In this fascinating and comprehensive study, Greg Bankoff traces the history of natural hazards in the Philippines from the records kept by the Spanish colonisers to the 'Calamitous Nineties', and assesses the effectiveness of the relief mechanisms that have evolved to cope with these occurrences. He also examines the correlation between this history of natural disasters and the social hierarchy within Filipino society. The constant threat of disaster has been integrated into the schema of daily life to such an extent that a 'culture of disaster' has been formed.

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.

This theoretical contribution argues that the domination of Western knowledge in disaster scholarship has allowed normative policies and practices of disaster risk reduction to be imposed all over the world. It takes a postcolonial approach to unpack why scholars claim that disasters are social constructs while offering little but theories, concepts and methods supposed to be universal in understanding the unique and diverse experiences of millions of people across very different cultures. It further challenges forms of governments inherited from the Enlightenment that have been rolled out as standard and ultimate solutions to reduce the risk of disaster. Ultimately, the book encourages the emergence of a more diverse set of world views/senses and ways of knowing for both studying disasters and informing policy and practice of disaster risk reduction. Such pluralism is essential to better reflect local realities of what disasters actually are around the world. This book is an essential read for scholars and postgraduate students interested in disaster studies as well as policy-makers and practitioners of disaster risk reduction.

Today human ecology has split into many different sub-disciplines such as historical ecology, political ecology or the New Ecological Anthropology. The latter in particular has criticised the predominance of the Western view on different ecosystems, arguing that culture-specific world views and human-environment interactions have been largely neglected. However, these different perspectives only tackle specific facets of a local and global hyper-complex reality. In bringing together a variety of views and theoretical approaches , these especially commissioned essays prove that an interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding of the extreme complexity of the human-environment interface(s) is possible.

This volume of The Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations recounts the activities of Australia's military forces in response to overseas natural disasters. The military's involvement in overseas emergency management is focused primarily on the period immediately after disaster strikes: transporting relief supplies, providing medical assistance, restoring basic services and communications and other logistical support. Beginning with the 1917–18 influenza epidemic that ravaged the Pacific and culminating with the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, this book covers Australia's response to some of the most catastrophic natural events of the twentieth century. In their Time of Need is richly detailed, as Steven Bullard weaves together official government records and archival images with the personal narratives and photographs of those who served. This volume is an authoritative and compelling history of Australia's efforts to help their neighbours.

This book provides a critical perspective on people's response to disasters in the Philippines. It draws upon an array of case studies to discuss people's vulnerability, capacities and resilience in facing a wide range of different hazards.