A Return of the Disaster on the Scientific Scene?

For about fifteen years, in a scientific landscape marked by risk, research has increasingly been dealing with the topic of disasters. There are mainly two approaches: one, empirical, aims at describing and documenting situations of disasters; the other, more theoretical one, construes disasters as entry points to analyse contemporary societies. Nevertheless, the scattering of scientific productions as well as the specificity of disaster envisioned as a topic of study are in question. Can we produce a scientific discourse about disasters? Is the disaster a new paradigm that competes with the paradigm of risk? If it does, would it imply a change of our social model? These questions, certainly legitimate, are situated at such a level of abstraction that most of the time they don’t take into account the questions that emerge from their own field, thus overshadowing the heuristic character of this research.