Description
The notion of emergency is not only politically salient today but also plays a constitutive role in shaping our understanding of security. Security scholars have traditionally seen emergency as a state of exception that triggers a struggle for survival, justifying the breaking of rules and excesses of state power. While there have been attempts to decouple security from its survivalist logic, emergency has remained an analytical blind spot in the study of security, being surrendered to the “exceptionalist” paradigm. In contrast, the task of this paper is to offer a bottom-up contextual approach to conceptualizing emergency, which is sensitive to the emergency claims made by structurally disempowered actors in security politics across different settings. The paper recovers an alternative conception of emergency as an extraordinary moment of spontaneous beginnings that can activate the collective agency of previously marginalised subjects. However, to make space for this bottom-up conception of emergency, security theory needs to fundamentally reconsider the relationship between security, emergency, and politics. By de-exceptionalizing emergency and recognizing that it can interact with different security meanings, we can remove the critical variable that ties security to the logic of survival and exception. Moreover, challenging the idea of emergency as a form of “anti-politics,” the paper suggests understanding emergency as an intrinsic part of politics. The result establishes the conceptual foundations for an actor-centered, grounded empirical research on emergency politics that accounts for the participation of lay actors and the presence of multiple security logics.
