The Sociology of Complex Emergencies

‘Complex emergencies’ – disasters caused by natural events (famines, tsunami, earthquakes, forest fires, landslides, flooding) or through socially engineered problems (such as wars, pogroms, ecological devastation and the forced migrations of peoples) are an alarming, often tragic, but seemingly permanent part of human life and have been since history was first recorded or can now be recovered through archaeological techniques. What has possibly changed in more recent years has been the frequency and intensity of such events, their increasingly interrelated nature and the complexity of both the problems themselves and of the responses to them – by the state, by civil society, by individuals and by the ecosystem itself.