Mapping Vulnerabilities: The Narratives of Structural Violence

Abstract

This vast range of existing research on dimensions of vulnerability indicates the exclusivity of different ‘situations’ related to and generating vulnerabilities. While perusing the titles under ‘mapping vulnerabilities’ in web based search engines, it is starkly noticeable that most scholars talk about methods and indices on how to capture the nature and intensity of vulnerabilities in many different parts of the world, and a majority of these studies focus on climate-related crises, such as changes in the sea level and other catastrophic threats, exploring the incidence of threats and the impacts of those threats in terms of risk or possibility of loss. Therefore, it is important to understand how these vulnerabilities are created worldwide by corporate capital in a nexus with international power houses and organisations in this globalised world. ...The term vulnerability raises more questions than giving answers while mapping the socio-politico-economic impact of vulnerabilities. There is no dearth of literature on the procedures and strategies of mapping vulnerabilities. The contextuality of vulnerability like heat islands or water scarcity in cities to floods in the river basin areas gives useful insights into how to map the differential impacts of these threats on different community groups across class and gender through the lens of intersectionality. Thus, it is important to question the process of creating vulnerabilities, otherwise, one may get lost in the process of measuring vulnerabilities rather than looking into the structural processes vis-à-vis structural violence, which create these situations.