Letter from the Editors
Resilience takes many forms in the face of disasters both physical and political.
This month’s issue is devoted to resilience and its limits. From the ability of governments to regroup and mobilize in the face of disaster (literal or figurative, in the sense of an electoral drumming) to the ways people rebuild their lives in the face of wars and devastation, we explore the response to unexpected setbacks.
Our cover story is devoted to resilience in its most literal sense: The ability of the Indian Ocean region to recover from the devastation wrought by the 2004 tsunami. In addition to the immediate rebuilding, governments sought to strengthen disaster response mechanisms to make sure no natural disaster would take such a deadly toll again. As Alistair D. B. Cook, the coordinator of the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, explains, there have been noticeable advances made since 2004 in setting up frameworks for disaster response and prevention. Yet there’s a paradox, Cook writes: a “reduction in disaster deaths and damage inspires complacency as other policy areas are deemed more pressing.”
Rajeev Bhattacharyya, a veteran journalist and The Diplomat’s correspondent in India’s Northeast, had a rare chance to visit territory recently seized by the Arakan Army from Myanmar’s military. Traveling through the war-torn Chin and Rakhine states, Bhattacharyya recounts seeing shelled villages, washed out roads, and severe shortages of basic goods like fuel. “Poverty and underdevelopment were writ large in varying degrees across all the regions I visited in Arakan,” he writes. Yet life continues, despite an extreme lack of the most basic services governments usually provide for their citizens.
Politicians generally prefer leading from a position of strength. But that’s not the reality that new Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru faces. As Sheila Smith, the John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains, Ishiba has taken power in a far weaker political position than his immediate predecessors and he has far more international volatility to contend with. Japan’s domestic turmoil may render Tokyo ineffective on the global stage precisely when the world needs a strong, stable Japan.
We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.