This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
1 1 1 1 Editorial Anstett Élisabeth Dreyfus Jean-Marc Fournet Caroline April 2015 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 10.7227/HRV.1.1.1 Forensic identification and identity politics in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand: Negotiating dissolving boundaries Merli Claudia Buck
Introduction Best is the enemy of good Italian proverb popularised in the French by Voltaire Relief is the enemy of reconstruction Attributed to Otto Koenigsberger by Ian Davis ( Davis and Alexander, 2016 : 32) Is safe the enemy of safer? The expressions ‘Build Back Better’ (BBB) and ‘Build Back Safer’ (BBS) are popular humanitarian shelter straplines. Championed by special envoy Bill Clinton, ‘Building Back Better’ was the ambition after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami ( Clinton, 2006 ) – is also one of the Priorities for Action of the 2015
time-sensitive, common goal (saving lives, particularly in the crucial first days after a disaster) ( Forestier et al. , 2016 ). However, that does not mean that there are no challenges to civil–military coordination, not least when a large number of actors respond. An example of this is the 2008 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, to which a reported 14 UN agencies, 16 foreign militaries and 195 foreign humanitarian organisations were involved in humanitarian assistance ( Wiharta et al. , 2008 ). However, challenges in disaster responses are
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occasioned an unusually long-lasting and far-reaching media scandal in Sweden. The rumour about Under-Secretary of State Ingmar Ohlsson In connection with the earthquake in the Indian Ocean and the subsequent tsunami disaster on 26 December 2004, when around 250,000 people, including 543 Swedes, lost their lives, the work performed by the Swedish Prime Minister’s Office was exposed to heavy criticism in the media. An opinion shared by many people was that the authorities had reacted too slowly and unprofessionally, and had lacked a sustainable disaster plan just when it
necessary to corroborate the identification. Bone and teeth are the more reliable sources for DNA and provide higher success rates,42 but the extraction methods are more complicated and time-consuming than for soft tissues.43 Nevertheless, there are very real problems associated with contamination in commingling contexts. Usually, this is of greatest concern when sampling the soft tissues; however, following the tsunami in Southeast Asia it was noted that samples taken from bone tissue also exhibited contamination.44 The source of the contamination is uncertain
which there exists not only situations of intentional mass killing, but also countless recent experiences of disasters, whether natural or industrial, from Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 tsunami in Japan to the Savar building collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, the recent Ebola epidemic or multiple air crashes such as the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine or the Germanwings Barcelona–Düsseldorf crash in the French Alps, which serve to remind us of the reality and deep significance of this issue. Notes 1 Translated from the authors’ French by Jon Hensher. 2 J
, tsunamis and bushfires, are heightened events where time is said to be ‘of the essence’ in coordinating a response to save lives and property. Here I examine how dynamic maps, digital spatial media, are being used to respond to such crises. I use my approach to the analysis of interactive ‘crisis mapping’ projects as a means to explore and review how using the concepts of ‘bubbles’ and ‘foams’ can help us to make sense of these mapping projects over time. The mapping of crises is an apt case study because we see how maps seek to account for shifting landscapes Maps
