Abstract/Summary

This thesis seeks to critically analyse the relationship between international law and disaster risk. Despite the increasing global threat that disasters present, international law’s engagement with their prevention remains at a relatively nascent stage compared to the development of other areas of the law. However, the progress that has been made since the United Nation’s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s suggests that international law is widely viewed as a valuable tool in addressing the issue and reducing the risk of disasters. In contrast to this, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways that international law itself may also play a role in the creation of disaster risk. It is here that the project makes an important and original contribution, by interrogating this presupposition and analysing the ways that international law itself may be culpable in the creation and exacerbation of risk. Through a novel, compound theoretical lens combining Marxist and Third World approaches to international law and insights from disaster theory, the thesis highlights the longstanding complicity of international law in the production of disaster risk. The thesis draws on understandings of disasters as processes that reach back through time, and thus begins its analysis with an examination of the early history of international law and the role of its colonial doctrines in the historic construction of vulnerability and hazards. It then turns to modern international law, particularly within the realm of international economic law, to examine the continuing legacies of these early developments and the ongoing role of international law in disaster risk creation. Overall, the thesis offers an original contribution to conversations on the connection between international law and disaster risk. Rather than focusing only on the positive role that international law can have in the reduction of disaster risk found in the majority of the literature, it seeks to highlight more pathological aspects of the relationship between the two and the implications of this. It ultimately concludes that unless the burgeoning field of international disaster law engages more with such critical accounts of international law and their understandings of the harm the law produces, then it will remain blind to a major source of disaster risk creation and be unsuccessful in achieving its normative aims.