The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

So my name is Megan Bradley. I'm an associate professor at McGill University in Montreal.

I work in political science and international development studies.

So I'd like to start off by saying first thank you very much to Fred and Alex and the other co-organizers for inviting me to join you today.

It's almost 4 a.m. in Montreal right now, so I'm hoping that this is going to be more coherent than it might otherwise be given the time change.

So it's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in a conference like this,

in particular because I'm coming from a rather different academic culture than I think many people in the room.

I'm assuming that most of you make your intellectual homes in disaster studies.

I've been engaging more and more in disaster studies in recent years, but I come from a background of working primarily on refugee issues.

A lot of my past work has focused on questions around the ways in which refugees experience and contest,

grapple with major injustices and the extent to which transitional justice processes take account of and engage refugees as actors.

So more recently I've been working on displacement in disaster contexts, doing field work in contexts like Haiti after the earthquake,

the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan and on and off in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

And this has been a chance for me to start exploring and engaging with the disaster studies community,

and it's been really interesting to learn a bit about some of the past discussions in this conference series.

So as a scholar in human rights and transitional justice, I have been struck by a broad trend.

And this is the idea that the pursuit of accountability for massive human rights violations is, I think,

one of the defining features of politics at the national and international level, also at local levels,

certainly since the end of World War II and particularly since the end of the Cold War.

This isn't to say that accountability for major human rights violations isn't in any sense the norm,

but we've certainly seen the development of a whole range of institutions, mechanisms and processes

that are often engaged to try to deal with and recognize, make movements towards redressing some of these egregious violations.

So we can think about mechanisms from international courts through to truth commissions, grassroots initiatives.

And disasters, of course, are often characterized by gross human rights violations,

as the initial comments really, I think, brought into focus.

So just to highlight a few quite obvious cases in point, in 2008, Typhoon Nargis killed some 138,000 people in Myanmar or Burma.

And many of the people who were most egregiously affected were in areas involved in armed opposition to the regime.

And so, as some might remember, the government actually initially refused to allow international aid to the survivors,

which certainly compounded the suffering and death associated with the disaster.

And then, perhaps more famously, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina involved massive human rights violations,

predominantly against poor black residents of New Orleans at every stage,

from preparation through to the initial response and recovery process.

So as Greg Button and Mark Schuller have reflected, for many disaster victims,

the assignment of blame and responsibility is often an integral part of their struggle to find meaning after catastrophe.

And yet, these injustices are rarely acknowledged and addressed through processes and institutions

that are designed and intended to try to acknowledge and redress abuses.

So I've been trying to sort of grapple with why this is and to what extent we might understand this to be a problem.

So really, this is sort of a broader effort to try to bring the fields of transitional justice and disaster studies into conversation with one another.

And I'm certainly coming at this as a kind of transitional justice person,

so I might use slightly different language and have some different background assumptions than others in the room,

but hopefully that's an opportunity for an interesting conversation.

So in particular today, Fred said I should speak for about 30 minutes, so I'll try to keep that limitation.

I'd like to share some ideas from a recent article that I've done on the relationship between disasters and transitional justice.

So this work is asking in particular whether systematic abuses in disaster contexts should be understood as part of the scope of transitional justice,

and don't worry, I'll spend some time explaining what I mean by that if it's not a familiar term.

And second, what might transitional justice contribute, if anything, to redressing massive violations in disaster contexts?

So in exploring these questions, I've argued that misperceptions in the human rights and transitional justice community

about so-called natural disasters as inevitable and blameless misfortunes have perpetuated neglect

in these communities in theory and practice of injustices that are associated with disasters.

So part of what I've been trying to do with sort of my people, per se, is try to sort of open up some of the insights