Although the 1990s was the United Nations’ International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), disaster events have hardly reduced. Far from it, a whole host of disasters, such as floods, cyclones, tsunamis, droughts, desertification, soil erosion, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and air pollution, to name a few, continue to wreak havoc around the world, causing unprecedented ecological and humanitarian crises. A large section of the world’s population suffers from some or other disaster on a regular basis. Climate change has made matters worse by accelerating the processes of ecological instabilities at multiple scales, thereby rendering marginalized communities, especially those in coastal areas and small island nations, much more vulnerable. There is nothing “natural” about these disasters, however. On the contrary, disasters are a social calculus, deeply embedded in societal power relations, political economic forces, and structural inequalities. I approach disaster from a political ecology perspective, which means examining the ways in which biophysical nature interacts with political economic forces across scales, thereby (re-)producing uneven geographies of disaster and vulnerability. My research pays special attention to the question of the state – its role in the production of disaster and vulnerability, and the politics of disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction. Disasters are devastating, but they can also create opportunities for social mobilization and resistance. My research engages with this aspect as well, thereby highlighting the agency and activism of disaster-affected people.