This edited book establishes a justice‑oriented agenda for understanding and acting on disasters in the world’s most hazard‑exposed regions. Challenging technocratic and event‑centred framings, the volume theorises disasters as historically produced and politically mediated, tracing how colonialism, capitalism, extractivism, and uneven governance create and compound risk. Across four parts—foundations; (re)conceptualising disasters; methods; and critical voices from the field—the chapters develop key ideas such as critical vulnerability, structural/prospective amnesia, and disaster populism; advance plural, decolonising methodologies (including talanoa, autoethnography and co‑production of knowledge); and offer grounded cases from Aotearoa New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, Rapa Nui, Chile, Vietnam and the Pacific. In doing so, Critical Disaster Studies in Asia and the Pacific centres Indigenous and local epistemologies, Gender Equality, Disability, and Social Inclusion (GEDSI)‑informed practice, and systems-behaviour models for transformative disaster risk reduction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars across disciplines, this is an indispensable resource for researchers, practitioners and policymakers seeking to move from managing hazards to transforming the conditions that generate disaster risk.

Shinya Uekusa is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. His work focuses on disaster linguicism, vulnerability, reflexivity, and the experiences of migrants and other minoritised groups in crisis. He co-edited A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch: Critical Disaster Studies Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Kien Nguyen Trung is GEDSI and Research Lead at Water Sensitive Cities Australia, Monash Art, Design, and Architecture, Monash University. An applied sociologist, he works at the intersection of disaster risk, climate adaptation, behaviour change, system transformation, and AI assisted qualitative methods. He serves on several journal editorial boards, including Disaster Prevention and Management, The Qualitative Report and International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

Sébastien Penmellen Boret is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS), Tohoku University, Japan. His research examines death, memory and inclusion in disaster contexts in Japan and Indonesia. He is author of Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death (2014) and co-editor of Death in the Early Twenty First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).