From disaster to devastation: drought as war in northern Uganda
Authors
Publication Date
2018-09-10Journal Title
Disasters
ISSN
1467-7717
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
Volume
42
Issue
52
Pages
S306-S327
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Branch, A. (2018). From disaster to devastation: drought as war in northern Uganda. Disasters, 42 (52), S306-S327. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12303
Abstract
This paper proposes a shift from the concept of disaster to one of devastation when dealing with the destructive consequences of climate change. It argues that today, a discourse of climate-change disaster has become dominant, in which present disasters are seen as harbingers of a future of widespread climate disaster, products of a global nature in upheaval. The paper contends that one needs to go beyond the series of dichotomies that the climate-change disaster discourse relies upon: future/past, global/local, natural/social. To frame climate disaster as a product of global climate change, and conflict the product of those climate disasters, is to occlude the forms of environ- mental violence and experience of climate change among disaster-affected communities. Through an exploration of the drought in Uganda, the paper asserts that disaster should be understood as embedded within ongoing, longstanding, multiscalar processes of devastation produced by his- tories of human engagement with the environment, including that of war.
Keywords
Anthropocene, armed conflict, climate change, post-colonialism, Uganda
Sponsorship
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/P008232/1)
Embargo Lift Date
2100-01-01
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12303
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/285981
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