Guest editorial Introduction to the special issue “The L’Aquila earthquake 10 years on (2009-2019): impacts and state-of-the-art” L’Aquila’s earthquake in April 2009 provoked damage and loss to people, communities, the economy and the environment. Since then, several works have adopted a human and social science perspective (e.g. Carnelli et al., 2016) to unpack different aspects of the emergency and recovery of L’Aquila and nearby areas. This earthquake gave rise to a new generation of Italian scholars embracing this kind of perspective on risk and disaster studies (Benadusi, 2015; Carnelli et al., 2016). We, as guest editors of this special issue of Disaster Prevention and Management: an International Journal, argue that 10 years after the earthquake, there is still need – and perhaps now more than ever – to talk and reflect about it, for at least three main reasons. First, the aftermath of the L’Aquila earthquake has revealed the potential for analysing disasters from a political angle (Pelling and Dill, 2010). This allows us to reflect on the event as a political issue, and to move strong critiques of the post-disaster state intervention by openly talking about the failure of the nation-state as representation of liberal democracy (Valent, 2018; Forino, Carnelli, Ventura and Tomassi, 2019; Forino, Carnelli, Ventura and Valent, 2019). Bock (2017) argued that the Italian government (the state), after the event, generated a sense of hope by bringing mass-media in the affected areas and rhetorically claiming “we will never leave you alone”, “we are with you”, “never more these tragedies!”, “housing for all as soon as possible”. A few years later, when it was realized that all these promises had not come to fruition, this hope was replaced by a sense of uncertainty. From an agent of hope, the state became therefore a source of hopelessness and uncertainty, fostering a sense of crisis (Bock, 2017) and undetermined displacement (Alexander, 2013; Carnelli, 2012). Despite the huge amount of funds allocated to emergency management (Ventura, 2010), the state intervention in the L’Aquila aftermath was a “second earthquake” (Bock, 2017)[1] that has consequences even today on the everyday life of thousands of citizens that had to regain and reshape their emotions and habits around endless scaffolding, rubble, off-limits zones and work in progress. Instead of being “simply” a crisis induced by a natural hazard, the crisis is essentially a political matter, where inaction and/or neoliberal strategies (Barrios, 2011, 2017), elephantiasic bureaucracy and the corruption of the state and its institutions are deeply intertwined. On this regard, this issue will move critique to the ways the Italian government managed the disaster and will reveal the rhetoric of institutions and of powerful actors, both within and outside the institutions. Second, we argue that what occurred in L’Aquila in these years can be found in other disaster aftermaths across Italy. We can say that it is possible to identify structural patterns of post-disaster recovery’s impacts that are reproduced on the affected areas in different forms and at different levels (Bonati et al., 2019). Existing literature (Alexander, 2010, 2013) revealed that L’Aquila recovery presents unique characteristics, particularly in relation to the temporary housing solutions becoming permanent and the economic costs of emergency management (Ventura, 2010). However, we argue that what occurred in L’Aquila can be found in other recovery experiences, particularly post-earthquakes, after 2009 (http://periferiesurbanes.org/?p=7884&lang=en). For example, after the earthquakes in the Emilia Romagna region in 2012, Pitzalis demonstrated that a similar top-down governance pattern was applied, totally excluding bottom-up initiatives and local participation in the name of an “emergency paradigm” (Pitzalis, 2015). In a similar vein, the activists/research group Emidio Di Treviri (2018) demonstrated that temporary housing solutions after the Disaster Prevention and Management Vol. 28 No. 4, 2019 pp. 414-418 © Emerald Publishing Limited 0965-3562 DOI 10.1108/DPM-08-2019-394 414 DPM 28,4