1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910826623603321

Autore

Fortun Kim

Titolo

Advocacy after Bhopal : environmentalism, disaster, new global orders / / Kim Fortun

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, c2001

ISBN

1-282-67903-1

9786612679032

0-226-25718-5

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (436 p.)

Disciplina

363.7/058/0954

Soggetti

Disaster victims - Services for

Environmental policy - Citizen participation

Social responsibility of business - Environmental aspects

Bhopal Union Carbide Plant Disaster, Bhopal, India, 1984

Disaster relief - India

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [385]-401) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- FIGURES -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- PROLOGUE: THE TIMES -- INTRODUCTION. Advocacy, Ethnography, and Complex Systems -- ONE. Plaintive Response -- TWO. Happening Here -- THREE. Union Carbide, Having a Hand in Things -- FOUR. Working Perspectives -- FIVE. States of India -- SIX. Situational Particularities -- SEVEN. Opposing India -- EIGHT. Women's Movements -- NINE. Anarchism and Its Discontents -- TEN. Communities Concerned about Corporations -- ELEVEN. Green Consulting -- EPILOGUE -- ApPENDIX -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the resulting litigation provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground. Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains.



She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the victims' stories, the innovative narrative sheds light on the way advocacy works within a complex global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."