Introduction to "SOUTH EAST ASIA RESEARCH, 21(3), 371-473"

This Special Focus is the second part of ‘Life after collective death in South East Asia’, a collection of papers examining what happens after wide-scale destruction has occurred and how the social and individual lives of the survivors recover. Part 1, published in South East Asia Research in June 2012 (Vol 20, No 2), focused on the social and religious processes that help the ‘(re-)fabrication of social bonds’. Part 2 deals with another major aspect of resilience – the issue of help, especially in the case of international humanitarian aid. In many ways, in the contemporary situation, it is taken for granted that help will be provided. We question the evi- dence for this, asking what rationales are involved in post-catastrophe help. We shed light on why, for example, people decide to engage in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to help distribute drugs in a Cambodian outpatients ward or, alternatively, to carry rice sacks in the Ayeyarwady Delta to help victims of the typhoon in Myanmar. We highlight why people in the West consider such activi- ties ‘normal’. We focus on how people, having been labelled as ‘victims’, receive and perceive such aid and how they respond to it. Further, we ask how (and to what extent) aid contributes to change, implicitly or explicitly, in the societies affected. Finally, we question what contemporary international aid brings when compared to the older local relief systems and systems of mutual help, particu- larly those examined in Part 1.