disaster-politics interactions have been studied for decades, but usually from a specific political framing, covering a specific geographical area, or from a specific disaster framing. As well, plenty of quantitative work has been completed, yet the data limitations are rarely admitted openly or thoroughly analysed. Few publications bring together the topics of disasters and politics in terms of a disaster diplomacy framework, yielding a grounded, qualitative, scientific point of view on the topic.

The author's of the award-winning Emotional Labor now go inside the stressful world of suicide, rape, and domestic hotline workers, EMTs, triage nurses, and agency/deparment spokespersons, to provide powerful insights into how emotional labor is actually exerted by public servants who face the gravest challenges.

Disasters are the result of complex interactions between social and natural forces, acting at multiple scales from the individual and community to the organisational, national and international level. Effective disaster planning, response and recovery require an understanding of these interacting forces, and the role of power, knowledge and organizations.

This book sheds new light on these dynamics, and gives disaster scholars and practitioners new and valuable lessons for management and planning in practice. The authors draw on methods across the social sciences to examine disaster response and recovery as viewed by those in positions of authority and the 'recipients' of operations. These first two sections examine cases from Hurricane Katrina, while the third part compares this to other international disasters to draw out general lessons and practical applications for disaster planning in any context. The authors also offer guidance for shaping institutional structures to better meet the needs of communities and residents.

This edited collection explores aspects of contemporary war that affect average people -- physically, emotionally, and ethically through activities ranging from combat to television viewing. The aim of this work is to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, an international lawyer, an ethicist or other intellectual. This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking, without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda. It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, gender and war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can change our understanding of who is located where doing what with respect to war -- women warriors in Sierra Leone, war survivors living with their memories, and even an artist drawing something seemingly intangible about war -- the arms trade. The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it with those lives and perspectives in mind, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue. This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

In the Aftermath of the Pandemic is an accessible treatment manual enabling psychotherapists to use Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) to address the psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and other large-scale disasters. Well-studied and time-limited, IPT has demonstrated efficacy in treating mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). IPT helps people to mobilize social support, to process and take control of environmental stressors, relieving symptoms. As such it appears an excellent intervention for the wave of psychiatric problems accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. The book describes IPT techniques and focuses on treating the disaster's major outcomes-depression, PTSD, and anxiety-illustrating their treatment with multiple detailed case examples drawn from actual clinical presentations from the pandemic. The book also addresses the sudden shift from in-person to remote tele-therapy, and includes a novel COVID Behavioral Checklist of psychological risk factors. Dr. John Markowitz, a leading IPT expert, explains the psychological impacts of disasters like COVID-19 and the particular usefulness of IPT in addressing them, making this a crucial text for clinicians looking to address the psychiatric crisis the pandemic has wrought.

Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in Times Square during rush hour, wiping out half of Manhattan and killing 500,000 people. A virulent strain of bird flu jumps to humans in Thailand, sweeps across Asia, and claims more than fifty million lives. A single freight car of chlorine derails on the outskirts of Los Angeles, spilling its contents and killing seven million. An asteroid ten kilometers wide slams into the Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami that renders life on the planet as we know it extinct. We consider the few who live in fear of such scenarios to be alarmist or even paranoid. But Worst Cases shows that such individuals-like Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy-are more reasonable and prescient than you might think. In this book, Lee Clarke surveys the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination, from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics. Along the way, he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has rendered them ordinary and mundane. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases will be must reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

Earthquakes come without warming, and often cause massive devastation, resulting not only in the loss of property but also of lives. Many of the survivors suffer from intense and lasting psychological trauma. This book covers the experience of recent earthquakes in India, and what has been learnt (and what we have failed to learn) in the process of managing the aftermath in each case. This includes immediate medical attention, long-term mental health care, and the reconstruction of housing and infrastructure in both rural and urban areas.

The experiences of the contributors, many of whom have actively contributed their expertise to disaster management and recovery, help us understand what problems require a swift response and which aspects should be based on detailed analyses keeping in mind local conditions. Reconstruction is seen as offering an opportunity to rebuild society such that all sections of the population are empowered and brought into the community's decision-making process. It is also an opportunity to develop construction techniques that are suited to local materials and skills but are also more earthquake-resistant than the old. And finally, there is the realisation that the best first responders are local community groups which need to be nurtured, and trained in crisis management and risk mitigation.

Human cultures have been interacting with natural hazards since the dawn of time. This book explores these interactions in detail and revisits some famous catastrophes including the eruptions of Thera and Vesuvius. These studies demonstrate that diverse human cultures had well-developed strategies which facilitated their response to extreme natural events.

This is an age of great calamities. War and revolution, famine and pestilence, are again rampant on this planet, and they still exact their deadly toll from suffering humanity. Calamities influence every moment of our existence: our mentality and behavior, our social life and cultural processes. Like a demon, they cast their shadow upon every thought we think and every action we perform.

In this classic volume, Sorokin attempts to account for the effects these calamities exert on the mental processes, behavior, social organization, and cultural life of the population involved. In what way do famine and pestilence, war and revolution tend to modify our mind and conduct, our social organization and cultural life? To what extent do they succeed in this, and when and why do they prove less effective? What are the causes of these calamities, and what are the ways out?

In dealing with these problems Sorokin tries to give a detailed description of the typical effects of famine and pestilence, war and revolution, such as have repeatedly occurred in all major catastrophes of this kind. To use academic language, he attempts to formulate the principal uniformities regularly manifested during such calamities. This book is a forgotten masterpiece of explanation and prediction. It opened new fields of study and broadened the scope of existing specialties

The Indian Ocean Tsunami, which devastated 70 percent of Sri Lanka's coastline and killed an estimated 35,000 people, was remarkable both for the magnitude of the disaster and for the unprecedented scale of the relief and recovery operations mounted by national and international agencies. The reconstruction process was soon hampered by political patronage, by the competing efforts of hundreds of foreign humanitarian organizations, and by the ongoing civil war.

The book is framed within this larger political and social context, offering descriptions and comparisons between two regions (southwest vs. eastern coast) and four ethnic communities (Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, and Burghers) to illustrate how disaster relief unfolded in a culturally pluralistic political landscape. Approaching the issue from four disciplinary perspectives - anthropology, demography, political science, and disaster studies - chapters by experts in the field analyse regional and ethnic patterns of post-tsunami reconstruction according to different sectors of Sri Lankan society. Demonstrating the key importance of comprehending the local cultural contexts of disaster recovery processes, the book is a timely and useful contribution to the existing literature.

Disasters are not natural. Natural events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, etc. become disasters because of the fragile relations that exist between the natural, human and built environments. Sadly, major disasters will always occur in towns and cities in the developing world where resources are limited, people are vulnerable and needs are particularly great. The prevailing state of emergency challenges thoughtful and sustainable planning and construction. Yet it is possible, in theory and in practice, to construct them in a way that provides a sustainable environment and improved conditions for current and future generations.

Rebuilding After Disasters emphasizes the role of the built environment in the re-establishment of lives and sustainable livelihoods after disasters. Expert contributors explain the principal challenges facing professionals and practitioners in the building industry.

This book will be of great value to decision makers, students and researchers in the fields of architecture, social sciences, engineering, planning, geography, and disaster recovery.