Creating Common Ground to “See the Same Disaster”

Abstract

The international institutional order that has gradually developed around the UNISDR since the 2000s has been accompanied by a triple process: quantifying the “disaster” phenomenon that the nascent international world must address, producing a shared language to communicate within this world, and finally, standardizing the ways in which disasters are dealt with. As David Mosse writes about the development world,

The production of “global” (or “scientific”) orders requires hard work. […] Ultimately, harmonized global development policy is an interpretive order that conceals the complex politics of passions of practice, while being powerful enough […] to ensure that diverse events, ambitions and political exigencies are translated into a singular global logic which helps sustain the comforting metropolitan illusion that global policies make history. But even though global policy does not produce the orders it describes (they do not involve de facto control), its effects, brought through directing resource flows, are real. (Mosse 2005: 23–24)