Emergency: A Vernacular Contextual Approach

Abstract

Abstract Security scholars have traditionally viewed 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 security studies. The dominance of an elite-centric, exceptionalist paradigm in the study of emergency has foreclosed the possibility of alternative conceptions of emergency and neglected the voices of structurally disempowered agents. This paper advances a vernacular contextual research agenda that is sensitive to the empirical diversity of emergency meanings and practices while foregrounding emergency claims made by non-elite actors. Challenging the idea of emergency as a form of “anti-politics,” the paper contends that emergency should be understood as an intrinsic part of politics. It then recovers an alternative, “emancipatory” conception of emergency as an extraordinary moment of spontaneous beginnings that can activate the collective agency of marginalized actors. The final section establishes conceptual foundations for actor-centered, grounded empirical research into emergency politics and suggests avenues for future research. Contextualizing emergency and attuning to the voices and experiences of everyday actors are crucial to remove the key variable that ties security to the logic of survival and exception.