Global Disaster Management and Therapeutic Governance of Communities.

This paper considers the changing views of disasters and the changing views of communities and its manifestation in global disaster management and therapeutic governance of communities. The paper will discuss the shift in Western societies from the optimistic view of human agency in disasters and community responses as stoical and pro-social to a view of human pathology in disasters and community responses as dysfunctional. The last part of the paper will discuss the shifting Western views towards disasters in the developing world. The traditional humanitarian treated emergencies as caused by natural disasters and the community as innocent victims, often represented as the helpless supplicant child, who needed aid. The recipient community in international aid was thereby not culpable, but infantilised. Over the last two decades there has been a shift to approaching emergencies as natural disasters to on-going complex emergencies. The concept merges emergency, development, political and psychosocial analysis and is influenced by social psychological theories. Complex emergencies are attributed to cycles of poverty, trauma and violence. Under the concept, the community becomes problematised and re-conceptualised as victims and perpetrators requiring therapeutic governance to break the vicious cycles of dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]