Conclusion: The Challenges of Vulnerability Reduction

Abstract

The book has been written with a number of aims and objectives in mind. First, I am concerned to clarify and conceptualize the notion of vulnerability which is increasingly employed in public discourses and political life generally Arguing that existing approaches to vulnerability do not capture the depth of people’s experience of it and trying to expand our ways of knowing this complex phenomenon, I propose to understand the concept of vulnerability as an irreducibly plural, multidimensional notion that cannot be conceived on a single continuum. In order for studies of vulnerability and its remedies to analyse central mechanisms of social life, the notion of vulnerability is conceptualized as not only an important and an inevitable aspect of the human condition but also as being socially constituted. Such an understanding of vulnerability assumes that, in addition to being biologically frail, we are also socially vulnerable, which together intensify the risks that arise from our vulnerability. The proposed aggregative conception of vulnerability offers a broad definition of the term which captures the ways in which an individual experiences different aspects of disadvantage connected with human dependence on another, the unpredictability and the irreversibility of action. This conceptualization provides a new framework for understanding individual experience of, and resilience to, vulnerability and implies search for remedies for exposure to involuntary dependence, the unsecured future and the painful past.