“Who Won the San Francisco Earthquake?” The Impact of Disasters on International Politics

Dylan Motin

Abstract
Many believe that global challenges eventually elicit global cooperation. Yet, decades of global warming and the recent coronavirus pandemic have failed to change international politics’ texture. Global threats to human well-being do not appear to provoke decisive international coordination. Yet, surprisingly, some local, more limited natural or technological disasters like the Chernobyl accident or the Justinian Plague significantly impacted international affairs. Why do global disasters killing many millions leave the international order intact, while some local disasters upset international relations profoundly? I argue that only disasters transforming the international distribution of power will reorder patterns of alignments and conflicts. Conversely, disasters affecting the international community relatively evenly safeguard the balance of power since everyone suffers equally. Thus, globally shared disasters usually do not cause significant changes in the international order. Patterns of relations remain the same, and power politics does not stop. I describe a few cases of disasters provoking power shifts and of disasters impacting wars to support my causal argument. This paper significantly pushes the borders of IR and realism, which have paid little attention to disasters’ impact on interstate relations.

Keywords
Cooperation, Disasters, Distribution of power, Pandemics, Realism