Same, Same but Different: Provoking Relations, Assembling the Comparator

? 'Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population', whilst trying to nd the 'same, same but dierent', 1 has directed our aention to the practicalities of undertaking social scientic forms of comparison, as well as to some of the ethical and political questions that arise from its use. 2 Much has been wrien about the laer question: as we detail in the book's Introduction and touch on again below, comparison has been critiqued within social science from a variety of quarters. ese concerns range from the unwarranted reduction of complex social and cultural phenomena by researchers through the imposition of comparative practice, comparison's complicity with sometimes dubious political and methodological projects (e.g. European coloni-alism, strident methodological positivism, the creep of market-oriented ranking practices), and even the meaninglessness of invoking comparison as a distinct practice, given its apparent ubiquity in other seings. What has received far less aention are the ways in which comparisons of all sorts come into being through an entity that we call the 'comparator'. We