Ex Post State Responsibility for Politically Manufactured Disasters

[Debora N. Gunawan is an SJD student at the University of Michigan Law School]

In late November 2025, a wave of torrential rains, cyclones, and monsoon-driven storms battered South and Southeast Asia. Devastating floods, landslides, and mudslides ravaged wide swathes of the region, from Sumatra in Indonesia to southern Malaysia, southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, and even the Philippines and Vietnam. Reports show that in Indonesia alone, about 3.2 million people are affected, with more than 700 deaths, 2,600 have been injured, and 504 are missing. At the same time, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia documented hundreds of deaths, widespread displacement, and massive destruction of homes and infrastructure. Pakistan’s 2022 floods, Brazil’s 2023 Rio Grande do Sul disaster, and previous cases of repeated landslides in the Philippines follow a similar pattern. 

While climate pressures intensify rainfall and extreme weather, these disasters cannot be understood as purely natural phenomena. Previous studies reveal a consistent set of underlying drivers: deforestation, extractive expansion, loss of water absorption areas, unsafe land-use planning, regulatory failure, and corruption. In these contexts, rain functions as a trigger rather than a cause. The scale of harm reflects political choices that systematically produce vulnerability and transform foreseeable natural hazards into mass human suffering.

This post argues that such politically manufactured disasters are not isolated governance failures or unfortunate acts of nature. They are legally cognizable harms produced by state action and omission that violate international environmental and human rights obligations. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, it distinguishes natural hazards from disasters aggravated or produced by governance failure, drawing on international legal standards. Second, it examines how international law attributes responsibility when preventable environmental harm results in disaster, focusing on human rights treaties, state responsibility doctrine, and regional and international jurisprudence. Third, it articulates concrete ex post obligations, including duties of investigation, remedy, equality in relief and reconstruction, and guarantees of non-repetition grounded in international human rights law.

From Natural Hazards to Politically Manufactured Disasters

International law draws an important distinction between natural hazards and disasters, a distinction that is often lost in political and media narratives. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) defines disasters not as the natural event itself, but as the result of hazardous events interacting with human exposure, vulnerability, and capacity, leading to human, material, economic, and environmental losses and impacts. Furthermore, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is a United Nations soft-law framework adopted by all UN Member States in 2015 at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. Covering the period from 2015 to 2030, the Framework makes clear that disaster risk is shaped by governance choices, land use, environmental conditions, and institutional capacity, rather than by natural hazards alone. Heavy rainfall, cyclones, or earthquakes may be natural events, but whether they become disasters depends on how societies are organized and governed. The Sendai Framework was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution A/RES/69/283 (2015), confirming its status as a voluntary framework rather than binding international law.

Building on this framework, disaster scholars have long emphasized that disasters are socially and politically produced. As Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, and Davis argued, natural hazards only become disasters when they intersect with vulnerability created by political and economic decisions, including land distribution, development models, and governance structures. Their “Pressure and Release” model shows how root political and economic causes translate into unsafe conditions, such as settlement in floodplains or unstable hillsides, that make extreme weather deadly rather than manageable. Furthermore, Andrew Maskrey argued that disaster risk is an inherent product of development processes that generate socio-territorial inequality, rather than an accidental by-product of natural hazards. In his account, disasters represent the temporary intensification of an ongoing condition of vulnerability produced by political and economic systems. He emphasizes that communities do not control the key drivers of risk, such as land use, environmental management, and infrastructure planning, which remain firmly within the authority of the state. Recent disaster risk creation scholarship builds on this insight, emphasizing that risk accumulates through ordinary development and regulatory decisions that normalize exposure and render harm foreseeable long before any hazard occurs.

This distinction is important because some hazards remain genuinely unavoidable even where states act with robust care. For example, the case of Japan, which faces some of the world’s most severe natural hazards, including tsunamis and earthquakes, yet sustained investment in land-use planning, strict building codes, early-warning systems, and public preparedness has significantly reduced loss of life. In such contexts, international law does not generally attribute responsibility for the occurrence of the hazard itself.  Legal scrutiny instead focuses on whether the state responded adequately, equitably, and without discrimination.

By contrast, many floods and landslides in South and Southeast Asia fall into a different category. Here, natural hazards interact with conditions produced by what UNDRR and disaster governance scholarship consistently describe as disaster risk creation, driven by unsustainable development models and weak regulatory enforcement. In these cases, hazards are foreseeable and recurrent, and the scale of harm reflects long-standing policy choices rather than natural inevitability.

In this narrower but increasingly common category, the concept of politically manufactured disasters becomes analytically useful. The term does not deny the role of nature. Rather, it captures situations in which states knowingly permit or promote environmental degradation and unsafe land use despite clear scientific warnings, prior disaster experience, and existing legal obligations. In such cases, disaster is not merely aggravated by governance failure, but it is produced through it. Once a disaster is understood in these terms, international law no longer treats it as misfortune but as a problem of responsibility.

When Does International Law Attribute Responsibility for Disaster Harm?

International law attributes responsibility not only for acts, but also for omissions. Under the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), a state commits an internationally wrongful act where conduct attributable to it fails to conform with an international obligation (Arts. 2 and 12). Such conduct may consist of a failure to regulate, supervise, or prevent foreseeable harm where international law imposes duties of protection or due diligence. Environmental mismanagement, tolerance of illegal extractive activity, and failure to enforce land-use regulation can therefore constitute breaches of international obligations long before a flood or landslide occurs. 

Human rights law has played a central role in operationalizing this logic. The right to life under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) imposes positive obligations on states to protect life against foreseeable threats, including environmental risks. In Portillo Cáceres v. Paraguay, the Human Rights Committee held that the state’s failure to regulate environmentally harmful agricultural practices violated the right to life once contamination caused serious harm to affected communities. Importantly, the Committee emphasized that responsibility did not end with the initial harm. By finding a violation of Article 2(3) of the ICCPR, it affirmed the state’s obligation to provide effective remedies, including accountability and redress for environmental harm resulting from foreseeable risks.

Regional courts have gone further. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly held that disasters linked to regulatory failure engage state responsibility under the right to life. In Öneryıldız v. Turkey, deaths caused by a methane explosion at a poorly regulated waste site were attributed to the authorities’ negligence. In Budayeva and Others v. Russia, the Court rejected the argument that a fatal mudslide was a natural disaster. Authorities had long been aware of the risk and failed to implement land-use planning and protective measures. The Court found a violation of Article 2, stressing that known environmental risks trigger binding preventive and post-disaster duties.

Similar reasoning appears in the Inter-American system. In Sarayaku v. Ecuador and Lhaka Honhat v. Argentina, the Inter-American Court treated environmental degradation resulting from state-authorized activity as a violation of rights to life, health, food, water, and cultural integrity. Although not framed as classic disaster cases, these decisions establish that environmental harm arising from governance choices creates ongoing state responsibility, including obligations of restitution and structural reform.

This approach is reinforced by civil society and global climate governance. In response to climate-fuelled floods across South and Southeast Asia, FORUM-ASIA has emphasized that these disasters are not acts of nature but the result of climate pressures interacting with deforestation, weak regulation, and development policies that prioritize economic growth over human safety. Similar framing emerged at the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Brazil, where floods and landslides were increasingly discussed in terms of climate justice, loss and damage, and state responsibility toward affected communities. While these processes do not create binding law, they reflect a growing consensus that foreseeable disaster harm linked to policy choices engages state obligations under international human rights law.

Ex Post State Responsibility 

Once a politically manufactured disaster occurs, international law imposes a distinct set of ex post obligations that go far beyond emergency relief and humanitarian assistance.

First, states have a duty to investigate. This obligation flows from ICCPR Article 2(3) and has been consistently affirmed by the Human Rights Committee in General Recommendation No. 31. Investigations must be independent, transparent, and capable of identifying not only immediate causes, but also the regulatory failures, permits, and policy decisions that produced the disaster. Inquiries that frame harm solely as natural or unavoidable fail to meet international standards. 

Second, states must ensure effective remedies and reparations. Under Article 31 of ARSIWA, reparation must, as far as possible, eliminate the consequences of the wrongful act. In environmental and disaster contexts, this includes restitution, compensation for loss of life and livelihood, rehabilitation of affected persons, and environmental restoration. Temporary aid or symbolic assistance does not fulfill this obligation.

Third, disaster response and reconstruction must respect equality and non-discrimination. International human rights law continues to apply in emergencies. Instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) General Recommendation No. 37 emphasize that disasters can exacerbate inequalities, and states must ensure equal access to relief, participation in reconstruction decisions, and protection from discriminatory practices.

Finally, ex post responsibility includes a duty to provide guarantees of non-repetition. Under Article 30(b) of ARSIWA, a state responsible for a breach must offer assurances that the wrongful conduct will not recur. In disaster contexts, this means states may not rebuild or maintain the conditions that produced the harm. Where disaster risk results from governance failure, compliance requires reform of land-use planning, enforcement of environmental regulation, review of extractive licenses, restoration of water-absorption and ecological buffer areas, and integration of disaster-risk reduction into development policy. This obligation is reinforced by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030), though non-binding, further affirms this approach by explicitly linking post-disaster recovery to long-term risk reduction and “Build Back Better” principles (paras. 19, 24(d), 33). Taken together, these sources confirm that guarantees of non-repetition are not discretionary. Where disasters are politically manufactured, international law requires structural change.

Conclusion

The floods and landslides that swept South and Southeast Asia in late 2025 were not simply the result of extreme weather. They were the foreseeable outcome of political and regulatory choices that created vulnerability at scale. International law no longer accepts the label of “natural disaster” as a shield against responsibility. Where hazards are transformed into catastrophe through governance failure, states incur obligations that persist long after the waters recede.

Ex post state responsibility reframes disaster from an episode of charity to a matter of justice. It demands truth, remedy, equality, and structural change. As climate pressures intensify, this framework will only become more urgent. The real question is not whether international law recognizes politically manufactured disasters. It already does. The question is whether states will be held to account for them.