Description
How do crisis responses by international organisations (IOs) affect global order? Many scholars agree that IOs not only perceive but also construct crises—from financial collapse to hurricanes, armed insurrection to pandemics—in order to formulate adequate responses and interventions. Determining or claiming which problem underlies a given crisis, and which solution is available to address it, has consequences for IO action capacity and legitimacy. How this affects the structure of global order is less clear. In this article I conceptualise the latter as crisis ordering. A practice-tracing study of the International Sanitary Conferences (ISCs), predecessors of the World Health Organisation, shows how crisis ordering passes through three stages: construction, capture, and configuration. Based on archival research, I show these at work during two formative ISCs—in 1866 and 1892—at which cholera was constructed as an “Oriental threat” to Europe. A crisis ordering lens reveals that health governance was not merely responsive as a functional bargain; nor simply reflective of broader conditions of global order at the time. Foregrounding the roles of the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Egypt I show that instead it was productive of new vectors of hierarchy: sanitary competence rankings; uneven distributions of blame and burden; and a geography of containment zones. Crisis ordering, in sum, is a key mechanism through which crisis responses leave identifiable traces in the sediment of global order, and captures what happens when crisis constructions are sustained over the long term.
