JC Gaillard is Professor of Geography at Waipapa Taumata Rau (The University of Auckland), Aotearoa (New Zealand).

This book argues that the domination of Western knowledge in disaster scholarship has allowed for normative policies and practices of disaster risk reduction to be imposed all over the world. It takes a postcolonial approach to deconstruct concepts, methods, and forms of governments inherited from the Enlightenment.

1. What is a Disaster?

2. A Genealogy of Disaster Studies

3. Unfulfilled Promise of a Paradigm Shift

4. The Quest for Pantometry

5. The Governmentality of Disaster

6. Climate Change and the Ultimate Challenge of Modernity

7. Exclusive Inclusion and the Imperative of Participation

8. Gender in Disaster beyond Men and Women

9. Power and Resistance in Disaster Risk Reduction

10. The Invention of Disaster

Postscript: Where to From Here?