By JC Gaillard, Waipapa Taumata Rau, Aotearoa, University of the Philippines Resilience Institute, New Zealand

Southasiadisasters.net is a unique publication; one that offers a rare opportunity for practitioners, policy makers and scholars to share their experiences and perspectives in fostering the reduction of disaster risk across South Asia. As such, Southasiadisasters.net is a site of convergence that has organically emerged as our go-to resource for anything disaster-related in the region, whether it is to learn how we understand harm and hardship or how actors of all sorts respond to people’s suffering. What has made it so powerful and trusted is that Southasiadisasters.net rejects both hierarchies and norms, which is both rare and needed in a field of scholarship, policy and action that is so normalised after Western standards.

In Southasiadisasters.net, all forms of knowledge, all experiences, and all perspectives are valued as the mirror of their own truth and reflective of their respective epistemological traditions. Southasiadisasters.net is indeed a culturally-grounded publication; one that fosters genuine relationships across cultures and professional backgrounds. It recognises that South Asia is an incredibly diverse region and hence appreciates difference as a strength. Ultimately, Southasiadisasters.net encourages people and actors of disaster risk reduction to share their own experiences of harm and hardship as a form of enrichment. Learning is indeed to come from diversity and plurality rather than universality and normalisation.

Southasiadisasters.net makes such relationships possible because it offers a (very) rare opportunity to publish in diverse local and regional languages, without forcing translation. It thus recognises that languages are the main vehicles of our thoughts, of how we make sense of the world, including when it comes to natural phenomena, harm, hardship and suffering. Southasiadisasters.net therefore constitutes a grounded pathway for local people, practitioners and scholars to truly express their experiences and perspectives, unfiltered by the standards of translation and the legacy of colonial languages. Opacity is seen as an opportunity to emphasise difference and foster learning.

This non-hierarchical and non-normative ethos has made Southasiadisasters.net one of the flagships of the Disaster Studies Manifesto and Accord, alongside other grounded publications such as Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies in Africa and the Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos sobre Reducción del Riesgo de Desastres (REDER) in South America. The fact that it is here publishing its 225^th issue is an obvious sign that these publications are needed, that it is possible to favour local audience without excluding outsiders’ perspectives, that opacity and hybridity are opportunities rather than challenges.

As such, Southasiadisasters.net is a publication of the pluriverse.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of AIDMI.