| Recent debates regarding the merits and implications of framing demographic, resource and environmental problems as security issues have largely neglected matters of human vulnerability to natural hazards. Although a small number observers have proposed the integration of questions of hazard vulnerability within alternative formulations of security, the potential drawbacks of doing so have remained almost entirely unexamined. It is argued in the present thesis that defining issues of disaster risk in security terms may only serve to further legitimate the security practices of states which already play an important role in the social production of vulnerability. Drawing primarily upon strategies of discursive analysis, the present thesis elucidates this argument by examining the manner in which conventional formulations and understandings of security in global politics have contributed to the social production of hazard vulnerability before, during and after the impact of natural hazards. |
