Law, State and the Politics of Catastrophes: a Critical Perspective on Epiphanies of Injustice and the Need for Protection
Keywords:
Disaster, social vulnerability, risk, Desastres, vulnerabilidad social, riesgoAbstract
While the phenomenon of catastrophes is emerging as a growing threat that humanity should face in the next years, legal studies have disregarded the issue for a long time. Recent extreme events have motivated a new attention towards the legal dimension as part of the context in which disasters take place. Catastrophes are a powerful breakdown of our normative world. Paradigms of regulation in this field have usually been identified in terms of prevention, anticipation and amelioration, theoretical schemes that can be applied to various branches of the law. Nevertheless, this is only a part of the challenge that the legal study of extreme events must face. They should in fact include into these abstract schemes the factors of inequality that contribute to producing higher rates of vulnerability. In this paper I propose to conceive catastrophes as legal epiphanies, through which it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness, the efficiency and the sustainability of regulatory choices.
Mientras el fenómeno de las catástrofes se está convirtiendo en una amenaza cada vez mayor que la humanidad deberá afrontar en los próximos años, durante mucho tiempo los estudios jurídicos no lo han tenido en cuenta. Hechos extremos recientes han hecho que adquiera mayor relevancia la dimensión legal como parte del contexto en la que ocurren los desastres. Las catástrofes suponen una poderosa ruptura en la normativa de nuestro mundo. Los paradigmas de la regulación en este campo se han identificado generalmente en términos de prevención, anticipación y mejora, esquemas teóricos que se pueden aplicar a distintas ramas del derecho. Sin embargo, esto es sólo una parte del desafío que debe afrontar el estudio jurídico de los fenómenos extremos. En realidad, deberían tenerse en cuenta los factores de desigualdad que contribuyen a producir mayores ratios de vulnerabilidad. En este trabajo me propongo concebir las catástrofes como epifanías legales, a través de las cuales es posible evaluar la eficacia, la eficiencia y la sostenibilidad de las decisiones reguladoras.
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