Analyzing an External Crisis from a Network Perspective: the Response to Cyclones Idai and Kenneth

This paper will examine the humanitarian response to Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, which hit Southeastern Africa between March and April 2019. These natural disasters left millions of civilians in need of assistance and became the tropical cyclones in the South-West Indian Ocean with the highest death toll in decades. Nevertheless, Idai and Kenneth did not gain much political salience in Europe, unlike other threats with a higher potential to affect the European Union Member States directly. Hence, this article will analyze the extent to which EU Member State and supranational bodies coordinated their response with the non-governmental and non-EU governmental members of the network that managed the recovery efforts in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It will also apply the resource dependence theory in order to make sense of the relations between the financial donors and money receptors that orchestrated the reaction to these incidents. With these purposes in mind, this study will combine social network analysis with several semi-structured interviews with high-ranked officials serving in governmental and non-governmental organizations that were involved in the humanitarian response. More specifically, this article will use an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) so as to test a series of relational hypotheses concerning the drivers of formal and informal tie formation, as well as regarding the overall effectiveness of the crisis network. For their part, interview-based findings will provide relevant empirical insights into the operation of EU-led interventions aimed at combatting external crises with an epicenter located in a region far from the EU borders.