Project Leader: Dr Karim Knio, Senior Lecturer in Politics
The apocryphal statement ‘Don’t waste a good crisis’ suggests that crises, for many observers, have multiple dimensions.
Apart from signalling a rupture in established patterns of behaviour, crises also provide opportunities for change and improvement. Recognising the combination of various elements of crisis, scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds have analysed the genesis, unfolding and impact of crises. Historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists and scholars of international relations have contributed to helping us understand the various facets of the crisis concept.
The numerous crises engulfing the world today are arguably very different from the ones famously studied by Karl Polanyi in his seminal book The Great Transformation. Yet, there is little doubt as to whether these current crises entail a great transformation or not. Far from being mere changes to the existing world order, classically depicted by the rise and fall of particular hegemonic states, the current crises appear to be more structural in their nature forcing us to rethink the manner in which we understand capitalist, financial, regulatory, security, environmental and knowledge regimes.
Image: © 2002. Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy
Indeed, today’s world seems to be marked by an omnipresent sense of crisis. Both the magnitude and impact of the recent financial crisis have fundamentally shaken the foundations of both the US and EU economies. International Financial Institutions (IFIs) are under pressure to rethink modalities of governance, and to strengthen the institutional apparatus of the current chaotic and over-permissive global financial regulatory framework. China’s steady military rise has been testing the conventional boundaries of maritime sovereignty and legitimacy through emerging conflicts with its ASEAN neighbours in the South China Sea and beyond. Multilateralism has gradually given way to unilateralism in the management of crises through international legal institutions. In parallel, economic growth in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) have not only been altering global production and trade regimes, but have also deepened the commodification of natural and human resources in Sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, the toppling of entrenched authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), partly in response to broad-based citizen uprisings, has thrown this already unstable region into further uncertainty, especially as to whether newly victorious Islamic political parties will comply with the rules of democratic regimes.
An omnipresent sense of crises is not strictly confined to the above-mentioned, events based, time-space configurations. These crises have also elicited epistemic challenges to a variety of scholarly debates situated in various disciplines in the social sciences and in law. For example, classical debates in International Relations (IR) theory about declining American hegemony and the changing nature of liberal internationalism have been further intensified in the wake of the recent crises (Ikenberry 2009; Keohane 2012; Moravcsik 2011). In International Political Economy (IPE), the bulk of the literature has appeared to alternate between two discussions. Firstly, scholars have focussed on the impact of the current financial crisis on the US (Krugman 2011; Rodrik 2010, 2012) and the EU (van Appeldorn 2012; Ryner 2012), and secondly scholars have analysed the nexus between recurrent crises and emergent new forms of capitalism(s) around the globe (Boyer 2010, 2012; Nolke 2012). In the field of Public Administration, the policy orthodoxy of ‘New Public Management’ has been challenged by arguments centring on the return of the ‘State’ as a way to address the multiple crises (Colebatch 2009; Peters 2011). In the field of Development Studies, notions of ‘good governance’ have been contested by the rise of new development paradigms connected to the increased presence of ‘emerging economies’ in developing countries. At the same time, the credibility of modernisation-oriented notions of state-building as the proper response to situations of ‘state fragility’ and outright state collapse have been questioned. In the field of public international law, the normative liberal and positivist orientation of legal discourse has gradually given way to a critical discussion about the politics of justice and international law, particularly in the face of global crises (Koskenniemi 2009; Nouwen and Werner 2010; Marks 2008).
The objective of this research project on Crisis, Continuity and Change (C3) is to bring together a group of scholars across various social sciences disciplines and law who are currently working on this important topic. The C3 understanding here does not only entail a scholarly analysis of how crises have originated and how they have had an impact on a whole array of socio- economic and political practices. This project is also concerned with the manner in which we theorise crisis in its own right. In other words, this project seeks to deepen our understanding regarding the conditions under which crises are conducive for the creation and/or facilitation of change, continuity or change-continuity interactions.
In other words, the focus on studying crisis in its own right – as opposed to studying crises ‘in/of’ something – echoes O’Connor (1987;1998) and Castree’s (2009) critiques of Neo-Marxist treatments of crises, which often dominate intellectual discussions on this topic. Although it is a travesty to lump all Neo Marxists scholars’ work in one category – Burnham’s (2011) work clearly being an exception here – there has been a tendency in the literature to deal with crises as ‘exogenous moments’ or ‘turning points’ in time where the contradictions of capitalism(s) are either accentuated or overcome. While our understanding of crises is not necessarily confined to capitalism(s) per se, general analyses cannot account for how agents construct various meaning of crises and the conditions that have facilitated their existence. Therefore, it is essential to embed crises within transformational continuity- change considerations.
To elaborate further on this problematique, the C3 project will address at least three interdependent levels of analyses. From a theoretical standpoint, taking agents’ construction of meaning during crises seriously entails a sophisticated treatment of the spatial context where crises are unfolding. In contrast to some of the literature in International Political Economy (IPE) and International Relations (IR) (Ikenberry 2009; Keohane 2012), our spatial understanding of crises is not necessarily restricted to state centred, inter-state and/or supranational relations, situated at the global level. Instead, space is treated as multi scalar and transnational, encompassing a complex interaction between various levels, such as the ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘national’, ‘international’ and ‘supranational’ (Scholte 2003). This leads us to ask a number of theoretical, spatial-temporal questions. Firstly, if space is not necessarily a given territorial entity, what implications will this pose to our analysis of crises? In parallel, can we consider crises as events in time, causing social transformations? What determines whether certain events can be labelled crises or not? And what determines their (multi) causality? Should the temporality of crises be read from a chronological-historical perspective in the first place? And what is the role of subjectivity in our depictions of crises?
The multiple ways in which the concept of crisis can be understood can also be illustrated through the physics concept of "surface-to-surface friction", as the following image depicts.
IMAGE: Surface-to-surface friction is a force that impedes the relative motion of two surfaces in contact, or that of a body in a fluid. In this section we discuss surface-to-surface friction of two bodies in relative static contact or sliding contact. In the real world, friction is due to the imperfect microstructure of surfaces whose protrusions interlock into each other, generating reactive forces tangential to the surfaces. To overcome the friction between two bodies in static contact, the surfaces must somehow lift away from each other. Once in motion, the degree of surface affinity is reduced and hence bodies in sliding motion tend to offer lesser resistance to motion. These two categories of friction are respectively termed static friction and dynamic friction. Original source: Wikicommons.
To unpack the abstract spatial-temporal dimensions of studying crisis, this project suggests a set of operational questions, which will explicitly delve into the nexus between political change and crises. A potential list of operational questions include: Can crises be windows of opportunities for political change? Or are they conducive towards restoration and continuity? What do we mean by political change and who defines these terms? To whom is this change directed, and by whom? Does political change need crises in order to materialise? Why do certain interests use crises to promulgate continuity while other interests manipulate crises to introduce change? Are crises permanent or recurrent?
The implications of these theoretical and operational questions on the thematic level of analysis should be evident. While there is a great value in researching the impact of the financial crisis on major global players, or in the interaction between global food, environmental and financial crises for example, the contribution of the C3 project lies in its emphasis on the mutual interaction between analyses of crises in their own right and crises ‘in/ of’ something.
The focus of the C3 project will therefore be first and foremost on the political implications of crises, which are manifested in the attempts to manage crises and adapt to the major implications that crises have for political, social and economic institutions, regimes and arrangements. This implies that the C3 projects takes a dynamic view to crises, and focuses on the genesis and unfolding of crises, as well as the responses of a variety of actors on these. Topical questions for speakers in the seminar series, as well as papers produced as part of the project, would include the following:
- How does one perceive the main responses that aim at managing crises? How successful does one expect the responses to be?
- Why are some institutions and regimes better able to cope with crises, and adapt successfully, than others? Under which circumstances are these institutions and regimes more successful?
- What is the relationship between formal (political, legal) institutions and social forces in the management of and adaptation to crises?
- How does one see the relationship between the dynamics of the broader political economy and/or longer-term political change to the unfolding of crises and the attempt to manage crises and/or adapt to its consequences?
- What is the impact of ideology/worldviews and interests in the management of and adaptation to crises?