Vulnerabilities

This chapter explores different orientations to vulnerability as a condition of being. The chapter approaches the various definitions of vulnerability before moving on to a review of climate change and disaster studies, which are the fields where vulnerability has been developed as a significant concept. The chapter also reviews the study of poverty where vulnerability emerges as a related category. Sociological approaches on precarity, which have relevance for addressing vulnerability and vulnerable populations, are an important addition to economic approaches to poverty. The role of the state as a context and as an agent shaping vulnerability is crucial. Within the state, the chapter explores specific themes such as welfare and everyday governance and the field of law, humanitarian support, and conflict. A fundamental problem emerges where the state is simultaneously the source of recognition of vulnerable populations, concerned with the alleviation of vulnerability, and yet also produces situations of vulnerability. The chapter finally addresses the vulnerable subject in relation to the anthropology of subjectivities and the anthropology of violence and suffering to approach the question “who is vulnerable?”