۱٫۱٫ Introduction

The past few years have seen a remarkable shift in the acknowledgment of the role of law in the management of disasters. Importantly, the developing field of international disaster law (IDL) has moved from a strong focus on disaster response and relief, towards a more holistic view of the role of law in disaster prevention and management. The field, as is now developing, builds upon and around other areas of (international) law, such as international human rights law (IHRL) (IASC, 2011; Lauta, 2016), international environmental law (Stephens, 2016; Peel and Fisher, 2016), climate change law (Lyster, 2016), and international water law (Phan and Winkler, 2016). Rather than a coherent corpus of law, IDL, in its current form, can be considered an “overarching umbrella”, under which various areas of law are integrated into the context of disaster management (Breau and Samuel, 2016). One of the core challenges for scholars currently working in this multifaceted area of international law is how to account for its fragmented legal foundations, in order to achieve a more comprehensive account of IDL. Although this work is in its infancy, important progress has already been made through academic initiatives (see, especially, Breau and Samuel, 2016; Caron et al., 2014; Lauta, 2015; de Guttry et al., 2012) as well as through the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) International Disaster Law Programme. i Law has for long sought to regulate human-made hazards. Regulations and agreements have arisen within specific fields – such as the the 1986 Convention on Assistance in the Case of Nuclear Accident and Radiological Emergency, the 1990 International Convention on Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Cooperation, and the 1993 Convention concerning the Prevention of Major Industrial Accidents – in order to prevent and provide accountability for disasters. The focus on human-made hazards is also visible in relation to law regulating humanitarian aid, which has mainly been developed in relation to the context of armed conflicts (see, especially, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949ii), with much less said about relief in the disaster context (the International Relief Union, which was founded in 1927, only took action in two disasters, before it was officially dissolved in 1967. See Macalister-Smith, 1981). In relation to natural hazards, questions around accountability and responsibility become all the more difficult to address, and the law has taken significantly longer to reach this space.