Epistemic Injustices in Disaster Theory and Management

Abstract

The present paper argues that the standardised treatment of disaster research and practice perpetuates the production of systematic epistemic injustices against victims of disasters. On the one hand, disaster victims are often prevented from contributing with their opinions and knowledge to the processes of disaster mitigation and disaster conceptualisation. On the other hand, disaster victims tend to lack the hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experiences intelligibly, due to the existence of significant hermeneutical gaps in the hegemonic terminology on the matter. I argue that both forms of epistemic injustice, the testimonial and the hermeneutical, are sustained by an epistemic privilege between the Global North and the Global South in matters of disasters. The second group comprises what I categorise generally as ‘disaster victims’. I identify two forms of structural prejudice that operate against disaster victims: one is the ‘non-expert’ prejudice, and the other is the colonial prejudice. Finally, because of the intercultural nature of disaster environments, I discuss the field of ‘multicultural competencies’ as a useful form of unveiling and counteracting the epistemic injustices contained in both disaster theory and practice.

1. Introduction

The literature on disasters is fraught with examples of miscommunication between disaster relief workers and local victims1. Disasters are intercultural events. They bring together victims and responders of varying ethnocultural and racial backgrounds. This is especially true in the case of developing nations, where local aid and resources are typically limited and international assistance is required [2] (p. 10). Decades of experience in disasters have shown that effective assistance and response to disasters requires complex levels of cross-cultural communication and understanding between all the parties involved in order for the help to become successful. This applies, of course, to aspects of the help that are inevitably culturally informed, such as attending victim trauma, grief or other complex emotions, but it also applies to other apparently less culturally informed aspects, such as providing food and shelter [3] (p. 66). The especially complicated and particular context of disasters means that specific types of abilities for intercultural communication are required in these contexts. By contrast, innumerable examples from practical contexts of disasters show us that failure to grasp the significance of cultural differences in the provision of services is the most common outcome in these contexts.

Although instances of cross-cultural miscommunication might appear as an expected result of mismatch between mutually foreign cultures, several details point to a more careful reading of the situation. On the one hand, these examples happen too often in the contexts of disasters: miscommunication, misunderstanding and the resulting failure of help seem to be the rule more than the exception, and they often result in increased problems for disaster victims [2] (p. 12). On the other hand, a closer observation of the conflicts reveals the existence of an asymmetric pattern of behaviour between two different social groups—that of the local victims and that of the typically Western practitioners. The latter are the ones who tend to misunderstand, downgrade and dismiss the experiences and opinions of the former and to limit their participation in the different phases of disaster management. Meanwhile, local victims often recount facing sentiments of frustration as a result of not feeling heard, understood or taken seriously by the practitioners2.

In addition to some clear ethical connotations, these conflicts reveal a deep epistemic problem in the standardised management of disasters. The problems here are epistemic3 insofar as they involve serious issues of communication, trust, understanding and relevant knowledge about disasters. In this paper, I argue that a close look at the protocolised treatment of disasters reveals the existence of systematic patterns of epistemic injustice in the latter. Applying the language of epistemic injustice to disaster literature can be useful to shed light on the patterns of inequality, privilege and prejudice that lie at the centre of disaster management and disaster conceptualisation, and might help to identify more correctly the causes that generate and perpetuate them. It also can help to give a proper name to and tackle the seriousness of the wrong produced against the disaster victims4. Moreover, it can contribute to enrich discussions on disasters by filling a gap in the literature, considering that the relationship between disasters and epistemic injustice has not been sufficiently explored so far5.

Epistemic injustice in the context of disasters emerges from the lack of representation6 and epistemic authority of the voices of non-Western victims of disasters. This lack of representation is contrasted by the overrepresentation of the voices of those who are not direct victims of disasters, but who possess the cultural and economic monopoly on disaster knowledge. I argue that a useful way to describe this is through the notion of epistemic privilege between the Global North and the Global South. I establish the two categories to refer broadly to two distinct groups in the context of disasters. The former includes the assistance and relief workers, practitioners and experts, as well as, very often, the theoretical voices, editorial boards and most recognised researchers on the disaster field. The latter, I broadly identify as the ‘disaster victims’, because they are those who statistically suffer the most devastating consequences of disasters.

The epistemic asymmetries and privileges of the Global North in matters of disasters reproduce persistent epistemic wrongs7 against disaster victims insofar as they contribute to the marginalisation and silencing of the testimonies and social interpretations of the experiences of the latter in relation to disasters. As I note, the resulting epistemic injustices arise persistently in the theoretical and the practical dimension of disasters. As a result of this pattern, disaster victims face serious additional harms against their epistemic standing, and some essential knowledge about the reality of disasters is collectively lost.

The structure of this paper is as follows: In Section 2 of the paper, I introduce the notion of epistemic privilege and apply it to the distinction between the Global North and the Global South—the latter with respect to disaster victims. In Section 3 and Section 4, I analyse the role of the epistemic privilege of the Global North in reproducing testimonial and hermeneutical injustices against victims of disasters, respectively. Internal to the formation and perpetuation of epistemic injustices against victims of disasters is the assimilation of certain stereotypes and prejudices that situate victims as less credible and intelligible than ‘Western experts’. Among these, I distinguish at least two: the colonial prejudice and the ‘non-expert’ prejudice. Finally, Section 5 discusses the emergent field known as ‘multicultural competencies’ and argues that implementing intercultural sensitivities in the protocolised treatment of disasters—both in its theoretical and practical branches—can provide a useful basis for preventing and counteracting epistemic injustices in these contexts.

2. Epistemic Privilege in Disasters: The Global North and the Global South

The literature on epistemic privilege is vast and the concept has been associated with a lot of different notions, ranging from self-knowledge [13,14,15,16] to social epistemology and epistemic injustice. Epistemic privilege has been particularly emphasised in standpoint epistemology [17,18,19,20,21]. As Briana Toole [22] puts it, “standpoint epistemology is committed to the view that some epistemic advantage can be drawn from the position of powerlessness” (p. 1). She calls this ‘the epistemic privilege thesis’ (p. 1). For example, someone with disabilities might be better positioned to assess what work needs to be done to make the city block more accessible for people like themselves (p. 2). In this respect, “the standpoint epistemologist treats those with social disadvantages as if they were experts, like doctors or mechanics” (p. 2, italics in the original).

According to standpoint epistemology and to those who defend it, epistemic privilege is conceptualised as a positive notion. However, epistemic privilege can refer to a negative phenomenon as well. A major defender of this line is the decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo. In one of his essays [23], Mignolo identifies Europe with its ability of having established itself as having “the epistemic privilege of being the center of the enunciation” (p. 12). The fact that European thinking (and its association with modernity) has the privileged monopoly of what counts as modern means, according to Mignolo, that non-European perspectives are not endowed with validity and are relegated as subaltern perspectives. In other words, the epistemic privilege of colonial and European thinking has the power of assuming a totality and thus precludes other knowledges outside the canon (p. 12).

Under this view, epistemic privilege functions as a mechanism that can perpetuate epistemic injustice and other epistemic harms. In this connection, Ian J. Kidd and Havi Carel [24] have also provided an extensive description of epistemic privilege and the consequences it poses to the institution of contemporary healthcare systems. They introduce the notion of epistemic privilege to describe what happens when health professionals decide everything and “occupy an epistemically privileged role of assessing which testimonies and interpretations to act upon, as well as deciding what sorts of testimonies to receive, from whom, what form they can take, and so on” (p. 7). In the particular case of healthcare, the epistemic privilege of practitioners and doctors manifests in three components that might arise simultaneously. One, the practitioner might have the authority to establish the standards and norms for epistemic exchange in a given community—for instance, in defining the concepts and debates to be used about health (p. 7). Two, the practitioner might exhaust the authoritative role in epistemic exchanges, such that they control which persons and groups are included in the debate and what degree of credibility they are to be assigned (p. 7). And third, the practitioner might have the power of decision over when an issue is settled, when enough evidence has been presented, when a particular issue has been given sufficient time and attention, etc. (p. 7).

Three observations are important at this point. When Kidd and Carel talk about practitioners, they are not describing the behaviour of individual doctors, but a pattern of behaviour that is rooted in the healthcare institution. It might be that individual doctors exercise epistemic privilege, but the root of the problem is structural and relies on aspects like the protocolised medical methodology and language: “modern healthcare practices privilege impersonal third-person reports and empirical data over personal anecdote and pathographic testimonies in a way that structurally disables certain testimonial and hermeneutical activities” (p. 7). Secondly, epistemic privilege is a manifold concept and can be possessed by patients too. In fact, because of their direct access to the experience of illness, patients might have an epistemic privilege of their own: “Patients have the knowledge of how a particular condition feels, how it impacts on their life and changes their way of being in complex and subtle ways […] Only they can say whether a certain treatment causes pain, or how well they feel” (p. 7). The epistemic privilege of ill patients does not supplant or deny the epistemic privilege of doctors and practitioners. The latter are epistemically privileged too as a result of their scientific training and expertise in clinical knowledge (p. 7). In other words, Kidd and Carel’s goal is not to undermine the authority and expertise of the clinicians´ epistemic privilege, but rather to point out that this epistemic privilege can become unwarranted under certain conditions. Particularly, doctors can have an unwarranted epistemic privilege “if the assignment of epistemic privilege is grounded in the presumptive judgement that there are no other plausible candidates for privileged epistemic status in the context of certain forms of patient care” (p. 8). This usually happens when the epistemic privilege of one group is sustained by an undue ignorance or rejection of the equally valid knowledge of others (in this case, patients), thus causing the exclusion and devaluation of the knowledge of the latter. In the context of healthcare practice and policy, this is evidenced when it is only the health professionals´ word that ‘really matters’, while the patient´s knowledge is excluded from decision making (p. 7).

Unwarranted epistemic privilege can produce epistemic injustice. As defined by Miranda Fricker [25], epistemic injustice refers to a “wrong done to someone in their capacity as knower” (p. 1). Fricker identifies two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice takes place when prejudice causes a hearer to assign a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s testimony. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts a speaker at a disadvantage when trying to make sense of their social experiences (p. 1). Very often, the downgrading of a speaker´s credibility and intelligibility is caused by a previous asymmetry between the speaker and other speakers with whom they stand in a relationship of epistemic privilege. This is what happens in the medical institution, according to Kidd and Carel´s view. The privileging of certain speakers—and of their ways of knowing and conveying their knowledge—can encourage epistemic injustice insofar as it structurally disables the testimonial and hermeneutical contributions of others as a result.

Now, when applying these reflections and terminology to the particular context of disasters, we can see that many similarities appear. The Global North assumes an epistemic privilege over the Global South on the treatment of disasters in a way that replicates Kidd and Carel´s three manifestations of the privilege. The Global North has the authority to establish the epistemic standards and norms in the global discussion about disasters and plays a leading role in defining the concepts and debates about these events. The epistemic contribution of the Global North is also assumed to exhaust all the authoritative knowledge on disasters, in a way that excludes other voices and knowers outside the Western tradition from participating in the collective discussion. Moreover, Western ‘experts’ on disasters often have the power of decision over the relevant processes concerning both the theoretical conceptualisation of disasters and the practical decision-making in disaster relief and management.

The epistemic privilege of the Global North on matters of disasters affects both the theoretical and the practical dimension of the protocolised knowledge about these events. To see just how this privilege plays out in theory, let us focus for a moment on the first dimension. Even though disasters affect most strongly the Global South, the field of disaster academic research is largely dominated by Anglophone journals and publishers run by multinational large corporations, all of them located in the ‘first World’ [26]. These journals hold the monopoly over the production of theoretical knowledge about disasters, leading the majority of publications and academic research on the topic. Moreover, they have a shaping influence over not just the contents, topics and debates, but also over the language, terminology and methods of dissemination of disaster knowledge. Some examples of this involve the prioritising of contents related to disaster risk reduction, emergency response, humanitarian practice, emergency medicine and health, natural hazards, etc. [26] (p. 6). The formats also favour the use of the English language and standardised structures including an introduction, a review of the literature, a description of methods, a presentation of findings and conclusions (p. 6). The prioritisation of these specific formats, contents and language reflects the privileging of the forms of academic research typical of the Western epistemological tradition, for example, by overrepresenting the use of a secular language of scientific objectivity and universality that transcends cultural particularities. Such a conceptual privilege means that researchers and journals located outside this specific tradition who wish to participate in the public discussion about disasters need to adapt to these formats or else they face risks of disappearance and cease of publication. Even for those who manage to adapt to the standards of Anglophone journals, having to change their ways of working, their concepts and terminology and even their language may entail “losing the essence of their argument” (p. 12). The monopoly of Anglophone journals and researchers sustains an epistemic privilege of certain specific academic traditions in a way that downgrades and excludes other knowers and their testimonies. In particular, “the combined hegemony of the English language and the Anglophone traditions of international academic publishing can marginalize scholars whose native language is not English” while “excluding other traditions of academic writing” (p. 12). This belongs to a wider problem concerning what Suresh Canagarajah calls the ‘geopolitics of academic writing’ [27]. In the case of disasters, the overrepresentation and epistemic privilege of the Global North becomes unwarranted insofar as it structurally disables the voices of those located outside the Western epistemological tradition. Especially if these instances become systematic and persistent, they can lead to epistemic injustice against non-Anglophone knowers and knowledges by systematically preventing them from participating equally in the common conversation about disasters.

The following section shall be dedicated to explore in more detail how the epistemic privilege between the Global North and the Global South encourages the reproduction of epistemic injustices against disaster victims. For this, I shall focus especially on practical contexts of disaster relief and management. However, before turning to that, I would like to clarify some aspects of the distinction between the Global North and the Global South.

I have used this distinction to identify two particular groups with different roles in contexts of disasters: the disaster experts and practitioners and the disaster victims. In doing this, I am not claiming that neither of these categories should be understood statically or homogenously. Because of their unpredictable nature, disasters can happen everywhere, so we may think that people living in the Global North can also become ‘disaster victims’. While this is technically true, the terminology I am choosing draws on Tobias Rasmussen´s distinction between natural events and disasters [28]8. According to this, whether an event develops into a natural disaster depends on conditions such as the vulnerability of the local population, the infrastructure or the level of preparedness and other factors (p. 181). This means that although natural hazards impact both developed and developing countries equally, it is mostly the ‘developing countries’9 who tend to suffer from them. The difference in the impact and suffering applies to the subsequent sharp increase in poverty of the country, but also in the number of persons affected and the value of the damage (p. 181). The recorded data of the last decades show that this difference in impact is not anecdotic but rather acutely salient: “of the more than 7000 natural disasters recorded during 1970–2004, three-fourths of the events and 99 percent of the people affected were in developing countries” (p. 184). Moreover, according to G. N. Ritchie [33], this effect is intensified every year (p. 112). The reasons for this difference are various, but all point to several factors stemming from the material, structural and economic asymmetries between the developed and the developing countries. For example, a demonstrated efficient prevention of disaster risk involves the use of market insurance mechanisms, but these are underdeveloped or absent in many developing countries [28] (p. 182). Developing countries also tend to rely on fragile infrastructure, state and federal aid and material resources in comparison to developed countries. The scarcity or lack of local aid and resources impulses developing nations to often require international assistance, often through relying on international assistance and cooperation to mitigate the effects of their shocks [28] (p. 183).

The mentioned data point out the existence of significant differences between the two regions of the world that the scholars identify as developed and developing countries. In my opinion, these differences are enough to sustain a plausible distinction between the Global North and the Global South in contexts of disasters. Said distinction, along with the establishment of a somewhat homogenous category of ‘disaster victims’ are not without complications, but, for this particular context, they have great promise as forms of reflecting the structural root of the epistemic asymmetries between those who possess the means and authority to lead the knowledge on disasters and those who statistically suffer more from them. Because they are the ones who suffer the most frequent and most brutal consequences of disasters, the latter constitute the paradigmatic victims of disasters.

Another advantage of using this distinction is that identifying disaster victims as a somewhat homogeneous and distinct group can help to recognise their epistemic agency and epistemic privilege due to their direct involvement with disasters, in a way that practitioners from the Global North may not have the same access to—even if they are recognised as ‘experts’ on the matter. This could encourage us to rethink the epistemic role that current victims of disasters should be given, not necessarily as a way of dismissing or substituting international experts and professionals, but as a form of granting them more participation and credit in the process of conceptualising and responding to disasters.

Moreover, another reason why the distinction between Global North and Global South might be useful in the context of disasters is because it contributes to unveil the existing relations of colonial and racial domination between the two groups. As I argue in what follows, these prove to play a central aspect in disaster dynamics and encourage the systematic perpetuation of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice against victims in these contexts.

3. Testimonial Injustice in Disasters

A common manifestation of testimonial injustice involves the systematic exclusion of certain speakers from participation in the common pooling of knowledge [25] (p. 1). At the origin of the systematic exclusion is a prejudicial perception of the speaker or a group which causes them to receive a deflated level of credibility (p. 1). The coexistence of prejudice with epistemic privilege is not uncommon in exchanges of testimonial injustice. Epistemic privilege is often attributed to speakers who belong to groups granted with social prestige and other epistemic goods, including excessive attributions of credibility. Meanwhile, negative prejudices work by attributing credibility deficits to those speakers who are perceived as members of other groups outside the ones who possess the credibility excess. The relationship between the credibility attributed to the two groups is a contrastive and interactive one, as José Medina [34] suggests: “implicitly, being judged credible to some degree is being regarded as more credible than others, less credible than others, and equally credible than others” (p. 61). In particular, excessive attributions of credibility constitute an epistemic injustice because they trigger credibility deficits towards other speakers who receive a deflated level of credibility as a result of being compared with the former. Given that epistemic privilege relates to excessive attributions of credibility, this means that, where there is epistemic privilege, there will often be prejudice as well.

In what follows, I want to point out at least two prejudices that play a significant role in the exclusion of the voices of disaster victims from the collective conversation about disasters.

On the one hand, the distribution of the epistemic privilege in matters of disasters is deeply connected to an implicit distinction between speakers who are seen as ‘experts’ and those who are seen as ‘non-experts’. What I shall call the ‘non-expert’ prejudice is commonly associated with non-Western speakers and research traditions whose differential knowledges, terminology and methods are perceived as less scientifically accurate, and thus less credible, because they lack the specificity of the professional language. The distinction between experts and non-experts is equally present in disaster practice. In these practical contexts, the identification of the group of disaster victims with the category of non-experts and the identification of the Western practitioners and assistants with the category of experts is another manifestation of the epistemic privilege of the latter. Western psychologists, NGOs, UN agencies and other professionals not only dictate which interventions should be provided and under which protocol, but also possess the authority in defining the situation and in identifying the psychological dimensions of the problems [35] (p. 274).

Of course, the fact that experts are granted epistemic privilege in virtue of their professional training is not problematic in itself, but can become problematic if it is rooted in the exclusion from participation of the local victims and populations of the countries assisted. Western experts often have their opinion regarded as authoritative when it comes to the processes of intervention and diagnosis in the aftermath of disasters. Due to their professional and technical training, their words are given more epistemic standing than those who are viewed as non-experts. Meanwhile, the victims of disasters who fall within the second category often have their opinions dismissed as uninformed, insufficiently articulate or otherwise not sufficiently informative to be included in the process. Their opinions can be considered as having some anecdotic value by some practitioners, but they are not granted credibility unless ‘validated’ by a qualified expert, to whom their word is subordinated. In contrast to experts, disaster victims are charged with lack of the conceptual resources to provide useful and adequate input in processes of disaster recovery and management. The results include the impossibility for those perceived as non-experts to convey their testimonies and knowledge successfully as well as the relegation of their role in disaster recovery as passive objects of assistance whose epistemic standing must be supedited to the criterion of the professionals.

On the other hand, the operation of the non-expert prejudice could not be fully understood without taking into account another prejudice with which it is closely linked. This second prejudice is the colonial prejudice. The epistemic dimension of colonial and Eurocentric thinking is widely described in the literature on epistemic injustice and epistemic violence10. According to representatives of this literature such as Gayatri Spivak [11], Eurocentric thinking functions by assuming that Western science and thinking is at the vanguard of human thinking, while the knowledge and traditions outside the West are in contrast prejudicially perceived as pre-scientific, tribal, illiterate and peasant (pp. 282–283). The colonial prejudice can lead to epistemic injustice and to other practices of epistemic violence through the systematic marginalisation, silencing, erasure, invisibility and degrading of local traditions, which are turned into ‘subjugated knowledges’ (p. 287). As multicultural events which bring together people from countries situated in the Global North and in the Global South, practical contexts of disasters do not escape the risks of facing dynamics influenced by residual colonial prejudice. In fact, my suggestion is that this form of prejudice becomes indispensable when it comes to understanding the root causes of the countless instances of miscommunication and conflicts among those involved in disaster relief and management. Many authors have in fact insisted on the cultural origin of many of these conflicts: as Marsella et al. note, there is a “growing recognition that responses to disasters often failed to consider the variations in the cultural world-views, values, and lifestyle preferences of disaster victims” [2] (p. 4). As I said in the beginning of this paper, these conflicts do not arise innocently, but “too often”, the authors continue, “the assistance that is rendered is based upon a preconceived set of assumptions and policies rooted within the Western cultural traditions of the providers, especially ideas about how one must construe a disaster and what is necessary for recovery and rehabilitation from a disaster’s impact” (p. 4). This is also consonant with what Michael Wessells [35] points out about the reality of the interventions in practical contexts of disasters:

“In emergency situations, psychologists hired by NGOs or UN agencies often play a lead role in defining the situation, identifying the psychological dimensions of the problems, and suggesting interventions […] Viewed as experts, they tacitly carry the imprimatur of Western science and Western psychology, regarded globally as embodying the highest standards of research, education, training, and practice […] Unfortunately, the dynamics of the situation invite a tyranny of Western expertise. The multitude of problems involved usually stems not from any conspiracy or conscious intent but rather from hidden power dynamics and the tacit assumption that Western knowledge trumps local knowledge”

(pp. 274–275).

Otherwise put, the perception of Western practitioners as experts is inseparably tied to implicit Eurocentric assumptions about the “universality in the application of their humanitarian efforts because of the ethnocentricity that is fostered by the obvious power of science and technology” [2] (p. 26). In comparison, local traditions and knowledge systems are viewed as primitive, tribal, ‘ethnic’ or ‘too culturally mediated’.

Very often both prejudices, the non-expert prejudice and the colonial prejudice, operate together in contexts of disasters. To show this, let me introduce a particularly illustrative example of what happened following the 1999 Taiwan disaster. The event, known as the ‘most catastrophic’ in the country [4], was full of examples of ‘cultural mismatches’ arising from the humanitarian assistance pouring in following the earthquake. The tensions manifested diversely in the management of the material resources as well as the psychological consequences of victims. Shortly after the incident, the place was crowded by a multitude of psychologists, social workers and people who called themselves ‘mental healers’ and ‘experts’ [4] (p. 10). They arrived at the zone of the earthquake with great enthusiasm, but soon became frustrated as they saw that the local population preferred to go to the Buddhist monks and temple masters instead of the foreign psychotherapists and counselors to share their problems. When asked about the reasons, a local woman answered the following:

“I do not know how to communicate with the experts. He told me that I have some kind of disease in my mind but I think I am OK. And he kept asking me to express my feelings toward the earthquake, but I feel embarrassed if I tell people my own feelings … I went to a Master in the temporary temple and she taught me how to deal with the situation. How to calm my anxieties through worship and helping others. How to accept the grief as an arrangement by the gods”

[4] (pp. 10–11).

According to S.P. Lin, the main reason for this failure is that Western professionals tried to impose their psychotherapy techniques to local victims in a way that was not appropriate for their specific cultural context and needs. The zone of the earthquake was inhabited by Hokkien and Hakka Taiwanese and aboriginal people, many of which participated in the Confucian culture. The psychotherapy offered by the Western professionals was just not right for this particular context. Professionals ignored this because they failed to grasp the fact that local people had their own ways of coping with the traumatic event, and that these were as equally valid as the Western worldview and strategies of healing. They lacked not only a sense of cultural awareness of their potential patient´s culture, but also of their own culture when trying to impose a Western worldview on traditional Confucian people [4] (p. 11). However, instead of taking this opportunity for self-scrutiny, some of the professionals attributed the victims´ complaints to “lack of education” [4] (p. 14). Some others “went so far as to assert that the concept of psychotherapy originated in the modern West and is therefore designed implicitly for wealthy, civilised people” [4] (p. 14).

Another very similar example can be found in the Sri Lankan post-tsunami experience of 2004. Athula Sumathipala recounts how following the tsunami, international groups of Western medical relief arrived offering to provide counselling and medical aid. As in the previous example, the humanitarian assistance in this case proved of ‘limited effectiveness’ because the practitioners lacked knowledge of the local languages, culture, health infrastructure and epidemiology of the country [3] (p. 71). Among the major issues, the medicalisation of distress and other “assumptions about Western models of illness and healing” (p. 71) led some responders to advocate for strict post-traumatic stress models which led to increased preventable suffering in victims (p. 71). The practitioners insisted on trying to impose these inappropriate measures even despite the fact that “there were clear signs that local people were coping well with the disaster” (p. 71). The local population possessed its own traditional social support systems and coping mechanisms that had been in place for hundreds of years. These included local healers or physicians, like astrologers, diviners or oracles, as well as other resiliencies rooted in religious faith and practices. Western practitioners prejudicially ignored these traditional support systems and dismissed them as invalid in virtue of assumptions about Western universality, in an attitude that denoted that “the idea that people from different countries might have fundamentally different psychological reactions to a traumatic event was hard for some to grasp” (p. 71).

These examples reflect how the non-expert and the colonial prejudice, when operating together with the epistemic privilege of the Global North, can contribute to perpetuating testimonial injustices against local disaster victims. Despite the evidence and the complaints of the local people, Western professionals manifest a prejudicial distrust about the effectiveness of the methods of healing of the population involved. Victims of disasters, their knowledge and opinions are systematically exposed to dismissal, marginalisation and lack of credibility by Western theorists and practitioners who assist them in contexts of disasters. A closer look at these practices reveals that these acts are originated by underlying patterns of prejudicial perception of non-Western victims of disasters and their credibility. In these cases, the non-expert and the colonial prejudice are also revealing of a wider dynamic of epistemic privilege sustained by the Global North over the Global South, which crystallises in the prioritisation and monopoly of an ideal language of Western professionality in the public and standardised knowledge on disasters.

Especially when produced systematically and persistently, these factors can lead to serious actions of testimonial injustice against non-Western victims of disasters through the dismissal or downgrading of their epistemic credibility as informants in the process of disaster relief and management. As a result, disaster victims are seriously downgraded in their epistemic authority and standing, and are relegated to a passive role of care-receivers rather than active participants in practical contexts of disaster solving. Moreover, as these examples show, testimonial injustices aggravate the harms against the population who is already suffering by trying to impose their own methodologies and thus preventing them to convey and develop their own ways of coping. This can produce further harms and increased suffering, as it can lead local disaster victims to experience cognitive dissonance, loss of epistemic confidence or an actual loss of knowledge that is relevant for their recovery process.

Disaster victims face systematic testimonial injustices when they are often denied the opportunity to participate actively in the definition of disasters, or when they have their input, knowledge, methods and opinions rejected. Disaster victims often face hermeneutical injustices too as a result of their being systematically prevented from articulating and/or sharing their disaster-related experiences to the Western practitioners. In what follows, I embark on analysing how said patterns can also reproduce systematic practices of hermeneutical injustice against victims of disasters.

4. Hermeneutical Injustice in Disasters

In contexts of disasters, hermeneutical injustices can occur when victims struggle to communicate intelligibly their lived experiences related to the catastrophic events to others. Hermeneutical injustices typically manifest themselves in testimonial exchanges, when speakers try to convey their interpretations to others and are responded with incomprehension by their hearers [25] (p. 1). A form in which this can take place in disasters is by preventing victims from sharing the interpretations of their experiences intelligibly with Western practitioners and healers, for instance, by facing responses of incredulity, dismissal or lack of ability to engage with them. Hermeneutical injustices constitute structural events; this means that they originate at a previous level, when victims are prejudicially excluded from participating in the practices of articulation of collective understandings, concepts and other socially shared hermeneutical resources. The consequence of this hermeneutical marginalisation is the production of conceptual lacunae in the place where the names of certain experiences of marginalised groups should be [25] (p. 1). In the disaster field, the hermeneutical marginalisation of disaster victims is evidenced in the fact that the hegemonic knowledge on disasters is incapable of addressing important aspects of their experiences related to the disaster. As reflected in examples like the above, the standardised and majority accounts on disasters tend to miss some central dimensions of the reality of these events, dimensions that are essential to a complete understanding of the nature and scope of disasters. A common feature of the standard views is, for example, the lack of recognition of the role that cultural elements play in configuring the understandings of disastrous events. The standard interpretations of disasters tend to prioritise culturally neutral, secular, rationalist descriptions that are more according to the logic and language of Western knowledge systems. Leaving these aspects aside can pose serious limitations to our knowledge about these events. Cultural factors play a central role throughout all the different phases of disasters. Aspects like religion can have an especial influence in shaping how the disaster is understood and made sense of. On the occasion of the South-East Asia Tsunami of December 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) [40] advised external disaster assistance bear in mind that the population´s interpretation of the disaster had been invested with religious meaning and was “understandable, and manageable, in that context” (p. 4; my italics). Accordingly, WHO stated that assistance that did not involve a full understanding of the complex cultural contexts of a disaster, involving the religious elements, would be both “ineffective and unacceptable” (p. 4). Alongside religion, language can also play a crucial role in determining how victims communicate their experiences and perceptions about disasters. Sumathipala notes that we should pay especial attention to the culturally embedded elements in a particular language and emotions—including the non-verbal—used by victims in contexts of disasters. “Some of these fundamental concepts are unique to that community’s ways of perceiving the world, and cannot be directly translated into another language without serious loss of meaning” [3] (1988, p. 66). This idea includes not just language per se but can also be applied to other culturally bound expressions11.

There are other important dimensions of disasters that the hegemonic views of these events tend to neglect. For one thing, the predominant forms of measuring the damage of a disastrous event privilege the data about localised material damage and other elements related to the logic of short-term interventions—such as forecasting resources, specific immediate therapies, etc. Focusing on these issues and not others makes sense in the context of interventions of international assistance, which have a limited period of time and resources and whose most pressing goal is to help alleviate the most serious consequences of the disaster in order to focus on the immediate recovery of the local zone. However, the impacts of disasters linger for a long time after the event has occurred, sometimes during generations, and many time after the international attention has been lost. Marsella et al. note that “while it is axiomatic that emergency care is essential for the saving of human lives and the prevention of disease and disorder”, it must also be understood that “the cycle of a disaster extends far beyond the acute phases to short-term, mid-term, and long-term recovery, rebuilding, and prevention phases” [2] (2008, p. 3). The subsequent phases to the emergency phases, those involving rehabilitation, rebuilding and reconstruction, are the ones most invested with meaning, including culturally informed meanings (p. 3).

Relatedly, another common assumption within the standard disaster knowledge is that the scope of the victims is limited to those immediately affected by the disaster. According to A.J. Taylor and A.G. Frazer [42], however, there are at least six different level of victims in the course of disasters. These include not just those directly exposed to the catastrophic event, but also the grieving relatives and friends of those primary victims, the rescue and recovery personnel in need of help to maintain their efficiency, the community12 involved with the disaster and even the people who, even though not directly involved, still experience states of distress and disturbance (p. 11). Moreover, the NSW Disaster Response Handbook of 2000 already pointed out that the suffering caused by disasters includes many more feelings and psychological manifestations that those contemplated in the traditional DSMI manuals. These include feelings of helplessness and powerlessness, loss, dislocation, guilt, inescapable horror or human malevolence, among many others, and are culturally mediated as well [43] (p. 16).

All these points are not trivial because an inadequate understanding of the complex reality of disasters will not suffice to help make sense of the whole reality of these events and according to the real experiences of victims. Especially if it leaves out essential elements of the current experience of disaster victims, such an understanding can create hermeneutical gaps in our collective conception of these events. Authors like Kaikini [44] have made a similar point by arguing that categorisations like the now canonical distinction between natural and man-made disasters13 “do little for our understanding of the moral stakes of institutions and collectives involved in the aftermath of disasters” (p. 1). As the author puts it, this distinction indicates a “gap in conceptualizing” these events, which innocently or not innocently tends to perpetuate interpretations of the former that do not reflect their whole complex moral and phenomenological nature (p. 1)14.

Disasters involve much more than struggles of survival and healing. They are also struggles for hope, purpose and meaning [2] (p. ix). Privileging exclusively the language of Western rationality and expertise while obscuring other interpretations of the lived experience of disasters makes us lose important aspects of the nature and scope of their harms on the people involved. More than this, it can also encourage hermeneutical injustices towards disaster victims by preventing them from making sense of their lived experience of the disaster in a way that is intelligible and meaningful to them—namely, within their cultural contexts and meanings of expression. Just like testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice downgrades the epistemic standing of disaster victims and hinders their ability to contribute as active co-participants in the collective discussion about disasters as well as in the processes of disaster recovery. Moreover, the impacts of hermeneutical injustice can extend into other additional epistemic and non-epistemic harms, including feelings of isolation, confusion or helplessness, that can cause additional suffering to victims.

Recent efforts have been made to show that other articulations of disasters beyond the canonical are possible and desirable in order to provide a more integral understanding of their complex reality and effects. For instance, Kaikini has proposed to reconceptualise disasters as ‘events of social suffering’ that “constitute moments of crisis for humanity as a whole in which the status quo of a contemporary human condition is altered or forced to change” [44] (p. 2). Such redefinition, Kaikini argues, constitutes an “ontological rephrasing” that captures best their nature while being able give significance to both “the loss of the dignity of life and the loss of physical life” (p. 2). Understood in this way, the language of suffering enables us to begin to articulate the experiences of disasters and the memories of their victims metaphysically (p. 2).

Understanding disasters in their complex reality is not just a matter of hermeneutical justice to the victims, but is also essential to ameliorate our hegemonic knowledge of these events. Doing this can contribute positively to the prevention of their risks and the mitigation of their effects in the future. The last decades have seen a development of proposals for incorporating ‘multicultural competencies’ in the contexts of disaster emergency response. These measures work under the premise that “to help victims of disasters, we must understand who they are and what they need from their own perspective” [2] (p. 3). To do so, it is essential we understand, respect and use their culture in our efforts (p. 3). The following and last section discusses these new measures by focusing on their potential to revert or even prevent epistemic injustices in contexts of disasters.

5. Multicultural Competencies as a Palliative for Epistemic Injustice in Disasters

The field known as ‘multicultural competencies’ or ‘cultural competence’ has grown among health professionals in disaster matters over the last years [47,48]. Organisations like the WHO and the APA [49] have developed guidelines and ethical policies for training staff in multicultural competencies15. The guiding principle behind this idea is that in order to provide effective services, it is essential to understand the lived experience of the client/patient/victim [2] (p. 8). Not doing this can lead not only to errors in assessment, diagnosis and in treatment, but also to increased harms against victims. By acquiring cultural competencies, professionals of disasters are asked to acquire knowledge and skills “that will enable them to function competently within the cultural context of the people they are serving” (p. 8). This includes a wide set of issues ranging from knowledge of the history of victims and manifestations of such issues as oppression, prejudice, marginalisation and their psychological sequelae; manifestations of mental and physical illness; or knowledge of values, help seeking norms and world views of groups to be treated (p. 8).

The development of multicultural competencies requires an active process of self-criticism and self-transformation in professionals. They are asked to become aware of the cultural embeddedness of the patient as well as of their own methods of inquiry and professional practices, to critically revisit their own epistemologies, methods and assumptions, to modify their assessment tools to adapt for the specific group and culturally sensitive context and to navigate therapist–client language differences on assessment and treatment (p. 8). An especial emphasis is put in the psychological and psychiatric effects of disasters and on the culturally informed and linguistic nuances in the communication of these experiences (p. 8).

The increasing demand of multicultural competencies can serve as an example of what Sumathipala calls the demand of ‘ethical entry’ into disaster-affected communities [3] (p. 65). This demand requires that those who are ‘duty bound’ do not add further negative consequences to what is already faced by disaster survivors (p. 65). Ideally, this includes the commitment that the relief “should not be imposed by the donor´s will but should depend on the needs of the affected community” (p. 66) and that the community holds ownership of and leadership of the processes of healing (p. 65).

Naturally, this idea contains an important epistemic dimension too. Bringing to the front the culturally informed aspects of disasters and their role in constructing the reality of their lived experience is essential to allow to resurface the interpretations and meanings of the people involved in the different phases of a disaster. The new approaches of cultural competence provide a means of reassigning intelligibility to these neglected aspects within the protocolised disaster knowledge. In particular, my argument is that they can help counteract the structural epistemic injustices in the latter while promoting the implementation of alternative practices of testimonial and hermeneutical justice in these contexts.

On the one hand, considering the culturally embedded dimensions of disasters and how they influence the victims´ testimonies and forms of expression allows a way of incorporating the victims´ insights in the different phases of the disaster, including the diagnostic and the recovery phases. This enables us to undo the previous marginalisation of their word while helping to restore their testimonial agency by making them active participants in the process. Moreover, the intercultural approach to communication in contexts of disasters also encourages us to regard victims as potential informants instead of mere passive recipients of the professional assistance. It also allows to reconceive the process of disasters as a shared epistemic enterprise where meanings, testimonies and opinions are collectively discussed and in which victims´ contributions have an essentially informative task.

On the other hand, applying cultural competence to disaster contexts can help prompt a communicative climate in which disaster victims can better express and make sense of their lived experiences in a meaningful and intelligible way, thus restoring the previous hermeneutical gaps and silences that they suffered. Including factors like language or religion in our hegemonic understandings of disasters, for example, can allow victims to express some central aspects of their lived experiences in relation to disastrous events, by providing new concepts or means of expression that were absent in the secular and culturally neutral approaches. Doing this also enables disaster victims to share their experiences in a way that contests and undoes their previous situations of unintelligibility, ineffability, hermeneutical obscurity and confusion. Moreover, like in the case of testimony, it also grants them with an active participation in the public processes of disaster conceptualisation, in a way that permits us to collectively ameliorate our knowledge of the reality and scope of these events.

The reason why cultural competencies can help mitigate epistemic injustice in disasters is because they can directly attack the structural root of these injustices—namely, the epistemic privilege of the Global North on the production of hegemonic knowledge about disasters. As I said before, the idea behind multicultural competencies consists of a redefinition of the theoretical and practical construction of disasters as a shared epistemic enterprise between the different locations and traditions around the world, instead of an asymmetrical process in which the voices of the Global North are privileged over those of the Global South. This provides us with a useful way of undoing the epistemic privilege of the Global North, not necessarily by rejecting it, but by questioning its universality. It also enables us to restore the epistemic privilege of victims of disasters across the Global South. As mentioned before, the latter possess knowledges and experiences that might not be accessible to those who do not directly experience the complex and long-term realities of disasters. In virtue of this, disaster victims too have an epistemic privilege when it comes to certain essential—and sometimes, radically unique and different—lived aspects of disasters. As such, the authority of their knowledges should be recognised and not dismissed because they do not qualify with the language of Western expertise.

It seems paradoxical that the voices of those who majoritarily have a first-person access to disasters and to the idiosyncrasies and particular needs of the cultures affected by the latter are usually the ones given less epistemic authority to speak about these events. Even though their approach and experience to the disaster is not clinically trained, victims´ words should be given at least some informative value when it comes to assessing the diagnosis of the harms or the effectivity of the solutions applied. Besides, local victims should also be given at least some credit when it comes to assessing the validity of certain methods of healing within their particular culturally embedded context. As Wessells notes,

“Local communities have specific methods and tools for healing such as rituals, ceremonies, and practices of remembrance. Since they are grounded in the beliefs, values, and traditions of the local culture, they are both culturally appropriate and more sustainable than methods brought in from the outside”

[35] (pp. 274–275).

The framework of multicultural competencies might be just one of the ways in which we can start to recognise and take seriously the epistemic standing of victims of disasters, but its potential to counteract and mitigate the effects of epistemic injustice in these fields should not be underrated16.

6. Conclusions

In this article, I have argued that the protocolised treatment of disasters reproduces patterns of epistemic injustice against disaster victims in the two senses defined by Fricker, namely, as a wrong against their standing as rightful informants and as subjects of social interpretation in matters related to the production of disaster knowledge. I have also argued that epistemic injustices in contexts of disasters arise not accidentally, but as systematic patterns that affect both the theoretical construction and the practical treatment of these events. In particular, epistemic injustices are generated and sustained by structural features of the protocolised treatment of disasters. Among these, I have drawn attention to the epistemic privilege and epistemic asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South—which I have identified, respectively, with the Western experts and professionals and the disaster victims—and to the persistent action of two prejudices that operate against the latter—in particular, the non-expert prejudice and the colonial prejudice. As I have argued, applying the language and tools of epistemic injustice to the disaster literature and context can help to begin to identify the ways in which the patterns of epistemic privilege and prejudice are generated and perpetrated on a regular basis, while giving a name to the harmful impact of these actions on the victims. This is also an essential first step to begin asking how the protocolised treatments of disasters could be reformed in order to minimise, prevent or impede the formation of epistemic injustice against victims of disasters.

In Section 3 and Section 4, I have focused on the role that the epistemic privilege of the Global North has in perpetuating testimonial and hermeneutical injustices against disaster victims, in the respective senses of preventing them from conveying their testimonies and of obscuring the intelligibility and communicability of their experiences related to disastrous events. The impact of such instances of epistemic injustice is, I have argued, systematic in the context of disasters, and applies both to their theoretical as well as its practical dimension. As a result of this, disaster victims face harms against their epistemic standing, are prejudicially excluded from the global conversation on disasters, and some essential knowledge about disasters is collectively lost.

The way in which I have defined the epistemic privilege of the Global North in this paper needs to be specified further. By applying this notion to the context of disaster ethics, I have argued that the epistemic privilege emerges in these contexts as a result of a condescending Western politics in which certain voices and epistemic methodologies are privileged for the mere reason of belonging to the Global North. However, a question this raises is whether this epistemic privilege is to be understood as the result of misapplying the norms of Western Modern rationality, relatively narrowly construed, to contexts where this is not suitable, or—a stronger claim—whether the problem is in construing a rather misleading image of what Western rationality is. In other words, the epistemic privilege might be referred to an insufficiently self-reflective Western science in its application to practice, or it can have to do with the theoretical and philosophical frameworks of this rationality and science in themselves. Regarding the first aspect, the experience of disasters, where the application of Western standards to the variously plural cultural realities surrounding these events—and the corresponding endless examples of failure on this matter—shows that there is a universal problem of imposition of the Western rationality in contexts in which it is not suitable nor effective. Regarding the second aspect, however, the Western tradition encompasses a set of different traditions of thinking, many of which—such as critical theory—have not been unaware nor uncritical about the ethnocentrism or universality contained within this tradition. Therefore, the problem with the epistemic privilege of the Global North in matters of disasters does not stem, in my view, inherently and intrinsically from the very Western intellectual tradition, but from a hegemonic and standardised particular application of the latter.

Throughout this discussion, it has been evidenced that there is much more to the reality of disasters than the protocolised treatment of the formers allows to recount. Disasters are primarily integral events. They impact communities as a whole and their effect extends far beyond the crisis period and the international attention. Their costs and damage extend not just to the physical, but also to the psychological, the religious, the emotional, the economic, the moral, the cultural and other dimensions of human life. In the last part of the paper, I have suggested that the field of cultural competence can helpfully contribute to ameliorate our knowledge about these events, while allowing us to counteract epistemic injustices by allowing victims to regain their epistemic agency and negotiate their own meanings and interpretations related to disastrous events.

However, the achievement of an ideal of epistemic justice requires much more than this. For one thing, the epistemic privilege of the Global North is still very much predominant in the academic disaster field. Undoing epistemic injustices in this context would require contesting and redefining these dynamics as well, in a way that makes room for the participation of more voices from the Global South in the discussion. This implies very complex and demanding transformations, including rethinking the tyranny of major Western editorials and their logic of academic—and economic—rentability. Beyond that, an ideal of epistemic justice would too involve an arduous and non-ending task of cultivating the virtues of epistemic humility and epistemic open-mindedness in order to critically transform the ethnocentricity of our thinking.

All these changes are difficult and require effort, willingness and time. However, this work is urgent and pressing. This is more true especially if we take into account that epistemic injustice might very well become an increasing problem in the future because of the climate crisis, and the probability of increased disasters.

Disasters are one of the most catastrophic events that can alter the lives of whole populations dramatically. Adding epistemic injustice to the mix causes additional suffering, isolation, injury and pain to those already vulnerable.