3-Wrie a paragraphs on the followings- (150 words)
# Natural Disaster
# Covid 19 pandemic
# War and Peace
Answers
♥️Answer
COVID-19: A NATURAL DISASTER?
The Covid-19 pandemic has proliferated across media and discussion under a number of different titles: "sanitary crisis", "health emergency", "natural disaster"... What consequences are there to this selective framing of the situation, and what can it tell us about the nature of the global response? Interview with Sandrine Revet, anthropologist and leader of the Disasters and Risks seminar at CERI Sciences Po, and author of Disasterland: An Ethnography of the International Disaster Community.
Can the current COVID-19 crisis be considered a “natural” disaster?
Sandrine Revet: This question suggests several responses. It is interesting in that it invites us to reflect upon how we frame such an event and what consequences this can have in terms of the way we analyse it and deal with it. Even if the virus is naturally occurring, this pandemic is no more “natural” than disasters caused by tsunamis, hurricanes, or floods. The social sciences have for a long time shown that disasters occur when a phenomenon, which may be of natural or technological origin, meets a society made vulnerable by political decisions, economic choices, or forms of social organisation.
What seems interesting to observe is the way in which we think about what is happening and what this tells us about the means that are deployed to deal with the situation. Let’s consider UN agencies, for example: the international coordination concerning pandemics is managed by the International Health Organization and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). For these agencies, the current situation is considered a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”. In France, the frame is similarly that of a “health crisis” (crise sanitaire).
For me, such wording bears two risks:
The first one stems from the decision to talk about a “crisis” or “emergency” and to use the vocabulary that goes with this. The notion of crisis implies a normal state and its temporary disruption before a return to “normal”. The crisis translates graphically through the metaphor of a “peak”, and through the more naturalising metaphor of a “wave”, as well as curves that rise and come back to their original level more or less rapidly. It is a linear reading of the crisis. In addition to this, talking about a crisis implies that the structure is only affected temporarily. In the current situation, however, it is obvious that this pandemic is not an abnormal disruption of a “normal” functioning but rather one of the normal consequences of an “abnormal” functioning. The current situation will also trigger a shock for existing social structures, which therefore means that it corresponds better to the notion of disaster, which designates a transformative event that destroys, reverses, upsets the order that precedes it.
The second risk that I see in the widespread use of the notion of “health crisis” is related to the qualifying term “health”. By qualifying the event in this way, we risk prioritizing the framework of health over all others. But as political sociology has shown in the past, one of the effects of these “crises” is to overwhelm the usual organisation of society into sectors, to produce what Michel Dobry has called “desectorisation” and oblige us to think outside of our usual comfort zone. This forces us to focus on coordination, which constitutes a major challenge for risk management professionals and is one of the most complex operations to put into place in the sense that each professional world, each sector, has its own temporality, its own challenges, languages, aims, scales. Making all of these coincide is an extremely complicated undertaking. Even if there is no question of denying the specificity of this event or the central role played by the healthcare system in its management, circumscribing it through using the term “health crisis” eclipses all the domains that are and will be affected in the long run, and also implies that in everyday decisions, health takes precedence over everything else. But, of course, this isn’t the case. The health, social, environmental, economic, and political dimensions of this disaster are embedded within one another and they need to be considered together.
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