Vulnerability
Vulnerability is a concept that has received attention from different disciplines including economics, sociology, anthropology, disaster management, environmental science, health and nutrition (Alwang, Siegel and Jorgensen, 2001); hence there is no surprise to encounter different definitions as well as measurement problems for it.
This book chapter will follow a sociology/anthropology view of vulnerability because it captures a socioeconomic status (Alwang, Siegel and Jorgensen, 2001) and it is concerned with livelihood, survival and being safe (Moser and Holland, 1997). Vulnerability may emerge from and has been expanded towards different approaches enclosing susceptibility, exposure, coping capacity and adaptive capacity. It has also been considered to be physical, social, economic, environmental and institutional (Vélez, Narváez, Cortés and Cohen, 2001; Birkmann, 2007); and it has been related to poverty (Alwang, Siegel and Jorgensen, 2001) as poor people, households and communities are considered the most vulnerable (Moser and Holland, 1997).
Furthermore, it is far from uncommon that all around the world rural and minority communities are subject to human right abuses, becoming vulnerable communities. This is often the case as third parties identify their lands as valuable ones either for exploitation or for control of territory (Burnyeat, 2013). The latter is specially the case within armed conflicts, which has desolating effects on a community by affecting directly its individuals who result killed, injured or disabled (Guha-Sapir and van Panhuis, 2002). An armed conflict also attacks the community´s infrastructure on agriculture, destroys property households and food storages, thus forces migration and displaced population into other cities or countries. As result of it, the poverty line thickens as very often this population have low education levels and cannot have access to financial markets (Ibañez and Moya, 2010) or enrol into high-payed jobs. Furthermore, by using anti-personnel mines in cultivated areas, farmers cannot return to their areas (Guha-Sapir and van Panhuis, 2002). The latter situation is well summarised by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC, 2008), which considers a community to be vulnerable whenever power is being disputed by any dominant group within their area which leaves them exposed to lack of health, education, sanitary and social safety (Global Community, 2014)