The Influence of Natural Hazards on Socio-Political Processes: Concepts and Methodology

The purpose of the article is to analyze the formation and development of the conceptual grounds of natural disaster studies within the framework of social sciences. The idea that a natural phenomenon becomes a natural disaster only in human and social dimensions was ripening for centuries in human culture and has become the basic methodological position of the sociological approach to natural disasters. By the end of the 20th century disaster studies became in the Western science an institutionalized scholarly discipline with a widely developed methodological basis and with its own subdisciplines. Despite its interdisciplinary character disaster studies have formed as a brunch of sociology. The situation in Russian social science is different. Social studies of natural disasters are not systemic, but rather reactive and applied. The interest in these problems is growing in Russian scholarly community, and the knowledge of the state of affairs and of the theoretical and methodological basis can help to consolidate scholarly studies of natural disasters in social sciences.