How can we properly measure the impact of disasters, attacks, and wars?
Book
In Chasing Events, researcher Thijs van Dooremalen explores how we can truly understand the impact of major events. He shows that traditional comparisons fall short and argues for a new way to analyse the long-term effects of events.
Over the next three weeks, this article will be updated with new insights from Thijs van Dooremalen’s book Chasing Events.
The impact of disaster and war
Researchers who study the impact of events (terrorist attacks, disasters, wars) often compare the situation before and after the event. The idea is that everything that changes can be seen as an event effect.
In the book Chasing Events, researcher Thijs van Dooremalen argues that with such an approach, it is difficult to say that a change is truly related to the event. A few days after the event, this comparison might still make sense, but what about a few weeks or months later? By then, so many other things have happened that linking changes to the event becomes almost impossible.
Still, the comparison is indeed interesting. Six months after 9/11, right-wing populists (Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn) were successful in national elections in both France and the Netherlands. To what extent were the Twin Towers attacks related to this?
As an alternative, Van Dooremalen proposes examining what actors such as politicians and journalists themselves do with the event. Do they use it as an example in debates, and in what way? What policy implications do they draw from it? By 'chasing' events in this way (hence the title of the book), you can analyse their impact over longer periods.
This method makes it possible, for example, to map precisely whether Donald Trump needed 9/11 to achieve political success. The answer is: no. He hardly refers to it when stigmatizing Muslims or migrants; instead, he uses more recent attacks, such as the 2016 Orlando shooting. In the United States, 9/11 seems too 'sacred' to be politically exploited, even for Trump.
Book launch 'Chasing Events'
On 25 June, researcher Thijs van Dooremalen will launch his book Chasing Events. The program consists of a short presentation by Thijs, followed by a panel discussion with Professor Sarah de Lange (Institute of Political Science, Leiden University) and journalist of the newspaper De Volkskrant Peter Giesen. Interested? Make sure to register.