As the COVID-19 crises has taught us, disasters come in all shapes and sizes and at any given point in time. This course aims to use political science as a tool to understand the process of disaster mitigation by glancing through several instances of disaster management in history. The course will explore events such as the Cuban Missile crises and the more recent pandemic and study the actions of political actors with opposing and similar ideologies in order to infer what course of action is most suited for managing social, economic and political disasters.