ABSTRACT
Disaster diplomacy began with Kelman and Koukis (2000: 214) asking: ‘do natural disasters induce international cooperation amongst countries that have traditionally been “enemies”?’. They implied that local or regional disasters could positively affect bilateral relations amongst states which would not normally be prone to such co-operation, and that although disasters are felt at the local scale they might stimulate political co-operation at an international level. The potential for a locally situated disaster to affect international politics far beyond the physical reach of the disaster event is referred to here as a potentially globalizing effect of disaster. A similar but temporal disjunctive exists in the often fleeting interest of actors in disaster and diplomacy, compared to the longer-term gestation of root causes.
