Despite regular incidents of anti-migrant violence, peaceful and mutually beneficial relationships between South Africans and migrants can and do exist.
A year ago, the world was just starting to learn about a mysterious virus that was killing people in the Chinese city of Wuhan. While the ensuing coronavirus pandemic was unprecedented in current times, human experience with disasters and crises is obviously not new.
As an academic who teaches disaster management programs, I’ve studied how people react during different types of disasters. There are common patterns in the ways people come together to respond to these kinds of events regardless of whether the trigger was a natural hazard, technologically based or human-caused.
During the Cold War, fears in the U.S. about the breakdown of social order and widespread panic in the event of an atomic bomb attack led to the study of human behaviours in situations of collective stress.