Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century

by Julia F. Irwin

Overview

Catastrophic Diplomacy offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-century US foreign relations. Spanning over seventy years, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, it examines how the US government, US military, and their partners in the American voluntary sector responded to major catastrophes around the world. Focusing on US responses to sudden disasters caused by earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods—crises commonly known as “natural disasters”—historian Julia F. Irwin highlights the complex and messy politics of emergency humanitarian relief.

Deftly weaving together diplomatic, environmental, military, and humanitarian histories, Irwin tracks the rise of US disaster aid as a tool of foreign policy, showing how and why the US foreign policy establishment first began contributing aid to survivors of international catastrophes. While the book focuses mainly on bilateral assistance efforts, it also assesses the broader international context in which the US government and its auxiliaries operated, situating their humanitarian responses against the aid efforts of other nations, empires, and international organizations. At its most fundamental level, Catastrophic Diplomacy demonstrates the importance of international disaster assistance—and humanitarian aid more broadly—to US foreign affairs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469677231
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Julia F. Irwin is associate professor of history at the University of South Florida.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A cautionary tale of constant pitfalls in provisioning aid, as well as humble suggestions for a better path through the calamities of the future—especially as once-a-century disasters become ever more frequent in our climate crisis.”—Megan Black, author of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power

“Far beyond its explicit arguments about disaster aid, this book stands as a model of how to think and write about contingency in history.”—Jacob Remes, author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era

Editorial Reviews

“Catastrophic Diplomacy is a rich, ground-breaking, and thoroughly researched study. Julia F. Irwin brilliantly demonstrates that foreign disaster assistance never functioned as a disinterested form of aid. . . . Irwin [is] an indispensable and authoritative voice of twentieth-century U.S. diplomatic history.”—Journal of American History

“Brilliant. . . . [A]n exciting argument and an important corrective to the historiography of foreign aid.”—Diplomatic History

“A comprehensive and critical examination of an important yet under-explored aspect of US international relations. Irwin’s work, rich in detail and scope, represents an invaluable resource not only for historians of US American foreign policy but also for current practitioners and policymakers in the field of international aid and diplomacy . . . . [a] sweeping study . . . . a significant scholarly achievement.”—Not Even Past

“This thought-provoking book . . . . reveals how factors such as geopolitical self-interest, national sovereignty, socioeconomic disparities, and pure happenstance influenced when and how the US chose to respond to humanitarian crises . . . .understanding how the US historically used foreign assistance to further its self-interest abroad provides important lessons that can inform American policymakers’ responses to international catastrophes today.”—CHOICE

“For the current and future practice of disaster aid in the climate century, Catastrophic Diplomacy illustrates that nothing was inevitable in the history of US foreign disaster relief.”H-Environment

“Insgesamt ist ein großes Verdienst von Julia Irwin, die Verbindung von Hilfsbereitschaft und geleisteter staatlicher Hilfe als Teil der nationalen Interessenpolitik über das 20. Jahrhundert im Wandel umfassend informiert und klar argumentierend an markanten Beispielen nachgegangen zu sein.”—sehepunkte

Translation: “Overall, Julia Irwin’s great achievement is that she has investigated the connection between willingness to help and state aid as part of national interest policy over the changing 20th century in a comprehensive and clearly argued manner using striking examples.”—sehepunkte

“An important, deeply researched, finely crafted, and readable book [that] breaks new ground in detailing the long history of the understudied subject of US disaster aid overseas. It challenges conventional wisdom about when the United States became involved in foreign aid. It offers a window into foreign policy decision-making in the early twentieth century. . . . And it shows that the United States often acted on a humane impulse to relieve suffering in other nations, albeit sometimes doing so in a self-interested, controlling, and/or condescending manner.”—H-Diplo Roundtable

“Catastrophic Diplomacy is a much-needed intervention in the expanding historiography of humanitarianism and foreign aid. It is invaluable for demonstrating the politics and practices of aid delivery, addressing both the United States’ weaponization of relief in emergency contexts, as well as for uncovering the fascinating internal disputes between field-based internal disputes between field-based U.S. personnel as they debated what was the ‘right’ way to intervene in global crises. . . . I highly recommend adding this book to the canon of must-read humanitarian histories.”—Margot Tudor, Passport

From the Publisher