CHAIRPERSON
Prof Mike Douglass, Asia Research Institute, and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
The assumption is that with the disintegration of the USSR, the Second World ceased to exist. Yet the demise of the Communist bloc as a geopolitical reality did not mean that it ceased to exert a defining influence over the way people think and behave. Those who inherited the state apparatus in Kazakhstan are not just the heirs of the former system but are still largely the products of its institutions. Kazakhstanis were culturally moulded by incorporation into the Russian and Soviet state. In particular, their elites and intelligentsia share with their former patrons a particular epistemological framework and a set of procedures that have their origins in an alternative way of thinking and modus operandi to that of the Western liberal tradition and a market economy. This paper looks at the extent to which the legacy of the Soviet Union still pervades earthquake disaster risk reduction in Kazakhstan today. It also seeks to uncover a world that western Social Science no longer considers to exist and whose tenets and precepts it has relegated to the pages of History.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Greg Bankoff has worked and published extensively on both the historical dimension of how societies adapt to risk as well as engaged with contemporary civil defence and emergency management practices in Asia, Australasia and more recently in Europe. His most recent publications include co-authoring The Red Cross’s World Disaster Report 2014: Culture and Risk and a companion coedited volume entitled Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction (2015). He is Professor of Modern History at the University of Hull.
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