Introduction: What Is a Comparator? our experience oF Working on a coMparative proJect entitled ‘Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population’, whilst trying to find the ‘same, same but different’, 1 has directed our attention to the practicalities of undertaking social scientific forms of comparison, as well as to some of the ethical and political questions that arise from its use. 2 Much has been written about the latter 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. These 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 (eg European colonialism, 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 settings. What has received far less attention are the ways in which comparisons of all sorts come into being through an entity that we call the ‘comparator’. We