The Politics of 21st Century Environmental Disasters

Book excerpt: This book explores the main concerns for grappling with increasing environmental disasters and examines how environmental disasters are understood by states, corporations, and non-government organizations nationally and internationally. The focus of this book is threefold: first, to investigate what constitutes an environmental disaster and to identify the parameters for political responses nationally and internationally. Second, the chapters analyse contemporary state practices that exacerbate the impact of, and responses to, environmental disasters. They show how states promote extractivism based on limited understandings of nature drawn from Western philosophy. Finally, the book highlights the strengths and weaknesses in political and institutional responses at the local level to such disasters by state and non-state actors. This shows how both slow and fast violence of environmental disasters affects communities, but also how vulnerable subjects are based on people’s capabilities. The Politics of 21st Century Environmental Disasters is an indispensable resource for students and scholars in political science and environmental studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.