From cyclone in Bhola in 1970 to the disaster of Tohoku and Fukushima in 2011, the earthquake in Armenia in 1988, Hurricane Mitch in 1998 or the tsunami of 2004 in Southeast Asia, an international world of so-called ‘natural’ disasters has gradually emerged. Why ‘natural’? Since the 1990s, natural phenomena — earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, volcanic eruption — are no longer considered to be the sole cause of disasters: human activity increases the vulnerability of regions and residents to disasters, which it is therefore no longer acceptable to attribute to nature alone. The social world built around these disasters is made up of many actors from a variety of backgrounds: first aiders, NGO professionals, diplomats, scientists, etc. In order to form an ‘international disaster government’, they had to develop common norms, standards, tools and language in order to harmonise different or even competing ways of doing things. This book, which is the result of a seven-year ethnographic among stakeholders in this world, reflects this continuous work and brings it to light of the main tensions that drive it: between preparedness and resilience, prevention and emergency, traditional technology and practices, hierarchical command and horizontal organisation, random paradigm and vulnerability paradigm...