Area (2008) 40.4, 520–521 Area Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 520–521, 2008 ISSN 0004-0894 © The Authors. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Commentary The vulnerable society Geoff O’Brien*, Phil O’Keefe** and Joanne Rose** *Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST Email: geoff.obrien@unn.ac.uk **ETC UK, North Shields NE30 1EG Revised manuscript received 3 April 2008 Background The Bali negotiations on global futures raise again questions about society and risk. Some 30 years ago, in addressing the nature of risk, O’Keefe and his colleagues (1975) argued that under capitalism those most vulnerable were the most marginal in terms of livelihood. It was a crude measure of social class based on per capita GDP. There are now much more salient analyses of vulnerabilities (http://www.vulnerability.net.org). It is, however, worth returning to the argument. The argument was essentially around what we shall call ‘Type 1’ disasters. While the dominant curve of Figure 1 shows a direct correlation between the number of disasters and poverty, thus leading to discussion about marginal people and marginal places, the extremes of the graph show a different tendency. Where more income is available there is a tendency for disasters to rise quite simply because there is more property that can be damaged. At the other extreme, poor people, as measured in monetary worth, tend to be in pre-capitalist modes of production where subsistence coping mechanisms enable them to enjoy a level of resilience, thus reducing risk to disaster. Type 2 disasters The Type 2 disaster (Figure 2) assumes a globalised world in which ‘Fear of Fear’ (for example, 9/11 or nuclear catastrophe, as well as natural hazards) is significantly more important than the Type 1 disaster, which is ‘Fear of Famine’ (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). Beck and Giddens approach this from an event-led perspective as opposed to vulnerability. Building societal resilience is central to global calls to reduce vulnerability to disasters (Hyogo 2005). However, the focus of many national disaster management platforms is on building institutional resilience. Terrorism since 9/11 has added a new dimension – securitisation. The increase in surveillance risks fostering a culture of distrust and suspicion, particularly of individuals or groups that do not conform to an accepted norm. This is a recipe for long-term social alienation and erosion of social cohesion – the antithesis of resilience building (O’Brien 2006). Type 2 disasters essentially reflect the impact of globali- sation. To model this in the twenty-first century would suggest that everybody had been forced from pre-capitalist modes of production and that the value of property had substantially Figure 1 Type 1 disasters Figure 2 Type 2 disasters