Abstract
In a conference room at the Sendai International Center in Japan, a few hundred delegates from 187 countries have been sitting for three days, seated in alphabetical order by country. At the back of the room, tables have been set up for delegates who are identified by the group they represent (women, indigenous communities, private sector, non-governmental organization [NGO], etc.) rather than by nationality. Security staff sporting the blue shoulder patch with the United Nations insignia stand at the doors, but these open and close as people come and go. Empty chairs are available for external observers of the process so they can witness the goings-on in the negotiating room. A text scrolls over two screens on either side of the long table where the session chairperson and vice-chair are seated. Passages of text being discussed are highlighted in yellow, others are in brackets. These are the subject of the negotiation taking place in the room.
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Notes
- 1.
ad ref is the abbreviation of ad referendum.
- 2.
UN Major Groups are groups advocating for minorities: ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, children, youth, and so forth.
- 3.
Field notes, Sendai, Japan, March 14, 2015.
- 4.
In this book, I place “natural” in quotes, as is common practice in the social world I describe. “Natural” disasters are those cause by a naturally occurring phenomenon (earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, volcanic eruption, etc.), unlike other phenomena resulting from technology (e.g., factory explosion), health crises (pandemic) or so-called environmental disasters due to the damage they cause the environment, such as pollution or oil spills. Such distinctions are made by the actors themselves, not by me. The quotation marks used since the early 2000s around “natural” underscore the importance of human activity in the increasingly vulnerable conditions societies live in. In this perspective, the naturally occurring phenomenon alone does not produce a disaster.
- 5.
Here I am drawing on the work of Janine Barbot and Nicolas Dodier who use the notion of dispositif (translated here and elsewhere by “apparatus”) to study the process of redress for medical accidents, to mean “a prepared sequence of operations that for some aim to describe states of things and for others, to transform them,” Barbot and Dodier (2014: 408). See also Dodier and Barbot (2017).
- 6.
Field notes, Sendai, Japan, March 14, 2015.
- 7.
Johanna Siméant (2013) uses the expression “finding the field,” following Lisa Markovitz (2001). I prefer the notion of “construction,” which better describes the task of selection performed by the researcher, the choice of sites, and scales that lead to constructing a methodological edifice that ultimately makes it possible to grasp a phenomenon that occurs on an international scale.
- 8.
Two years (1997–1999) spent in Madagascar employed by a Swiss NGO working with children in detention and nine months in Venezuela (February–October 2000) as head of mission for a French NGO tasked with setting up a support project for victims of devastating mudslides.
- 9.
This agency was renamed UNDRR (UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) as of May 1, 2019. The old acronym, UNISDR, is used throughout this book as that is what it was called during the period of my fieldwork.
- 10.
A world apart more than a “closed world” (David-Ismayil et al. 2015: 59).
- 11.
In 2009, at the beginning of my investigation, some fifty people were working for the UNISDR in Geneva. In 2015, on my last field mission at the World Conference in Sendai, Japan, this number had doubled.
- 12.
Marc Abélès relies on the notion of public drama, echoing Victor Turner’s ritual drama, in his analysis of a ministerial meeting organized by WTO. He also emphasizes the performative dimension of the event (Abélès 2011: 129).
- 13.
A full-scale disaster simulation held in Lima, Peru, organized jointly by Peru’s Civil Defense and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 2010 during which I did ten days of on-site observation; a tabletop simulation in Mexico organized by Mexican Civil Defense and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 2012, a week of observation.
- 14.
OSOCC Course in Mexico, 2012 and INSARAG course in Mexico, 2012.
- 15.
Forty-three interviews were conducted for this study, of which thirty-four interviews were recorded and transcribed and nine interviews not recorded.
- 16.
The fields for observation were all selected in Latin America: this was an obvious choice, given that through my training and my background, I would not be entirely foreign to what I was going to observe and hear; in this type of ethnography as in others, a command of the language is an essential requirement of fieldwork.
- 17.
Relief Web and Prevention Web.
- 18.
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Revet, S. (2020). Introducing Disasterland. In: Disasterland. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41582-2_1
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