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Dysfunction and Disruption: Disaster Risks and the Law

My life as a law student started with a bang. On 11 September 2001 I was less than a month into my law studies. And the event became a gestalt switch for me. I remember engaging in a long discussion with my in-laws at the time, arguing that this was the first visible crack in the world order itself; the initial indication of a looming global collapse: fights over scarce resources, limited space and disbursed moralities. While this could seem like a self-aware and bored 19-year-old law student’s attempt to create attention or to spur yet another provocative, principled debate – it truly wasn’t. It felt different. For me, 9-11 was themoment. The moment in which I was for the first time confronted with a deep sense of vulnerability – not as a realization of personal mortality, but rather as an apprehension of central societal and cultural institutions’ fragility. The realization that the world I knew was, and is, at risk. During my studies I found this materialized mainly as the abstract all-encompassing fear of terrorism – and that this should be understood and studied from a legal perspective through the basic relationship between the individual and the state. Through this lens, security is the main theory to understand the world, and human rights the obvious battleground. However, this perspective somehow fell short in encapsulating the above described feeling of fragility. Or rather, the way the world actually did change could not be understood or even approached solely through an idea of securitization or by observing the fight over human rights. The world was indeed not governed solely by the fear of terror or war, but rather in a complex assemblage of risk(s) of different orders and origins. I came to study risks with potentially disastrous consequences or, in following, simply disaster risk. In a traditional risk framework, some might refer to these as low probability high impact risks or extreme risk. On the joyful occasion of the relaunch of EJRR, I will offer an account of such risks’ significance for law in general, and legal scholarship in particular.