2004 fear intervention and cosmopolitan order

8/6/2019 2004 Fear Intervention and Cosmopolitan Order

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A World of Emergencies:Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order*CRAIGCALHOUN ocial Science Research C ouncil

Les in te rvent ions dans les cs cas durgences hum ani ta i res complexes p)son t devenues une p ar t ie essen t ie l le de la soc ie te p lane ta i re . Le tex tefourn i t un com pte rendu de la conception des c urgences * e n t e r m e sd imagina i re socia l qu i p rocure u ne c arac te r i s t ique a la fois de la per-cept ion e t de I ac tion . Cet imagina i re m o d e la def in i t ion e t la rhe tor iquedes urgences , l es faGons dont e l les se prese nten t e t s on t reconn ues , e tlorganisation de l intervention. I1 reflete a la fois Ianxiete face au risquee t u ne foi moderne en vahissan te en la capac i te de ge rer les problemes .Quoique les evene men ts exigeant ces interven tions- ar exemple , auS o u d a n- oien t souvent rappor tes comme &a nt m ani fes tement convain-c a n t s , 1 s . imagin a i re soc ia l des urgences 8, organise conceptue l lementc e s y s t e m e .I n t e r v e n t i o n s i n t o c om p l ex h u m a n i t a r i a n e m e r g e n c ie s h a v e b e c o m e acen tral p art of global society. This art ic le provides an acco unt of thecons t ruc t ion of emergenc ies in te rm s of a soc ia l imagmary tha t g ivescharac te r i s t ic form to bo th percept ion and ac t ion . This imaginary shapesth e def in i t ion and rhe tor ic of emergenc ies , the ways in which they a reproduced and recognized, and th e organization of interventio n. I t reflectsboth anxiety in th e face of r isk and a pervasive modern faith in capacity tomanage problems. Though the events dema nding these in te rvent ions-forexample , in Sudan-are of ten presented as t ransparen t ly compel l ing ,the social imaginary of emergencies conceptually struc tures th is system.

IN T H E MIDST OF WORLD WAR 11, Pitirim Sorokin (1968)wrote one ofthe first important sociological studies of emergencies,Ma n and Societyin Calamity: The Effects of War, Reuolution , Fam ine, Pestilence upo nHu ma n Mi nd , Behavior , Soc ia l Organizat ion and Cul tural L i fe .Predictably, Sorokin w as concerned to situate the immediate situation inrelation to long-term social and cultural dynamics. How did different sortsof cultures take hold of calamities, he asked, and how did calamities change

Thi s a r t i c l e is hased on t he 35 th A n nua l S orokin Lec ture . p re s en t ed a t t he U nive rs i ty o fS as ka t ch ew anun 5 March 2004. Thi s manus c r ip t was first s ubmi t t ed i n March 2003 and accepted in Apri l 2004.( h i i t a r t : r r a i g . c a l h ~ ~ u n ~ r ~yu . rdu .


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37 1 CRSAIRCSA, 1 1 . 4 2001social and cultural organization? The theme was not altogether new toSorokin (1975),who wrote on the human experience and impact of hungerin the wake of World War I and the Soviet Revolution. And the theme wasenduring. Decades later, Sorokin (1964) brooded over the dissolution of asensate culture in decline and, especially, the question of what might effecta renewal of ideational and eventually idealistic values. Sorokin sought todo his part to encourage more creative altruism and he worried thatsociology in general was not doing its part. But he also wondered whetherthe world would recognize the importance of altruism only when shockedby unprecedented tragedy, suffering and crucifixion.Impressive altruism has indeed shaped responses to the worldstragedies in recent years. Since World War 11, and especially since 1989,there has been an extraordinary growth in the number of non-governmentalorganizations devoted to providing humanitarian assistance to thosesuffering the effects of wars, famines, and diseases. Organizations likeMkiecins S a n s FrontiPres are paradigmatic, and are among the mostmorally admired in the world. Calamities have always garnered mediaattention, and this is only more evident in this era of real time and heavilyvisual electronic media. It is also linked to successful charitable fund-raisingand pressures for interventions to stop suffering.But the social sciences have still not paid as much at tention to calamitiesas they might. There is a notable, but still small, subfield of disasterresearch. But this ha s remained mostly quite specialized, and there has notbeen enough integration of attent ion to disasters with the rest of sociologicaltheory and research. Specifically, there has not been enough attentiongiven to calamities, emergencies, and disasters in the context of sociologicalaccounts of globalization, and it is to this task that I would like to con-tribute today. I want to outline the way in which I think the emergency-forthis, rather than calamity has become the standard term-has beenwoven into a social imaginary, a way of seeing the world that fundamentallyshapes action in it.International and global affairs have come to be constructed largelyin terms of the opposition between more or less predictable systems ofrelationships and flows and the putatively unpredictable eruptions ofemergencies. This reflects both the idea th at i t is possible and desirable tomanage global affairs, and the idea that many, if not all, of the conflictsand crises that challenge global order are th e result of exceptions to it. I talso underwrites what I think is most dramatically new in the relationshipamong governance, violence, and t he use of force today: the appar ent com-pulsion to intervene. This, I think, we cannot understand simply by realistreference to state interests or culturalist accounts of civilizational clashes.It is certainly a matter of material interests; emergency relief and inter-vention isa huge industry if one analyses it thus. And it is a matter of cultural1. This w d i r i r i & h d l yw r i t t en i n 1917-1919


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A World of Emergencies 375understanding, but not simply the sort of culture as inheritance thatshapes accounts like Samuel Huntingtons. Rather, it is a new cultural con-struction. As the idea of a global order produced not by empire but by a sys-tem of nation-states involved the development of a characteristic way ofimagining the world, and was then made real in action, so does the idea ofemergencies. Emergency is a way of grasping problematic events, a wayof imagining them that emphasizes thei r apparent unpredictability, abnor-mality and brevity, and that carries the corollary that response-interven-tion-is necessary. The international emergency, it is implied, both can andshould be managed.The management of emergencies is a very big business and a very bigpart of what multilateral agencies and NGOs do. It is a central theme inwhat drives states t o spend money internationally. And if its most attrac-tive face is that of humanit arian assistance-by some accounts the mostmorally unambiguous and respected occupation in the world today-themanagement of emergencies is also a central way in which force isdeployed. Moreover, the notion of keeping the humanitarian and the militarysharply distinct has come under enormous stress ; it is perhaps a lost cause.In th e context of the break-up of Yugoslavia and of the central African warsand genocides, it seemed to many th at military interventions were necessaryhumanitarian responses to certain sorts of emergencies. Even those whosought to keep the work of humanitarian assistance neutral found thisincreasingly difficult, partly because they could not avoid working witharmies or in zones controlled by one or another party to combat. And at thesame time, campaigners for human rights were commonly unsympatheticto arguments that humanitarian assistance required neutrality.Both the very extent of demands for humanitarian assistance andproblems in delivering it have produced a crisis in the world of humanitarianemergency aid. We shall not deal adequately with that crisis, I want to suggest,unless we can approach it not just as a matter of operational logistics, fund-raising, and moral dilemmas, but with attention to the underlying socialand cultura l dynamics th at shape both the production of emergencies andthe production of responses. My theory is not Sorokins, but I think myconcern for this problem is very much in the spirit of Sorokin.

2.3.

Thi s i s a c ruci a l t heme in d i s cus s ions of c r is e s of huma ni t a r i an i s m . an impo r t an t t heme , hu t no t t heo n e I focus on he re . See Rief f (20031 , a s w e l l a s S t edm an an d Ta nne r 12003) .Argum ents for mil i tary intervent ion were by no m cans confined to left - l iberals lor ers twh ile left - liberals ) .b u t it was novel for left - l iberals to he amo ng the m ost act ive advocates of mil i tary inte rvent io nArgum ents were often rooted in a huma ni t a r i an agenda . and the Rw andan genoc ide hecan ie a s ymbolof the implicat ions of fai lure to ac t . F or many ac t ion c lea r ly m eant mi l i t a ry ac t i on to s top the geno-cide afte r i ts onset-rather tha n othe r kinds of act ions ini t ia ted much earl ier . For various s ides in t h i sdeba t e s ee Brow n, 2003: D u f fe ld , 2001; Finnemore, 2003; Power, 2002: Wheeler, 2 0 0 2 . Michae l Ba rne t t(2002)addres s es t he ro l e o f t he UN in Rw anda . A mong the j ourna l i s t i c repor t s t ha t focus sed a t t en t ionon th e abs ence of i n t e rven t ion in Rw anda , s ee G ourev it ch 119991and M elve rn 120001.A l an K u p e r m a n(2001)makes t h e ca s e t ha t s ucces sfu l i n t e rven t ion in Rw anda (a f t e r t he k i l l i ng had s t a r t e d) w as moreor less logis t ical ly imposs ible .


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3 7 6 CRSAIRCSA, 41.4 2004The Emergency ImaginaryOn the evening news, emergency is now the primary term for referringto a range of catastrophes, conflicts, and settings for human suffering.Perhaps even more importantly, it is the category organizing humanitari anresponses. Even excluding military dimensions, these cost tens of billionsof dollars a year in what amounts to a substantia l industry-if still smallcompared to automobiles , electronics, or the military-and mobilize tens ofthousands of paid workers and volunteers through the United Nations,multilateral organizations, bilateral aid agencies, and NGOs. Emergency isthus a category t ha t shapes the way in which w e understand and respondto specific events, and th e limits to what we think are possible actions andimplications. Think for a moment of Rwanda and Congo, Liberia and SierraLeone, Colombia and Peru, Israel and Palestine, the former Yugoslavia,and, of course, September llth, the resulting crises in Afghanistan andnow Iraq. Each of these is commonly spoken of as an emergency. But why,and with what distortions?A discourse of emergencies is now central to international affairs. Itshapes not only humanitarian assistance, but also military interventionand the pursuit of public health . Use of the category of emergencies in thisdiscourse is in fact related to how it is used in other settings-for example,in speaking of financial emergencies, though these are usually analysedvery separately. I will not t ake up all the ways in which the word emergencyis used; my interest is not so much in the word itself as in a discursive for-mation that shapes both our awareness of the world and decisions aboutpossible interventions into social problems. It is closely related to themuch-analysed notion of crisis and emergency thinking has relations tocrisis-thinking. But the idea of crisis suggests a determinant turning pointthat, commonly, the idea of emergency does not. Emergency suggestsinstead a similar urgency, but not a similar directionality or immanentresolution.Let me foreshadow three themes: note how the te rm naturalizes whatare in fact products of human action and specifically violent conflict. Notehow it represents as sudden, unpredictable and short-term what are usuallygradually developing, predictable, and enduring clusters of events andinteractions. And note how it simultaneously locates in particular settingswhat are in fact crises produced, at least partially, by global forces, and dis-locates the standpoint of observation from that of the wealthy global Northto a view from nowhere.It is as though there were a well-oiled, smoothly functioning normalsystem of global processes, in which business and politics and the weatherall interacted properly. Occasionally, though, there emerge special caseswhere something goes wrong-a build-up of plaque in the global arteriescauses a stroke, there is a little too much pressure in one of the global boilerrooms-and quick action is needed to compensate.


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A World of Emergencies 37 7This notion of emergency is produced and reproduced in socialimagination, at a level th at Charles Taylor (2002) has described as betweenexplicit doctrine and the embodied knowledge of habitus. It is more thansimply an easily definable concept because it is part of a complex packageof terms through which the social world is simultaneously grasped and con-structed, and produced and reproduced, together with others in th e socialimaginary. Emergency is, in this vocabulary, partially analogous to nation,corporation, market, or public. Each of these is produced as a basic struc-turi ng image and gives shape to how we understand th e world, ourselves,and t he na ture and potential of social action. While many factors, materialand social, go into the production of specific emergencies, we need toinquire into the cultural processes of the social imaginary to grasp why

they are understood through this category and what the implications are.A Wave of EmergenciesAt the moment, one international NGO lists 25 emergencies of pressinghumanitarian concern; 23 of the 25 are conflict-related (Relief Web, 2004).4It is primarily these conflict-related emergencies that led the UnitedNations University and World Institute for Development EconomicsResearch to speak at the end of the 1990s of the waue of emergencies ofthe last decade (Klugman, 1999). The various factors are summed up bythe United Nations, which says tha t countries face complex emergencieswhen they confront armed conflicts affecting large civilian populationsthrough direct violence, forced displacement and food scarcity, resulting inmalnutrition, high morbidity and mortali ty (Relief Web, 2001 . Complexhere is mostly a polite way of saying that there are multiple sides in a conflict,not merely victims, and th at they ar e often still fighting. Of course, thereis much the definition does not convey, including the fact th at this sufferingis inflicted mainly on the less developed world, though it also poses hugerisks for the more developed world.The term, complex emergency gained currency toward the end ofth e 1980s.It seems to have been coined in Mozambique where it especiallyreflected the idea that t he UN needed t o negotiate simultaneously with theRenamo movement and the government in order to provide assistanceoutside the framework of its standard country agreements (UNICEF,1999).Mozambique became a success story in providing effective help forrefugees and displaced persons. Whether o r not this was the precise originof the term complex emergency, it points to a core theme: the idea thatsome emergencies have multiple causes, involve multiple local actors, andcompel an international response. The Sudanese civil war and it s related

4. T h e t o t a l of 25 is up from 22 in l a te 2002. Th e two non-conflict-related emergencies are: 11 t h e H o r nof Africa drought tha t is clearly conflict-exacerbated; and 2 1 he Southern Africa Human itarian C risisin which drought, floods, and both AIDS and malar ia a re in ter twined .


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3 7 8 CRSAIRCSA, 41.4 2004refugee and famine crises provided another ready example at about thesame time. So did population displacements and ethnic fighting in the wakeof the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Neither can stand equally as a successstory.The idea of a wave of emergencies reflects the notion that the globalsystem somehow worked less well during the 1990s.Perhaps, in some ways,this was true , due to the adjustment t o the end of the Cold War. Its problemshave only multiplied in the cur rent decade. But notice that the imagery ofa wave suggests not friction within th e system, but surges from outside.The other common image is of a need for early warning, as though the issuewere the increasing failure rate of established cybernetic feedback mecha-nisms. What th is obscures is tha t t he wave of emergencies arises preciselyas globalization is extended and intensified, not as it dete riorates.The emergency imaginary, the deployment of the idea of emergency asa means of taking hold of these crises, also complements the growth ofhumanitarian intervention on a new scale. This is celebrated in varioustheories of cosmopolitan consciousness and the spread of thinking in termsof human rights. On the one hand, these bring out a sense of ethical obli-gation rooted in global interconnections. This is manifested even in a kindof humanitarian vocation in which many discover their most meaningfulorientat ion to the world. On the o ther hand, the idea of cosmopolitan politicsalso reflects a distanced view on the global system, a view from nowhere oran impossible everywhere th at encourages misrecognition of the actualsocial locations from which distant troubles appear as emergencies(Calhoun, 2003b). This is often a complement to a managerial orientationto the global system, as the same emergency imaginary shapes thinkingabout financial crises and famines. Where there is a discontinuity, theremust be intervention to restore linearity.Complex emergencies-and for th at matter financial , ecological andother sorts of emergencies-affect all human beings. But the idea of man-aging them is a concern and orientation that figures especially prominentlyin those countries, such as the United States, Japan, Canada, and themembers of the E.U., th at ar e large-scale international donors and sendersof relief workers. These countries, and a few others, also have special con-cerns because their relative peace and prosperity depend in considerablepart on how well or poorly they and their agents do in reducing both thehuman cost of emergencies and the social, economic, and political violenceand instability of which they are a part and which they make worse. In thebackground, then, is the fact that one fifth of the worlds countries com-mand four fifths of its income-which even the World Bank now stresses asa basic economic and human security problem. As one American commen-tator writing in Foreign Affairs recently put it: The rich world [has]increasingly realized that its in terest s are threatened by chaos, and tha t itlacks the tools to fix th e problem (Mallaby, 2002: 5 ) .This writer goes on tosuggest th at the solution is to reins tate imperialism in a new form, with the


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A World of Emergencies 379U S . taking the lead. This was perhaps a surpri sing idea when published in2002 but by 2003, especially after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, itwas a commonplace to describe the U S . as an imperial power-and if thisis more often criticized, it is sometimes proudly claimed.s The production ofemergencies, and the need to address them, has become one of the ratio-nales for asser tion of global power.This was clearly evident in the U S . decision to invade Iraq, as in thesecuritization of many kinds of global flows and transactions following9/11. Whatever the merits of the invasion of Iraq, though, it should beunderstood less in terms of defeating enemies or conquering territories orpopulations (though both may have been involved) and more as part of aproject of managing a world of emergencies-actual and threatened .Whether pre-emptive war was a good idea or not, it was not mainly a tra-ditional calculus of either imperial ambition or conflict between opposinggeopolitical or ideological positions that guided it. Rather, it was the effortto minimize potential negative consequences of instability. The neo-conservative argument that the greatest foreign policy weakness of theU.S. lies in its entanglement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict relates tothis, both in the direct terms of the instability of th at struggle, which is stilltermed an emergency after half a century, and in t he indirect t erms of allthe potential t errorist actions, arms trade, and other ancillary effects of thecore struggle.This suggests, among other things, that even if empire is a usefulmetaphor for thinking about U S . hegemony in an apparently unipolarworld, it is not an entirely precise analytical concept. There are similaritiesbetween the extension of U S . power today and the development of empiresin earlier times. Some similar analytic questions may apply, such aswhether it is inevitable tha t imperial powers will overreach themselvesby taking on military burdens their economies cannot support (Kennedy,1989). But th ere is also a sharp difference. The U.S. has been eager todisengage after policing states or regions it considers problems. I t istrue that, although George Bush campaigned with attacks on the idea ofnation-building he has embraced something of that strategy in Iraq.6 Yetthe U S . commitment to Iraq is limited, with early deadlines for disengage-ment. Similar issues are evident in the U.S. neglect of Afghanistan, still anemergency for many locally but off the agenda for major U S . attention (letalone development assistance) . And the way in which reconstruction is (or5.

6 .

Niall Ferguson 120031 became symholic o f t h e a r g u n i e n t t h a t t h e L1.S. had become an em pi re and oughtto rise to t he t a s k . H ard t and N egr i 120011were the most vis ihlr left cri t ics o f empi re i t hough the i ra r g u m e n t so minima lly un de rw rote p rac ti ca l ac t ion th a t t hey w ere on ly c r i ti c s i n t he mos t ah s t rac t ofsenses l .ti1 sonie ways the U S. seem s less l ike the Bri t ish Emp ire in i ts heyday. as ideal iwd by Ferguson. th anl ike Br i t a in and F rance t ow ards t he end of their colonial era , when they decided colonies were tooexpens ive , and tha t a deve lopmenta l approach w as needed to produce nat ion-s tates at leas t plaus iblyready for independence and as ga cefu l a n imperial exit as poss ible . See Cooper 12003:1-31. longer w rs ionin Calhoun, Cooper. and Moore Iforthcomingi .


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380 CRSAIRCSA. 41.4 2004isnt ) handled in Iraq will also be telling. The U.S. reluctance to rely on theU N has received considerable attention (and as the U S . apparently hasnow decided it needs the UN in at least some capacities, it will be interes tingto see whether the UN is able to steer its involvement effectively or mustmerely accept the U.S.-structured environment for its work). Decisions torely heavily on private, for-profit contractors and to treat non-profit organ-izations as though they are simply another form of private contractor arealso momentous. Should NGOs be measured against standards similar tothose used for business corporations-and found either effective or toosoft for the task of post-conflict reconstruct ion (as some in the U.S.administration have suggested)? What does this, as well as the fact thatwork proceeds only under close military or quasi-military administration,mean for the idea of humanitarian assistance?Humanitarian interventions became dramatically more frequent andprominent in the 1990s.They responded to the rise of a world of emergenciesand the ideal of responding to human needs in each case without attentionto the reasons why suffering had intensified. This has proved repeatedlyfraught with potential contradictions, not least between humanitarianaction that withholds evaluation of regimes and other actors producingconflict and human rights analyses and advocacy that depend on such eval-uations. Humanitarian interventions reflect the refusal to treat di sastersas merely matters of fate, approaching them instead as emergencies thatdemand action. But relying on humanitarian approaches alone is in tensionwith analysis of the factors that make emergencies recurrent and witheffective action to change them.Bad Things HappenThe rise of the new rhetoric of emergencies marks, among other things, ashift from accepting chance or fate as an adequate account of many problems.Disaster is among the oldest and most universal of human ideas, but itsmeaning is shifting. The Latin root of the English word suggests astrology,with its reference to the sta rs that guide human fate being out of alignment.It evokes the image of the world as structured by ubiquitous correspon-dences that Foucault traced in the classical age and that appear in a varietyof premodern guises (Foucault, 1971). Imagining the world th us joins allthe different orders of things into a whole, and connects each to all theothers , giving one sort of meaning to misfortune. Individual fates are oinedto collective ones by their embeddedness in this common system of corre-spondences, as individuals are joined to each other and to nature evenwhile hierarchically distinguished in the image of a Great Chain of Being(Loveoy, 19361.

7. T h i s is t h e image aga ins t which Tay l o r 120021 contrasts M o d e r n Social Imaginaries.


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A World of Emergencies 381Locating individual and collective fortunes amid these ubiquitouscorrespondences offered a way of making sense of them, as the Great Chainof Being made sense of other aspects of existence. This did not mean thatfate thereby became easy to accept; the order in th e system was not alwaysself-evident in nature and often required some notion of an incomprehensibleGod determining apparently arbi trary reality. In a Christian vocabulary, Godsgrace was beyond human understanding; to Neoplatonists, the chain ofbeing could be one of decline, as emanations of the divine were merged withmatter and more perfect causes issued in less perfect effects. In other tra-ditions, the issue was more one of gaining or losing the favour of th e gods.Fortuna, thus, was the Roman goddess of fate and chance. Fortunalooked after the fates of mortals and it was hubris to think that mere

human actions could control the destinies decreed from on high. Yet,Fortunas statue was kept veiled, because she was held to be ashamed ofthe capriciousness of the fates she bestowed on mortals.We moderns are less likely simply to accept fate, less likely to seemeaning in disasters than to see precisely t he absence of meaning. Theimagery of a risk society suggests something of this, and indeed a senseof risk is pervasive. This evokes not just a sense of potential harm-empha-sized in much discussion of risk society-but a specifically statisticalunderstanding of the chances of harm.h This may produce a pervasivesense of insecurity, though it is hard to compare ontological insecurityacross time and space and culture. While it is clear that human beings havea historically unprecedented capacity to destroy the world, it is not clearthat we live in greater daily fear as a result. That in many senses we-atleast people in the developed world-face less risk than our ancestors ismanifested in longer life expectancies. It seems important to look, then, notsimply at the prominence of risk, but at t he specific ways in which risk andthreat are conceptualized. This shapes the social organizat ion of fear and thedistribution of a sense of vulnerability.Moreover, we moderns are apt not only to rail aga inst fate but also tobelieve we can alter it. The notion of risk is immediately joined by th at ofrisk management. And certainly, through technology, trade, scientificunderstanding and creative energy, we have in fact remade the world inmany ways. We have time and again traversed what seemed to be the limitsof human existence. We are reluctan t to believe tha t any aspect of fortuneis out of our control, dictated by stars or gods. Yet we certainly have notescaped disasters.To start with, we have not even escaped some of the oldest kinds ofcollective disasters: crop failures, earthquakes, fires and floods. These con-tinue, and indeed many recur with new severity because changing patterns8. Much has been writ ten of the risk society, usually in term s of the ontological anxiet ies tha t drive mod ernst o d r e a m of communi ty , an d of how the au tonomy tha t i nd ividua tion of fe r s is unde rcu t by a pervas ivesense of vulnerabi l i ty. Environmental concerns provide primary examples . See Beck. 1992; B a u m a n n .

2001; Giddens . 1990


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382 CRSAIRCSA, 41.4 2004of human settlement and economic production make us more vulnerable.That the earths population has grown so dramatically in recent years istestimony to our ability to defeat diseases, improve nutrition, and healwounds. Yet, this burgeoning population is too often housed in flood plains,and too often concentrated in cities that cannot withstand earthquakes.This population demands quantities of food and firewood that lead to defor-estation and use of dangerous pesticides and farming practices that leechthe nutrients from land until, eventually, famine strikes. At the same timethat economic growth is needed, production for export undermines theresilience more diversified traditional economies had.We commonly speak of fires, floods, earthquakes, and famines asnatural disasters. We distinguish them thus from the divine or diabolicalvisitations of the Book of Revelations and attribute them to the order of anon-human world working of its own inner impetus. Yet, in important sensesit is misleading to speak of natural disasters. Disasters often occur pre-cisely because we have meddled with nature and they kill and injure on alarge scale because of risks we take in relation to nature. As the sayinggoes, God makes droughts, but people make famines.In any case, natural disasters-or, as the Internat ional Red Crossterms them, Unina tural disasters-have in fact increased in recentyears; they killed at least 665,598 people between 1991 and 2000. Officialstatistics predictably underestimate. The Red Cross reports an official totalof 280,000 deaths from famine in the 1990s. Yet this may be as little as afifth of the true total. Observers estimate that between 800,000 and 1.5million famine deaths occurred in the Democratic Peoples Republic ofKorea between 1995 and 1998; they simply were never officially reported.!The North Korean famine also exemplifies how natu re and human activitiesare increasingly intertwined in the production of disaster. Concentration ofpopulation also matters: dur ing the last decade, 83 percent of those whodied in ostensibly n atu ral disasters were Asians (Interna tionalFederation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2001 .During the same period, what t he Red Cross calls technological disastersaccounted for another 86,923 deaths. Nuclear reactor failures, factoryexplosions, and train crashes are clearly not just natura l. But deaths fromboth ostensibly natural and technological disasters are dwarfed by deathsfrom clearly human conflicts and their impacts on civilian populations:more than 2.3 million during that decade. Here, th e geography or disastermortality is different: Africa figures prominently, a long with the Balkansand Central and South Asia.9. A nd he re no t ? an i n~ tdn ce f t he t ension brtwct,n rffictive international uctiun-even t he collection ofd a t a . l et a l n ne t h e d e l iv e ry o f h e l p a n d th e cons t i t u t i on of t he w or ld as a collection of putat ively snv-

ereifin nat ion-s tates nnd of organizat ions l ike th e LIN iiind t h e International Commi t t ee of t he Re dCross o n t h e hahis of nat innul meinhers . The long fa i l u re t o cu ll t he S udan es e guve rnment t n a r ro untfor p rodur ing the cur re n t D ar f i i r nu t ragc rvflerts this. Mrmhership 01-gnnizations find it ha rd to s peakaga ins t t he i r mem ber s t a t e s , and in any cahe l r l li ng t he t ru th m a ) only re s u l t i n s t a t e ac t ion to blockth e uccehb of Iiuniani tarian urgenizut ions ti1 t h i w t h e y w ou ld l i k e t o h r l p .


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A World of Emergencies 383It is crucial, though, to recognize tha t the distinction among the threecategories of disasters (nat ura l, technological, and conflict-based) is par-tially-and perhaps increasingly-artificial and misleading. Ecologicalcrises are worsened by wars and ethnic conflicts, and also help to fuel them,as victims fight over scarce resources . Technological failures figure in both.And the secondary effects of natural disasters are huge. Hundreds of millionswho are not killed are displaced or suffer the loss of homes or livelihoods.It is worth repeating the figures I have just cited because we arenumbed to them. One of the features of the emergency imaginary is pre-cisely the simultaneous sense tha t this is huge to the point of being over-whelming and yet safely held at arms length from our more routine andsecure lives. And the figures cited substantially underestimate the death

toll and costs of emergencies.Consider HIVIAIDS, which now appears as less an emergency to mostNorth Americans in th e wake of antiretroviral drugs. This may be foolishcomplacency in Canada or the US.,ut when we speak of the AIDS emer-gency now we speak most immediately of Africa. Indeed, an emergency isprecisely what President Bush evoked in his 2003 State of the Unionaddress promising increased U.S. action on AIDS. The implications of thepandemic are quite staggering, though distanced for most of us by thelocation of the emergency on tha t continent. According to UNAIDS (20021,28 million of the worlds 40 million HIV-positive people are in Africa. Butmost of the more tha n 5 million new infections each year are outside Africa(with China, India, and Russia leading the way and each poised to experi-ence dramat ic acceleration as the epidemic breaks out of initially containingpopulation groups). Three times as many people die of AIDS each day asdied in the September 11 attacks. Of course, the social organization ofvulnerability and the social organization of access to care and medicationare basic determinants of who these will be. The so-called emergency is, infact, a basic social transformation in many African societies and, potentially,elsewhere. In several countries, more than 308 of the population will die ofAIDS, but live long enough not only to infect others but also to need sub-stantial care. This care is not only costly to governments but to families.Women provide most of it, taking them out of school and paid employmentto become unpaid caregivers. At the same time, the infection rate amongwomen is growing faster than among men; a dramatic new gender inequalityis being created. And add in last the numbers of orphans-some 14 mil-lion-and the loss of cultural transmission, as well as care, they suffer.Agriculture is threatened with collapse, partly because traditional tech-niques are not passed on from parents to children and partly from simplelabour shortages-an unimaginable idea only a few years ago.Now, in some sense, this is clearly an emergency-though in fact, forall the talk of an AIDS emergency there has been precious little action. But

10. Th e n u n i h e r grows annually


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384 CRSAIRCSA, 41.4 2004to imagine this only as an emergency is to systematically underestimateboth th e extent to which the disease is a long-term, perhaps endemic factorin much of the world, and the extent to which it is producing basic socialtransformations. It also encourages approaching it with attention only tothe immediacy of short-term efforts to prevent the spread of infection or tomanage the disease with treatment regimes. It impedes longer-term attentionto social change, inequality, and reconstruction.Though the term dates from the 1980s, complex emergencies are ofcourse much older. They have come in the wake of wars, for example,including not least the Second World War, and in cases of chronic conflictlike that in Palestine. Civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and, even more centrally,refugees and population displacement make emergencies complex-evenwhen the origins of a crisis are partly natural. Thus, the Sahel droughtof the 1980s was a natural disaster, made worse by bad social policies. Itcontributed to a flow of refugees across borders, and added complexitycame from the refusal of certain states (notably Ethiopia) to aid those itconsidered politically rebellious, and from the involvement of various lib-eration fronts in humanitarian aid, as well as independence struggles.Sadly, thi s was also an example of the high human toll exacted by complexemergencies, as hundreds of thousands of people died and millions fledtheir homes. Recent assessments of Ethiopia suggest, moreover, tha t twentyyears later, and even with a better government in place, the situationremains almost as bad. The Horn of Africa has remained a prime exampleof complex humanitarian emergency. Consider Sudan.Sudan has been torn by civil war for all but 11of the nearly 50 yearsof its independent existence. One reason for this is the way European colonialpowers carved up Africa, arbitrarily creating countries that had no priorhistory as states and often no common culture. Sudan was divided in manyways, including in particular between an Arabic-speaking, mainly MuslimNorth and a non-Muslim, non-Arabic-speaking (but not interna lly unified)South. But the reasons dont end with these divisions, and thi s is importantto remember, because when faced with complex emergencies analysts fallback on faulty explanations. Perhaps the most common of these is its amatt er of ancient e thnic conflict. This analysis is false on many levels. Itfails to address the reasons why ethnic differences become important orconflictual only at certain times, the ways in which ethnicity is not justinherited but made and remade in the course of both cultural productionand politics, and the extent to which specific leaders pursuing interest s of11. As Nicolas Van de Walle 12001: 601 notes, the nuinher of countries in which emergency seems a m is-nomer and perm anent cr isis more accurate ha s grown in recent years: Much ofth e inte l lectual appa-ratus of policy reform analysis wa s ill-designed to und erstand countries in which the re appeared by themid-1990s tu he a perman ent cr isis, or in the words of one observer a tradition of adjustment. In much

of Africa, by then. th e managem ent ofeco nomic cr isis had inst i tutional ized i tse lf with, for instance , theestabl ishment of permanent stahi l ization ministr ies and almost annual and certainly routinizedrecourse tu debt resche duling exercises that had once been considered exceptional respo nses to majoremergencies. What could he the m eaning of terms l ike c r is is or goooernmml commitment in countriesthat had been officially adjusting for two decades?


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A World of Emergencies 385their own ar e usually deeply involved in s tirring up ethnic conflicts. Theancient ethnic hatreds explanation also serves to excuse the internationalcommunity, implying there is nothing it can do, that the causes are purelylocal. But they seldom are.3Race, religion, language and ethnicity have all been factors in th e CivilWar between Northern and Southern Sudanese, even though none of themexplains it. Beyond local differences of religion, language, and ethnicity,there were many international factors. Some of these involved neighbouringcountries-like th e destabilizing effect of wars in Ethiopia and Uganda,which both pushed hundreds of thousands of refugees into Sudan and pro-vided ready access to military training and arms. Others connectedSudanese events to richer and more distant countries, most importantlythe discovery of large supplies of oil in Southern Sudan, which dramaticallyincreased the Norths interest in hanging on to that region and which bynow provides more than $1 million a day to sustain the governments ar mspurchases and other military expenses. And of course, the oil goes mainlyto the worlds richer countries, reminding us of one of the reasons whychaos in the poorer ones is a constant concern.How serious is tha t concern? Since fighting was renewed in 1983,4 to5 million Sudanese have been made homeless-an extraordinary one-seventhof Sudans population. And more than 2 million have been killed-morecasualties than the combined total of the conflicts in Angola, Bosnia,Chechnya, Kosovo, Liberia, the Persian Gulf, Sierra Leone, Somalia andRwanda. Most of the casualties have been civilians, not combatants(though that is, of course, a complex and contentious distinc tion). Sudanhas served as a base for Osama bin Laden and a1 Qaeda. And it has madeUNICEF and other UN agencies, several governments, and a wide-range ofNGOs what Randolph Martin (2002)calls unwit ting accomplices to theslaughter. It is not th at they kill anyone, of course, but that even while mit-igating some human suffering they may help to prolong the conflict. Asthey care for the victims of th e war-and th e floods, droughts and otherconcurrent calamities-they allow both the government and the rebels toignore these needs and responsibilities and, at least in Martins opinion,reduce pressure to resolve the conflict. The flow of international aid actuallyrivals th e estimated $500 million a year that oil brings the Sudanese gov-ernment . Both sides to the struggle have proved adept at manipulating th einternational donors-something made easier when donors rush in following12 . See Sharon Hu tch inson 119961 fo r an accoun t of this complexity with regard to one. ostensibly unified.Sudanese identity . Also see the different discussions in Brubaker and Cooper 120001 nd Calhoun12003a).13. This is, of course, a central th eme in t he discussions of Rwand a and Centr al Africa noted above. A variety

of outside governm ent actions were important-including a US. rogram to try to boost civil societyand democracy tha t s ta r ted some p rocesses of change and then was cu t o ff , he lp ing to des tab i l ize th eRwandan government. Another precipitating factor was the collapse of prices on the world coffee market.Similarly, in the b reak -up of the former Yugoslavia and the plunge toward e thnic war in Bosnia (a notherimporta nt symbolic case for humanitarian interven tion), internatio nal actors were involved at eachs tep of the way an d im portant background conditions included th e collapse of the forme r Soviet Unionand-less widely recognized-the high level of debt that weighed o n the central Yugoslavian government.


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386 CRSAIKCSA, 41.4 2004the TV cameras, rather than building a long-term presence and knowledgebase. Perhaps the most bizarre and pa thetic aspect of this is the obsessionof some evangelical Christian groups, especially in the United States, withthe notion tha t a central problem is slavery, and th at they make th is betterby spending millions of dollars a year buying the freedom of women, childrenand sometimes others held as slaves. The evidence seems clear that thisonly fuels a system of abductions (an d sometimes swindles).As the war between Northerners and Southerners approached resolu-tion, a new tragedy began to unfold in Western Sudan. Tens of thousandshave died, hundreds of thousands been displaced, and close to half a millionrisk death in Darfur as I write. Without going into detail, it is ins tructiveto note how readily the international agencies, NGOs, and media allemployed a rhetoric of racial and ethnic hatreds. This was portrayed, by peoplewho should have known better, as first and foremost a conflict betweenArabs and Black Africans. Among other things, this misses the factth at there are few, if any, visible racial differences between t he groups(though there are linguistic and other distinctions, and certainly differentwebs of solidarity). More importantly, this construction of the conflict asprimarily racial helps the government perpetuate the myth that presentthe mass killings areas due to local militias-the Janjaweed-that it hastrouble controlling. But this obscures the fact that t he government set themilitias in motion, armed many, and easy flows between official uniformedservices and the militias. The government itself is directly behind thekillings and-even if it is no longer able to control the process it started-it set mass murder in motion because of worries about political oppositionnot race. And not least of all, the race frame fits with the notion that t hegovernment itself confronts an emergency it could not predict.14 Theinternational community colludes in the misrepresentation in the hopethat it can influence the Sudanese government, and because it is unwillingto be explicit about the collision between th e nation-state system and theproblems of complex humanitarian emergencies. For its part, the Sudanesegovernment did not hesitate to demand the withdrawal of one of the fewsenior UN officials who openly called the killings genocide.I should admit tha t I have a personal connection to the Sudanese crisis.I was working in Khartoum when the fighting resumed in 1983,and indeedlived briefly across the street from the office of John Garang, who left hisposition in the University of Khartoums Center for Regional Studies tohead th e Sudanese Peoples Liberation Front . An Oxford classmate of mineheaded Chevrons Sudanese operations a t th is time, developing the initial

13 . It is worth n ot ing too. tha t use of t he race f rame makes i t eas ier fo r t he S udanes e gove rnnien t t o c l a in it h a t i t is heing abused by outhide cri t ics because i t is Arab-sol l iething all the eas i e r to claim in th econtex t of t h r Iraq war and i ts discredi t in g ofallegedly hum anit arian m otives comin g from t h e U S a n di ts al l ies . Th e race franie also fac il i ta t e s e l id ing the conf l ic t in t he W ed w i th t ha t be tw een N or th andS outh , mi s s ing s uch im por t an t po in t s its t he fbc t t ha t t hos e t h e gove rnnien l and J en jnw eed ki l l inD a r f u r a r e fe l low Muslinih.


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A World of Emergencies 387oil wells and pipeline. For a time, on behalf of the US. Agency forInternational Development, I worked for the now-deposed Sudanese gov-ernment on a project that has direct relevance to complex humanitarianemergencies. The Sudan was all but overrun with NGOs and bilateraldonors in the 1980s, so much so tha t t he Sudanese government literallycould not keep track of them or of the commodity assistance it received.Even middle-level officials of the donor agencies demanded personal atten-tion from ministers and top civil servants. In addition to its own troubles,the Sudan had taken in refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ugandaand other countries equivalent to ten percent of its own population. Aidwas overwhelmingly directed towards emergency assistance, rather thanlonger-term development. It became increasingly hard for the aid-dependentgovernment to function-which, ultimately, was one reason the governmentfell. My colleagues and I developed a management information system to trackthe aid itself and the activities of the donors; we also struggled-unsuc-cessfully-to secure co-ordination among th e donors (Calhoun andWhitt ington, 1988; see also Woodward, 1991 . Instead, different nationalaid agencies and donors quarrelled over the right to deliver aid in differentplaces. Most knew little about the Sudan, though, because the donorsinsisted on creating new projects and new TV appeals rather than fun-nelling funds to organizations tha t had worked effectively in the countrybefore the emergency (or even for longer during it).This is not simply a historical reminiscence. The same issues remaincurrent in complex humanitarian emergencies around the world. State failureis one of the most important causes of these emergencies, but the wayemergencies are handled commonly contributes to furth er state failure andthus to recurrence of crises, rath er than development out of tha t cycle. Andwhile th e work of donors is evidence of global humanitarian concern, it isastonishingly chaotic in its own organization. As Arthur Helton (2002a;2002b) commented on aid to Afghanistan and central Asia ( shortly beforehis death in the bombing of the U N mission in Iraq): How coordinated canthe effort be when donors will give money through both multilateral andbilateral channels, international organizations and NGOs will jockey forroles and money, and relief work will run up against recovery and develop-ment plans? Too little emergency relief will be organized through inter-national NGOs that maintain a long-term, rather than episodic, presencein crisis-prone regions. Much too little will build local capacity of eithergovernment or civil society.Even within the United Nations, a host of agencies compete for oppor-tunities-and funds-to work on humanitarian emergencies . In 1992, theUN created the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs(OCHA). This office has loomed ever larger in the work of the UN, partlybecause of the UNs increasing reliance on special appeals and voluntarycontributions from its member states. The UNs core budget, based on


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3 8 8 CRSAIKCSA, 41.4 2004the assessments of member sta tes, accounts for a relatively small fractionof total UN expenditures-especially for the operational agencies likeUNICEF or the High Commission for Refugees. Perceptions of emergenciesdrive national contributions to the UN as much as they do private contri-butions to charities. Although there is a consolidated appeal for support,different agencies inevitably compete for donor a ttention and funds. Anddonors are fickle and undependable. Many make pledges of aid that theyfail to deliver. Most of the money pledged four years ago to help East Timor,when that was the dominant humanita rian emergency of the moment, wasnever delivered.15The donors who gathered in Tokyo to make those pledgeswere not so much insincere as organizationally incapable of followingthrough on their own good intentions. They were also caught up in a ritualin which pledging support affirms certain beliefs about the world-like theidea th at crises can be managed-and about the goodness of our nationsand ourselves as much a s it indicates a program of action. They sought topropitiate cer tain gods of the new world order, including the angry god ofthreatening chaos.The figures make obvious that human beings are still vulnerable todisasters, that the various sorts of progress we associate with modernityhave, at the very least, not eliminated disasters and probably increasedsome kinds of them, as well as the scale of some consequences. This realitysits uneasily, however, with the extent to which modernity has also broughtthe expectation of effective action to s top such intrusions of fate into th eworld of human organization. We tend to think of disasters as in principleavoidable, even while we contr ibute to them and while the death toll grows.The idea of intervent ion is thus almost as basic as the idea of emergency.Today, people all around th e world respond to emergencies. Yet, we insis t inthinking of them as exceptions to the rule, unusual and unpredictableevents.In fact, emergencies have become normal. I do not mean that theseemergencies are not real and devasta ting, for they clearly are, nor eventhat they do not demand urgent atten tion. They are not merely mobilizingor fear-inducing tactics in the manner of fascism or the governments ofOrwells 1984-or, I fear, the colour-coded terror alert system of the US.Department of Homeland Security. But nei ther a re they exceptions to somerule of beneficent, peaceful, existence. In 1940, when Walter Benjamin(1969) famously wrote; the tradition of the oppressed teaches us tha t th estate of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule, hewanted to stress t he underlying continuities joining fascism to modernity,against those who would treat it as a deviation and so assure themselvesth at progress marched on nonetheless. We now see not one large emergencydismissed as an exception, but innumerable smaller ones still treated asexceptions to an imaginary norm, even though repeated so frequently as tobe normalized. Events supposed to be extraordinary have become so recur-15. Se e th e more general discussion in Foreman el al., 2000.


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A World of Emergencies 389rent that aid agencies speak of emergency fatigue. Refugees? Infectiousdiseases? Ethnic conflicts? These are all certainly aspects of contemporaryemergencies and yet none could be said to be rare. Indeed, each of thesesorts of emergencies is at least partially predictable, and specific cases maylast for years.Interventions into complex emergencies are not solutions, becauseemergencies themselves are not autonomous problems in themselves butthe symptoms of other, underlying problems (Terry, 2002). At the sametime, it would be a mistake to think t hat humanitarian response should, orcould, simply be abandoned in favour of working directly on the under lyingproblems. Assistance in dire circumstances is important, not least becauseth e underlying problems usually admit of no ready solutions. For some it isalso demanded by what Weber (19221, following Aristotle, called valuerationality-doing th at which is right in itself. In emergencies, this meansbearing witness, as well as saving lives or alleviating suffering. Each isunderstood to be immediately good, rather than simply productive of thegood in some longer-term fashion.But to ignore the limits of emergency assistance is to divert attent ionfrom those problems and also to forfeit opportunities to make responsesmore effective. We need to grasp more clearly why emergencies are nor-mal-however paradoxical th at may sound-not only in order to studysomething else, but also to improve how we deal with emergencies . And weneed to make this the starting point for building better institutions andplans for dealing with emergencies (a s well as working on the underlyingproblems). In analysing technological disasters, Charles Perrow made asimilar point: accidents are normal (Perrow, 1999). They are normal notbecause individual events will cease to be surprising and sometimes disas-trous, bu t because it is inevitable tha t things will sometimes go wrong, andthe very complexity of certain socio-technical systems guarantees accidents.Rather than trying to engineer an accident-free system, planners will oftenget better results by building in the expectation of accidents-minimizingthem as best they can-as well as coping mechanisms and responsive orga-nizational structures. In the same sense, seeing emergencies as normalwould point our at tention towards planning bet ter for dealing with them aswell as towards reducing their frequency.Private charities and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs)are also a central part of the story. As I suggested near the outset, theprominence of the idea of complex emergencies reflects not only new kindsof crisis in the world but-and perhaps more importantly-a new willing-ness to intervene. This willingness is shaped by several factors. The impor-tance of global news coverage cannot be underestimated. While this mayhave helped to create awareness and sympathy, it does not, in itself, producethe sense that something must be done. Equally important are threeother factors.First, the growth of an international field of humanitarian organiza-tions and activism is one of the major developments of the 1990s (though,


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390 CRSAIRCSA, 41.4 2004of course, with older roots), and ce ntral to w hat has come to be called globalcivil society. NGOs ar e a pr imary organizational vehicle for thi s concern,bu t i t also shapes t he aid a nd foreign policies of many co untr ies . Basic tothis f ield is the spread of hu ma n r ights as not merely a single idea bu t awhole f ramewo rk for responding to social an d poli tical issues. This is some-times cr i t icized for al leged Western bias , but despite this the range ofasser ted h um an r igh ts ha s g rown and t he vocabu lary of hum an r igh ts hasbecome near ly ubiquitous outside, as well as within, th e West. And withoutbeing cyn ica l, we shou ld r emem ber th a t hum an r igh ts an d humani tar ianin terven t ion ar e no t mere ly ideas , bu t they a re enshr ined in o rgan iza tionswith employees and media depar tments and fund-rais ing operat ions.Hun dreds of thousa nds of people ma ke their c areers in the world of aid an dinterventions.

Second, wil l ingness to intervene has been encouraged by the notionth at in a world ever m ore interconnected by globalizat ion, reducing cr isesis a necessary and self - interested goal . Public health , rather than humanrights, may be the paradigm here. AIDS is only the most prom inent infectiousdisease pressing a concern for international health on ci t izens an d govern-me nts in th e developed world. Ma lar ia ki l ls a million people a year , mostlyin poor countries. Tuberculosis is once again spreading rapidly, and mostcases in r ich countr ies have roots in poor ones-and most cases the re comefrom emergencies. But t he sense of interconnection e xtends also to impactsthroug h m igration a nd m arkets , a nd i l legal f lows of each as trade in dru gsan d weapons becomes a basic concern. Ind eed, it has of ten been the pres-entat ion of health issues as secur i ty concerns that has mobil ized action(bu t this is also a l imit ing f rame) .Third, we should not underest im ate the exten t to which interventionsinto complex hum anitar ia n em ergencies were encouraged by the sense th atit was not only r ight and necessary to act , but potential ly ef fect ive. Thecom bination of new levels of wealth an d new confide nce in technology alsoencouraged new conf idence in social engineer ing. Cit izens of the r ichercountr ies-and of ten their governments-began to thi nk of hum anitar ia nemergencies as solvable problems. This raises two conc erns. One is th at , inapproaching these as practical engineer ing problems, well- intentionedactivis ts disconnected them from a deeper analysis of the global order tha tbrought them to prominence. The other is that , when forced to recognizethat efforts have not always succeeded, that social problems are more com-plex, governm ents an d othe rs may too easily lose their confidence an d give up.We ar e aware of disasters in new ways. The media pre sent calamitiesf rom around th e world to us not jus t as s to r ies bu t in compel l ing p ic tu res ,and no t jus t even tual ly bu t a lmos t in r ea l t ime as they happen . A s aresult , there are new images of large-scale disaste rs to contemplate near lyevery day. The m edia inform us, bu t very unevenly, with a ter r if ic preferencefor the immedia te over the long- term, the new d isas ter w i th d ramat ic v ideofootage over the s truggle to deal with the a f terma th. T his i tself ref lects thecompeti t ion for audience share in a mark et in which news is, if not a


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A World of Emergencies 391commodity itself, a tool for selling viewers attention t o advertisers . Theremay be media effects, as, for example, television informs differently fromprint, but intensification of this market is also a source of the way weperceive emergencies.I6Such media exposure helps to generate charitable donations and pres-sures for national governments to act. But i t does not necessarily encouragethe most effective action. It is a powerful factor in pushing emergenciesto the forefront of public attention-but also in diverting funding fromlong-term development to emergency assistance, and making even emer-gency assistance troublingly short-term.Indeed, this is a basic question about the idea of American empire.America has military bases around the world, and its policies have beendramatically interventionist. I t is not clear, however, whether the desire tointervene at will is in fact enough to justify the word empire. I wouldsuggest keeping the image of emergencies in mind in trying to understandAmericas specific sort of imperialism. The U S . usually seeks to interveneto fix emergencies and contain th e thre ats they pose. It may get caught,unable to extricate itself from wars it enters . But i ts vision of th e world-atleast most of th e time for most people-is less one of expansion, or of acivilizing or developmental mission, than one that combines hopes of eco-nomic benefit with those of ending emergencies.The Image of EmergenciesThe imaginary construct of emergencies organizes attention to social lifeand indeed organizes dimensions of social life itself. In this it is likenation or corporation or person or individual. Each of these termsstructures objects in th e world, how they ar e understood and how action isorganized in relation to them-including, not least, in law and governmentalaffairs. The imaginary and conceptual construct emergencies (along withclose analogues like crises and catastrophes) is beginning to assume asimilar status. I t is not merely a description of the world, more or less accurate,but an abstraction that plays an active role in constituting reality itself.We have seen th at thinking in terms of emergencies reflects a view ofthese events as immediate in ways that obscures their mediations-for16. I refer here to th e mainly commercial media that ar e prominent in th eOE CD countries and much ofth e rest of the world. There are, of course. other media systems, and they may respond to emergenciesin different ways. For example, the Afghan crisis looked different on Aljazeera ( the argest internat ionalArabic broadcasting service1 than on CNN. The Internet is also an importan t medium of communicationand significant, in particular, for quick access to information about emergencies. But it is broadcastmedia that are the leading force in the dominance of the emergency as a frame for understanding

world affairs.17. The famous Thomas theorem (s o abelled and thu s constituted by Robert Mertonl posits th at if mendefine situations as real they are real in their consequences. The issue is not merely whether peopleaccurately represent th e external tru th of situations in taking action in them. but t he constitutiverole played by the ways in which they grasp and bring order to their situations. See Thomas andThomas (1928: 5 7 2 ) ;Merton 11973: 267-781; Merton 11995: 379-4241,


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3 9 2 CRSAIRCSA, 4 1 . 4 2 0 0 4example, by global economic insti tutions and inequality. We have seen th atthe emergency imaginary encourages an image of sudden, unpredictableand short-term phenomena, when th e reality commonly involves longer-termdevelopment, considerable predictability, and a duration through decades.We have seen also how the idea of emergency informs a managerialperspective, as well as a humani tarian one. Each is depoliticizing in importantways. To manage the global system is not to open it to democratic decisionmaking. To respond in purely humanitarian terms often involves preciselytrying to alleviate suffering without regard to the political identities oractions of those in need (an often acute tension, these days, as humanitar ianaid workers who are also concerned about human rights question whetherthey should minister to those who might go on to continue a genocide assoon as they are well enough).I want to note a few other features of the emergency imaginary. First,one dimension of this has to do with the way understandings of connectionand obligation are organized in global society. Here the emergency imaginaryreflects several features Taylor has presented as part of modern socialimaginaries more generally (Taylor, 2002 ). The emergency imaginary is,first off, a secular view. Emergencies are identified with regard to this-worldly causes and effects, even if they mobilize people committed to moretranscendent notions of the good. And emergencies may also reflect anotion of purity that Taylor has analysed in connection with monotheismand the idea of purging evil from the terrain of an ideally pure good.Working in humanitarian response to emergencies, helping to purgehumanity of this evil and its consequent suffering, is one of th e few appar-ently altogether morally pure and attractive vocations available in thecontemporary world. And I too admire those who devote themselves to it.Yet, this is enabled by an imaginary tha t occludes much of the way in whichemergencies are produced and reproduced. Bracketing politics and eco-nomics has effects.I8Second, emergency thinking presents humanity as a n extensive popu-lation of equivalent members-something Taylor has pointed out in relationto the ideas of individuals as market actors and individuals as citizens. Buthere there is an interesting distinction. Taylor has suggested how some ofthe new social imaginaries provide for a strong sense of collective agencythat is basic, among other things, to democracy. Thinking in terms ofhumanitarian emergencies draws on this sense of agency in promotingintervention to minimize suffering. But it denies agency precisely t o thosewho suffer. These are victims (ideally presented as children and women, notactive men) lacking dignity and being humiliated. Conversely, even while18. Poli t ics and economics matter not juat as unde r ly ing caus es of emergenc i e s bu t as immedia t e con tex t sand condi ti ons 0 1 relief work. Where they a re no t address ed c l ea rly . humani t a r i an i n t e rven t ions r i s kcomplici ty ei ther in confl icts or i n depol i t ic i z ing an t i -democra t i c approaches t o s topping th em. T hevalue-rat ional orientat ion is also in tens ion with ins t rum enta l analys is of th e impact , efficacy, a nd effi-ciency olhuma ni t a r i an a s s is t ance .


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A World of Emergencies 393interventions are, at one level, managerial, they are represented, at another,as gifts, or as acts of charity. They follow, it would appear, from an idea ofhumanitarian responsibility, but not from more specific, socially locatedresponsibility.Third, accounts of emergencies often bring cultural factors-notablyethnicity-into considerat ion on an ad hoc basis to explain violence andconflict, while implying that the stable functioning of th e global order ismore or less independent of culture. More broadly, the rhetoric of cos-mopolitanism in political theory implies th at culture is basic to local loyaltiesand tensions, while inhabiting the global ecumene depends on rising aboveculture, rather than mastering certain sorts of culture. It often seems toimply not only a systemic view of the world, but also a view of the emer-gency shaped by medical pathology; emergencies are like diseases to betreated. In this connection, as in other ways, the emergency imaginaryreflects the perspective of an ostensibly detached outsider. But t he outsiderdetached from any concrete situation of struggle is not free-floating-theNGO representative no more than a Mannheimian intellectual. On thecontrary, he or she is embedded in a specific niche constructed by both cul-ture and more material forms of emp ~we rme nt. ~Fourth, emergencies are also often approached as though what theydo is simply take away the supports of normal life. This leads even thosewho work in them, let alone others who consider emergencies at more of adistance, to imagine them as involving regressions. Some will even suggestthat modernity recedes and traditional coping mechanisms are all that isleft-as though most emergencies did not challenge tradi tion as much asmodernity.Finally, and not least of all, the emergency imaginary serves an impor-tant function as a mirror in which we are able to affirm our own shakynormality. That is, by recognizing emergencies and organizing attention toproblems around the world as emergencies, we-especially citizens of theworlds richer countries-tacitly reinforce the notion tha t the normal worldof globalization is one of systems th at work effectively, tha t shore up th eworld we inhabit, rather than destroying it, and that can be counted on towork in predictable ways. Approaching conflicts as emergencies is, perhaps,the least unpalatable way of accepting their ubiquity, but it feeds unfo-cussed fear even as it reassures, and it encourages responses that may dogood, but usually not deeply.

19. See Calhoun, 2003b: 869-97. In thinking of emergencies , as in contemplating nations and many otheraspects of th e contemporary global order and disorder, we partake o f aspects of what Heidegger calledthe world picture. That is,we adopt a synoptic view of the whole from a distance, rather than particularsituations from within.


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