Welcome to week 4, the goal of this week is to make you familiar with post-conflict scenarios or PCS. You'll learn to understand the common characteristics of disaster in a PCS scenario, and develop a sense of common problems and lessons for disaster response and disaster risk reduction. To start off with, in the first lesson will introduce a case study of a post-conflict scenario where disaster strikes, Sierra Leone. On 14 August 2017, Sugarloaf Mountain in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone broke, a mudslide and floods swept through the underlying communities leaving a trail of destruction in its path. Over thousand people were killed and thousands were displaced, the area where this disaster struck was like many other parts of the city, in area with rapid urbanization during and following the Civil War, and many inhabitants that remained highly at risk for this types of catastrophes. The case of the mud slight response in Sierra Leone is interesting to explore as it is representative of what generally happens in post-conflict scenarios, in Sierra Leone the Humanitarian Summit and The Grand Bargain, pushed for more locally lead responses. This fixed a frameworks for disaster risk reduction, in which much responsibility is given to the national state, in Sierra Leone the mudslide took place in a relatively small area in Freetown. Many actors saw this as an opportunity to support a localized response led by the national state as opposed to the strong influence of the International Community in the Ebola response that swept the country several years before, however as in many countries affected by conflict, institutions are still in flux and states often do not have the capacity to respond. This brings many challenges to Aid Actors that want to support the locally led efforts in response to the disaster. Interesting questions related to these types of situations are, what happens when the state itself is partially divided? And when there are tensions not only between national state structures, but also between the local and national levels of the state? When these tensions and weak capacities lead to problems into response, how do aid-state relationships come into play? Let's find out this week.