Choi, Vivian2010-03-262010-03-262008http://hdl.handle.net/10625/42514Also published in “Tsunami in a time of war: aid, activism & reconstruction in Sri Lanka and Aceh,” de Alwis, Malathi and Hedman, Eva-Lotta E., eds. (2009)A ‘preparedness’ rationale has increasingly shifted disaster management towards disaster risk management. The paper illustrates how the push to acquire more information and knowledge about disasters constitute new technological, governmental, and humanitarian practices. However, information does not always lend more knowledge; humanitarian action occurs in an untidy, thoroughly implicating, ‘second best world’. The structure of Global Information Systems (GIS) can be viewed as an instrument and artefact of disaster risk management, and also a network of relations. By way of ethnographic example, the paper shows how institutional and “rational” preparedness unfold in practice, in a devastated area of the eastern coast of Sri Lanka.Text1 digital file (26 p.)enCONFLICTSINTERNATIONAL AIDPOST-TSUNAMI RECONSTRUCTIONEARLY WARNING SYSTEMSDISASTER PREPAREDNESSNATURAL DISASTERSEMERGENCY RELIEFECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTIONAID PROGRAMMESCIVIL WARSRI LANKAManuscript