Legal Identity Documenting in Disasters: Perpetuating Systems of Injustice

Abstract

This chapter uses a review of recent studies of disaster responses to demonstrate that current disaster response frameworks that rely on legal identity are inadequate. A lack of legal identity documentation can obfuscate the needs of immediate disaster response, prevent affected individuals from accessing relief, and hamper post-disaster response and community rehabilitation, including rights to land and property. Ultimately these issues raise questions of the ‘justice’ of such response frameworks, inasmuch as they entrench existing social issues, further marginalise already vulnerable people, and run the risk of maintaining a dynamic of power in which the overall development and resilience of communities is made subordinate to the specific disaster itself.