Volume 71, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Tackling and Regulating Disasters; Guest Editor: Elya Tzaneva

Today, disasters of different kinds are inseparable from the lives of individuals and of communities. They thrust themselves into people’s existence and bring chaos to organised society, as they challenge, disrupt and change the typical patterns of relations between people and their environment, both natural and social. This subject is positioned in the relatively newly established scientific field of disaster anthropology. Taken together, the articles included have made extensive use of research material to show that human communities and their cultures are formed under the influence of the natural environment, the physical and mental characteristics of the people in them and, accordingly, of the social and economic development they themselves create. The articles examine various questions and subjects and allow comparison of the existing danger of disaster and the vulnerability of the groups affected by disaster, and consider the construction of their behavioural responses in managing disaster, and their relations at official, institutional and personal levels. There is consideration too of changes in the social environment, and of the effects of disasters on the political and economic development of the countries and communities in which they occur.

On 26 April 1986, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine led to a massive disaster, the consequences of which affected millions of people in northern and eastern Europe. Today, 35 years later, we recall it not only as one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of nuclear power but also as one of the main political preconditions or factors that led to the end of the USSR. This paper presents the initial stage of a comparative study on the memories of this disastrous event among Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and Bulgarians living on the periphery of the affected zone. The aim is to trace diverse aspects of public reflection in connection with people’s awareness and the degree to which they were affected, the reactions to the disaster, its effects and consequences, the preparedness of the population, and the latter’s assessment of post-disaster management.

In 1957 there occurred a technological disaster in the Southern Urals in the form of a nuclear accident at the Mayak chemical plant in Ozersk, Soviet Union. The accident led to the resettlement of two historical centres of the first wave of the Russian colonization of the region, as the villages along the Techa river were declared restricted areas during the cleaning of the radiation trail, and their residents were resettled. As a result, the original culture of the villages was lost. The inspiration for our research is Alexey Mityunin, a local historian, enthusiast, and public activist, who collected a martyrology of the disappeared Ural villages. This paper presents the results of field expeditions to Brodokalmak carried out in 2014–2017 by students of the Miass Branch of Chelyabinsk State University, Russia. Brodokalmak is the village where the people resettled from contaminated lands Zamanikha, Boevka, and Muslyumovo live or lived.

While post-disaster rebuilding is an urgent task for affected areas, an approach without consideration for climate protection will probably lead to another disaster of carbon lock-in. Therefore, policymaking and implementation are critically important. This paper takes the Guangyuan prefecture as a case study, where the local government took the lead in low-carbon initiative and made a great contribution to low-carbon development. Based on long-term field investigations and semi-structured interviews, using the theory of multi-level governance, it discusses policy formation and implementation in the Guangyuan prefecture, and how the governance system promoted an environment-and-climate-friendly rebuilding. The results demonstrate the urgency of carbon decoupling in post-disaster-rebuilding and the significance of an effective governance system. This provides insight to the contemporary world that post-disaster rebuilding is not only a revitalization of the affected areas, but a comprehensive undertaking to avoid other possible disasters and ensure a sustainable future.

This article examines the Pamiri Tajik population in China at the southwesternmost corner of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Prefecture and their struggles during numerous local natural and human-made disasters over the past decade. It explores, from the local point of view, the disaster recovery policies that function as a disguise for homogenization-oriented state-building initiatives. It examines how the local Tajik people have been reacting to and coping with natural disasters and the related relocation policy initiatives and how the disaster they are increasingly facing is the desecration of their homeland and the destruction of their traditional livelihood. The fieldwork findings reported are based on 12 years of fieldwork throughout Xinjiang, the Pamiri borderlands (both in the Pamiri region in Tajikistan and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang, China) as well as in the lowland relocation and sedentarization area in the Rabot resettlement township and the Tajik Abat resettlement township on the edge of the Taklimakan desert.

The study considers disaster as a social phenomenon that affects individuals, communities, and societies. It focuses on a specific technological catastrophe—a train explosion in the village of Hitrino in Shumen region, Bulgaria, that killed seven, left 23 injured, and demolished 23 houses. The article describes and analyses the local community’s reactions based on fieldwork, i.e. ethnographic and sociological surveys conducted in 2018 to 2019. Attention is paid to the behaviour, management, and methods of coping with the short-term and long-term consequences of the disaster on individual, group, and institutional levels, as well as to the changes in social and ethnic relations. Hitrino is defined as a community in crisis in relation to the degree of its ability to develop a local strategy in advance, and due to the experience it accumulated. The study shows that disaster recovery strategies must include work with local communities which play a key role in reducing the negative impact of catastrophe.

Georgia is a small, open, developing economy, situated in a key geopolitical area at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, striving to achieve greater energy and national security. Achieving energy security, however, can be challenging for a country poorly endowed with fossil fuels and with limited interactions with broader international energy markets. Georgia, luckily, has the potential to dramatically increase its energy security in the coming decades by means of greater integration with its neighbours and European energy markets, and building on the current emphasis on (and support for) energy transition and decarbonisation initiatives to fight climate change, leveraging its endowment of renewable energy sources and its strategic location between Europe and Asia.