The dialectics of disaster: Considerations on hazards and vulnerability in the age of climate breakdown, with a brief case study of Khuzestan

Abstract

In a historical moment inundated by disasters, understanding and conceptualising the phenomenon is a matter of some importance. No framework for doing so has been more productive than that developed by Wisner and his colleagues. But their so-called ‘Progression of Vulnerability’ (pressure and release [PAR] model) framework was conceived before the onset of the climate crisis. And that crisis, as the saying goes, changes everything.

Contribution: What follows is an immanent critique of the framework, with an eye towards shifting some of its parameters in order to account for the process of climate breakdown now multiplying disasters across the globe.