Revised version, resubmitted to Social Philosophy and Policy.
Note: This is not quite finalized. Please do not cite or circulate without permission.
Emergency Claims and Democratic Action1
Jennifer C. Rubenstein
August 1, 2014
While the precise number of people affected by large-scale emergencies depends on how
“emergency” is defined, whatever definition one uses, large-scale emergencies, such as those
associated with hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, epidemics, nuclear accidents,
chemical spills, terrorist attacks, and violent conflict, are hugely important social and political
phenomena. Even if we count only events that are designated as emergencies in official
databases, these situations significantly—and negatively—affect hundreds of millions of people
annually.2 For example, according to the “Emergency Events Database” and “Complex
Emergencies Database” maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters
(CRED) in Belgium, emergencies associated with so-called “natural” disasters have significantly
affected an average of 217 million people every year since 1990. About 300 million people are
currently affected by conflict-related emergencies.3
The straightforward normative importance of emergencies suggests that empiricallyengaged political theorists and philosophers should study them. And indeed, many have done
so.4 Nonetheless, in this article I argue that contemporary scholars interested in the political
1
I thank James Nickel, Jennifer Petersen, Allison Pugh, Denise Walsh, an anonymous reviewer, the editors of and
other contributors to this special issue, and participants in the UVa Politics Department Summer Brownbag series
for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Andrew Gates provided especially helpful comments and
editorial assistance. Thanks also to the students in my spring 2014 undergraduate seminar, Emergencies, for a
wonderfully illuminating discussion of the issues.
2
Of course, people can also benefit from emergencies. See David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political
Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983-1989 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press,
1994); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. (New York: Picador, 2008).
3
Jennifer Leaning and Debarati Guha-Sapir, “Natural Disasters, Armed Conflict, and Public Health,” New England
Journal of Medicine 369, no. 19 (2013): 1836–42.
4
This article engages primarily with the contemporary literature on emergencies, but emergencies have been a major
theme in the history of political thought as well. For accounts of how a wide range of canonical thinkers have dealt
with emergencies and related concepts, see Simon Caney, “Global Injustice and the Right of Necessity,”
1
and/or moral dimensions of large-scale emergencies should not study emergencies. Instead, they
should focus their analyses on emergency claims. Emergency claims are claims that a particular
(kind of) situation is an emergency, made by particular actors against particular background
conditions to particular audiences, which in turn accept or reject those claims. Emergency
claimants use speech, writing, visual images, and other strategies to persuade their audience(s) a)
that some person(s), thing(s), or state(s) of affairs are valuable, but b) they are threatened with
imminent harm or destruction, yet c) human agency is capable of preventing or reversing at least
some of that harm or destruction. That is, emergency claims are, among other things, claims
about value, threat, and human agency. The study of emergency claims thus diverges
dramatically from the study of emergencies understood as “objective” events independent of
human perceptions, and builds significantly on the study of emergencies understood as events
that are generically “socially constructed.”
A main reason to study emergency claims, or to adopt what I will call the “emergency
claims approach,” is that doing so draws our attention to emergency claim-making as a
distinctive political activity. A focus on the activity of emergency claim-making, in turn,
foregrounds and casts light on an important question: what are the implications of emergency
politics—understood as the making (and not making), contesting (and not contesting) and
accepting (or rejecting) of emergency claims—for marginalized groups?5 This article offers a
(unpublished ms.); Lazar, Nomi Claire, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009). Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011). For an effort to historicize emergencies from a sociological perspective that emphasizes the
humanitarianism, see Craig Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global Disorder” in Didier
Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi. Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian
Interventions. Zone Books, 2013.
5
By “marginalized” groups I mean groups that are pushed to the margins of society, where they lack not only access
to adequate employment, but also meaningful political power, moral standing as equals with others, and/or a means
to make their voices heard. This conception of marginalization is less focused on economic exclusion as the source
of other exclusions than is Iris Young’s account (Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. (New in
Paper edition, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011), 54-5).
2
detailed account of the emergency claims approach, and argues that it is a promising springboard
for addressing this question. To illustrate, I discuss the example of recent high rates of gun
violence in Chicago, Illinois, and show how the emergency claims approach draws our attention
to, and helps explain, otherwise puzzling features of the rhetoric surrounding this issue.
As I explain in general terms and with reference to the Chicago gun violence case in
particular, the emergency claims approach is promising because it shows that successful
emergency claims are often “Janus-faced.”6 On the one hand, these claims are powerful tools for
directing attention and resources to people in desperate need, and for motivating action on their
behalf; that is, emergency claims can be effective “weapons of (or for) the weak.”7 But on the
other hand, emergency claims can contribute to several intersecting forms of injustice and
domination, including by extending and entrenching the power of the already-powerful (e.g.
through the adoption of “emergency powers”). That is, successful emergency claims can be
potent weapons of the strong. They can also enact recognition and redistribution-based
injustices, and undermine democratic norms. The emergency claims approach not only
highlights all of these aspects of emergency claims; it shows them to be closely connected, and
even sometimes mutually constitutive. It is in this sense that emergency claims are Janus-faced.
Insofar as emergency claims are Janus-faced, emergency politics is simultaneously deeply
appealing and potentially injurious to marginalized groups. And insofar as this is the case, we
have good reason to search out alternative forms of political action that retain the sense of
urgency and nascent solidarity evoked by emergency claims, while avoiding the forms of
injustice and domination that they engender.
As will become apparent, I mean “Janus-faced” in a loose, colloquial sense, as one entity with two opposing
aspects.
7
This is a reference to James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). The
difference between “of” and “for” is significant; as we will see, individuals and groups can contest emergency
claims made “for” them.
6
3
In contrast to the emergency claims approach, much of the existing literature on
emergencies either does not attend to emergency claims at all, or focuses on only one (or part of
one) of their aforementioned “faces.” For example, the literature on the duty to rescue focuses
not on emergency claims, but instead on emergencies as objective or man-made events with clear
meanings.8 The literature on emergency powers does focus on emergency claims, but focuses on
one aspect of their second face: how they extend and further entrench the power of formal
political actors. Authors such as Bonnie Honig come closer to the approach outlined here, in that
they emphasize the need to find opportunities for “democratic renewal” in “emergency
settings.”9 However, Honig treats emergencies primarily as backdrops for democratic politics,
not the very material of such politics. In contrast, the emergency claims approach is concerned
with the making, unmaking, and non-making of emergencies as itself a political practice, with
democratic and undemocratic implications and effects. It therefore raises questions such as: are
the people affected by a given situation empowered to make, or contest, emergency claims about
it? What modalities of listening and openness to others’ emergency claims are ethically required
of democratic citizens? I do not attempt to answer these questions here, but instead try to show
that adopting the emergency claims approach brings them to the fore and sets us on a promising
path toward addressing them.
I. Emergencies, disasters, and crises
Singer, Peter. “Famine, Affluence and Morality.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972); Unger,
Peter. Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. Oxford University Press, USA, 1996. Critics of the
duty to rescue tend to focus on whether the existence of complications and uncertainties about a situation releases us
from obligations to aid distant others, rather than on how the content of these complexities alters our obligations.
E.g. Schmidtz, David. “Islands in a Sea of Obligation: Limits of the Duty to Rescue.” Law and Philosophy 19, no. 6
(2000): 683–705. A partial exception is Wenar, “Poverty is no Pond” in Patricia Illingworth, Thomas Pogge, and
Leif Wenar. Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. But seem my
discussion in Between Samaritans and States: the political ethics of humanitarian INGOs (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015 [expected], Chapter 8).
9
Honig, xv.
8
4
Emergency claims are not only claims as opposed to other ways of approaching
emergencies; they are also emergency claims, as opposed to other kinds of claims. In order to
see why it makes sense to treat emergency claims as distinctive, we need to distinguish the
concept of “emergency” from similar concepts such as “disaster” and “crisis.”10 This task can
initially seem daunting because “emergency,” “disaster,” and “crisis” are sometimes used
interchangeably. For example, CRED, mentioned above, describes the events in its “Emergency
Events Database” as “disasters.” Likewise, the US government’s “Federal Emergency
Management Agency” (FEMA) states that its mission is “to lead America to prepare for, prevent,
respond to and recover from disasters.”11 However, if we look at other usages of these terms and
at their definitions and etymologies, striking differences come into view.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an “emergency” is “a state of things
unexpectedly arising and urgently demanding immediate action.”12 This definition is broadly
consistent with ordinary, everyday usage of the term.13 The first part of the definition, that
emergencies are “unexpectedly arising,” distinguishes emergencies from situations of chronic
suffering, danger, or need, which are not unexpected precisely because they are ongoing. The
second part of the definition, that emergencies “urgently demand[] immediate action,”
distinguishes emergencies from disasters. Disasters are situations in which immediate action is
not necessary because the bad outcome has already occurred: a disaster is “a sudden or great
10
While there is a large literature on catastrophes, I do not discuss catastrophes here because the crucial difference
between catastrophes and emergencies for our purposes—that in catastrophes, the bad outcome has already
occurred—also holds for disasters. (E.L. Quarantelli, “Catastrophes are Different from Disasters: Some
Implications for Crisis Planning and Managing Drawn from Katrina,” published June 11, 2006,
http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Quarantelli/.)
11
“About the Agency,” FEMA, last modified July 14, 2014, http://www.fema.gov/about-agency.
12
“Emergency, n.”. OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/61130?redirectedFrom=emergency (accessed July 23, 2014).
13
I draw on dictionary definitions of particular words because they are helpful articulations of how these words are
frequently used and understood, not as authoritative accounts of what they “really” mean.
5
misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a calamity.”14 A large-scale emergency is thus an
impending disaster that can potentially be warded off, at least to some extent. For example, a
report issued by the research arm of Médecins Sans Frontières stated that “the 2004 tsunami,
which killed many more people than it wounded, should never have been described as a lifethreatening emergency.”15 That is, for the people who died, the tsunami was a disaster, not an
emergency.
When a situation is described as both an emergency and a disaster, the two terms
highlight different aspects of that situation. For example, calling the 2010 earthquake in Haiti a
disaster emphasizes that many people were killed or injured. Calling it an emergency
emphasizes that there is—or, was—a chance to save lives through immediate action. While the
terms “emergency aid” and “disaster aid” are often used interchangeably, “emergency”
telegraphs far more possibility. The optimistic view of emergencies is that they are windows of
opportunity for helpful action.
This distinction between emergency and disaster is also evident in our ordinary usage of
these terms. For example, if one is seriously hurt one goes to the “emergency room,” not the
“disaster room,” because the aim of emergency rooms is to save lives through immediate action.
In contrast, parents refer to their teenage children’s messy rooms as “disaster areas,” not
“emergency areas,” because the bad event (teenagers strewing their stuff everywhere) has
already happened, and there is no particular urgency about cleaning it up. More generally, we
speak of “impending” disasters and crises, implying the need for immediate action to avoid them,
“Disaster, n.”. OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. While action might be necessary to prevent a
disaster from worsening, the term “disaster” directs our attention to what has already happened. I thank Andrew
Gates for this observation.http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53561?rskey=AWOPP1&result=1&isAdvanced=false
(accessed July 23, 2014).
15
Rony Brauman and Michaël Neuman, “MSF and the aid system: Choosing not to choose,” published May 2014,
http://www.msf-crash.org/drive/0777-1405_msf-and-the-aid-system.pdf. While this was perhaps not a lifethreatening emergency, it might have been an emergency in the sense that it posed an immediate threat to other
things that people valued, such as their homes or livelihoods.
14
6
but we generally do not speak of impending emergencies, because the need for immediate action
is built into the concept of emergency.16
After the fire department from Alexandria, Virginia took command of the fire in the
Pentagon caused by the 9/11 attack, teams of firefighters were stationed at the doors to block
military personnel from rushing into the inferno to try to rescue their colleagues.17 The fire
fighters were interpreting the situation as a disaster—the damage had already been done—while
the military personnel were treating it as an emergency: there still might be a chance to save their
colleagues. One explanation for this different treatment of the situation seems to have been
different values. For the military personnel, loyalty to their colleagues, in the form of not leaving
them behind, was itself a crucial value. As this example suggests, not only different predictions
about threat or estimations of the capacity of human agency, but also ideas about what is of
value, shape perceptions of whether a situation is an emergency.
While responses to disasters can involve putting things back to the way they were, they
can also involve efforts to create the world anew (as happened to the public education system in
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina). Proponents of the shift to charter schools in the
immediate aftermath of the hurricane described it as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a
fundamentally better public education system in New Orleans.”18 Emergency relief, in contrast,
is much more about returning things to, or preventing further divergences from, the status quo
ante. “Build back better” is a familiar trope in post-disaster reconstruction, such as after Katrina
or the 2010 Haiti earthquake; it not a slogan of emergency services. (That such calls had to be
A Google Ngram of these terms in English from 1800 to 2008 shows that “impending disaster” is used about 50
times more often, and “impending crisis” is used about 25 times more often, than “impending emergency.”
17
Thanks to James Nickel for this example.
18
Cited in Danielle Holley-Walker, “The Accountability Cycle: The Recovery School District Act and New
Orleans’ Charter Schools,” Connecticut Law Review 40 (2007): 125. See also Ralph Adamo, “Squeezing Public
Education: History and Ideology Gang Up on New Orleans,” Dissent 54:3 (2007): 44–51.
16
7
made explicitly, however, suggests that the dominant understanding of disaster response is that
like emergency response, it also involves returning things to the status quo ante.)
While emergencies urgently demand immediate action, in a crisis a decision must be
made: a crisis is “a vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turningpoint.”19 Etymologically, the term “crisis” is related to “cross,” as in a road crossing in which
one must decide which way to go. While making a decision can be construed as a kind of action,
it is a much more internal and cognitive kind of action than what is usually called for in a
situation that is socially recognized as an emergency. For example, someone facing a “religious
crisis” or an “existential crisis” must think about and eventually decide what to believe. In
contrast, someone who encounters what she perceives as an emergency, such as a child drowning
in a shallow pond, must act—fast. There is no need to think deeply, because what to do is
obvious; the point is just to do it.20 (Even if there is confusion about logistics—is it better to
throw the drowning child a life preserver or swim to her?—the necessary course of action is still
reasonably clear.) Thus, like “emergency” and “disaster,” “emergency” and “crisis” can
sometimes be used to describe the same situation. For example, humanitarian organizations and
news outlets frequently refer to the present situation in Syria as both an “emergency” and a
“crisis.” The “emergency” label emphasizes the need to act and implies that the necessary
course of action is obvious; the “crisis” label emphasizes the complexity of the situation and the
need to think carefully before acting.
“Crisis, n.”. OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44539?redirectedFrom=crisis (accessed July 23, 2014).
20
Elaine Scarry offers CPR as an example of the kind of “thinking” that is useful in emergencies, but what she
describes is almost entirely habit and reflex rather than thinking. See Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012). Ironically, CPR does require a great deal of active judgment and
decision-making, even though Scarry does not describe it that way (Rachel Schwartz, personal communication,
Spring 2013).
19
8
As the foregoing discussion suggests, “emergency,” “disaster,” and “crisis” have
different temporal emphases. “It’s an emergency!” is a claim about something that just started
but has not yet ended; it is happening now. In contrast, disasters can only be identified as such
after they have had significant bad effects; “it’s a disaster!” is therefore a claim about what has,
at least in part, already happened—even if it just happened, and even if its effects will
reverberate into the future. Crises, like emergencies, are present-oriented. However, there is
some evidence to suggest that they can have a longer duration than emergencies: while we often
say that we are in the midst of a crisis, we tend not to say that we are in the midst of an
emergency (or a disaster), because the latter are of shorter duration.21 Thus, the title of the film
“Living in Emergency,” a documentary about Doctors Without Borders, is attention-grabbing
precisely because it runs up against the usual temporality of the concept of emergency.
Because the concept of emergency differs from the concepts of disaster and crisis in these
(and other) ways, emergency claims also differ, in corresponding ways, from disaster claims and
crisis claims. In studying emergency claims, therefore, we must pay close attention to the
distinctive content that the concept of emergency imparts. I return to this task below. We must
also examine the “claims” part of this idea, to which I now turn.
II. The Structure of emergency claims
In a recent book and article about what he calls the “representative claim,” Michael
Saward argues that we should “see[] representation in terms of claims to be representative by a
variety of political actors, rather than (as is normally the case) seeing it as an achieved, or
A Google Ngram shows that for the last few decades, “midst of a crisis” has been used about 25 times more often
than “midst of a disaster” and “midst of an emergency.” However, “permanent crisis” and “chronic crisis” are used
more than “permanent emergency” and “chronic emergency,” even when the relative prevalence of “crisis” over
“emergency” is taken into account.
21
9
potentially achievable, state of affairs...”22 Saward then offers a detailed account of
representative claims. Rather than merely showing that representation is socially constructed
rather than objectively existing, and rather than focusing on the social construction of a single
historical or contemporary case of representation, Saward articulates a general model of how
representation is constructed: by what actors, doing what sorts of things.
I now want to suggest that approaching emergencies in the same spirit as, and drawing on
some insights of, Saward’s theory of the representative claim provides a promising model for
studying the political and moral terrain of large-scale emergencies.23 While aspects of the
emergency claims approach can be found in the existing literature, as far as I know it has not
been explicitly articulated or defended.
The idea of a “claim” has at least three features that are especially relevant to the
emergency claims approach. First, claims are intentional descriptions or assertions about the
world: to study emergency claims is to study what actors say or assert about particular (kinds of)
situations, as opposed to objective facts that are independent of human action or perceptions,
such as the shifting of tectonic plates, or unspoken shared assumptions that go unsaid, such as the
(modern) idea that every individual human life is valuable. Both objective facts and unspoken
shared assumptions are important for the emergency claims approach, but as we will see, the
nature of their import is informed by putting intentional claim-making at the center of the
analysis. Second, claims are often claims to something—in the case of emergency claims, to
attention, resources, or a suspension of normal rules and procedures. Third, many (though not
Michael Saward, “The Representative Claim,” Contemporary Political Theory 5:3 (2006): 297-318; Michael
Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); see also, Andrew Schaap, “Critical
Exchange on Michael Saward’s The Representative Claim,” Contemporary Political Theory 11:1 (2012), 109-127.
23
Some claims are both emergency claims and representative claims, for example, “if nothing is done, climate
change will be a catastrophe for my constituents.” However, some representative claims are not emergency claims,
e.g. “my constituents want a new highway.” Conversely, some emergency claims are not representative claims, for
example, “climate change is an emergency.”
22
10
all) claims can be evaluated: some claims, like claims to resources, can be evaluated on
normative grounds, for example according to whether they are justified, reasonable, fair, etc.
Empirical claims can be evaluated based on whether they are true or false, supported by
compelling or paltry evidence, etc. In addition to being evaluated in these ways, claims can also
be studied to understand what their effects are, and how they function rhetorically.
Representation is usually seen as having a tripartite structure: a representative represents
a constituency to an audience. In contrast, the structure of the representative claim as Saward
describes it is more elaborate: “A maker of representations (‘M’) puts forward a subject (‘S’)
which stands for an object (‘O’) that is related to a referent (‘R’) and is offered to an audience
(‘A’).”24 Saward’s model thus goes beyond the standard model of representation in two ways.
First, the “representative” in the standard model is replaced, in the representative claim model,
with a “maker” who puts herself or someone else forward as a particular kind of “subject.” For
example, Nancy Pelosi (maker) represents herself as a smart, competent, and forceful political
leader (subject), or others, e.g. her staff, represent Pelosi in this way. The representative also
represents whatever is being represented in a particular way, foregrounding some aspects of it
and downplaying others, so “the represented” in the standard model becomes, in Saward’s
model, both “referent” (e.g. the US public) and “object” (e.g. the aspects of the US public that
are represented, such as their values or desire for jobs and security).25
Extending this kind of analysis to emergencies, we can say that an emergency claim
occurs when a maker of an emergency claim presents him or herself as a particular kind of
subject: an appropriate judge of what counts as an emergency. While the maker and the subject
in an emergency claim can be different entities, for example when a news anchor vouches for the
24
25
Saward, The Representative Claim (2010), 36.
Saward, The Representative Claim (2010), 36-7.
11
trustworthiness of an eyewitness to an approaching tornado, they are often the same, for example
when a news anchor portrays herself as an authoritative voice in describing an Ebola epidemic as
an emergency. The maker might claim that the subject (herself or someone else) is an
appropriate judge based on a variety of different sources of legitimacy: because she was
significantly negatively affected by the situation in question (e.g., she is a “victim”), because she
is a public official charged with addressing the issue or an expert with specialized scientific or
technical knowledge about it, or because she witnessed it firsthand.
The referent in an emergency claim is the situation about which the emergency claim is
made, the naturally-occurring or human-caused “raw material,” as it were. The object consists of
the features of the referent that are forgrounded and interpreted to show that they meet criteria
for what counts as an emergency. That is, the emergency claimant forges a match between
particular features of the referent—features that together comprise the object—and relevant
criteria for what counts as an emergency. (I describe the content of these criteria, which the
claimant also interprets to a limited degree, below.)26 To do this, the maker might write
newspaper articles, create reports with charts or graphs, verbally exhort her fellow citizens,
engage in emotional displays of body language, circulate photographs or videos, or even arrange
personal experiences for others, e.g. a tour of a recently storm-ravaged area for government
officials.27
The maker’s presentation of the subject, together with the match that the subject forges
between the object and criteria for what counts as an emergency, are offered to one or more
26
Especially when the maker and subject are the same entity, the claim to appropriateness will often be embedded in
the substantive claim about the situation being described as an emergency, or in the maker’s bearing or affect while
making that claim.
27
I exclude force and manipulation from my account of emergency claims because they raise distinct issues that
must be treated separately. However, emergency claimants can get audiences to accept their claims by inciting
emotions such as fear or pity, not simply by making dry, logical arguments.
12
audiences, which accept these claims—or not. While it is tempting to think of the subject as the
main actor in emergency claims, audiences are just as important: it does not matter what the
subject says or does if her claim falls on deaf ears. Because emergency claims are about
immediate action, subjects usually direct their appeals to audiences that they think can and
should take immediate action in response. Thus, the intended audience of emergency claims
often consists of those who the subject (and/or the maker who presents or vouches for the
subject) thinks must act immediately, either to provide assistance, avoid becoming victims, or
both. However, especially due to the wide-reaching effects of social media, emergency claims
are often “overheard” by third parties who are less directly connected to the situation— but
might still have some connection, for example the US public at large overheard the emergency
claims of officials in New York, New Jersey, and other states after Superstorm Sandy. Likewise,
audience members might belong to the same social group as the subject of the emergency claim,
for example when a community organizer tells her neighbors that they are facing an epidemic of
crime in their community, or they might belong to a different social group, for example when
Syrian rebels appeal to the populations of distant countries for funding or political support.
Finally, all of this happens against a backdrop of perceptions and assumptions that help
to shape both the maker’s claims and the audience’s response to those claims. Which kinds of
claims that subjects make, which subjects particular audiences view as appropriate, and which
claims audiences accept, are influenced by these background conditions.28
Here is an example of an emergency claim: on February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN Security Council. Because he presented himself as a
particular kind of subject—an appropriate judge of what counts as an emergency in this context,
While background conditions are not in Saward’s basic model, he discusses them. See Saward, The
Representative Claim (2010), 72-77.
28
13
but with a hint of “I’m no expert” self-deprecation—Powell acted as both maker and subject
simultaneously. He claimed that Iraq was stockpiling chemical, biological and nuclear weapons
that were an immediate threat to global security, and that something had to be done to remove
this threat:
When we confront a regime that harbors ambitions for regional domination, hides
weapons of mass destruction and provides haven and active support for terrorists, we are
not confronting the past, we are confronting the present. And unless we act, we are
confronting an even more frightening future…The United States will not and cannot run
that risk to the American people. Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of
mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September
11th world.29
Powell thus took a referent, the arms situation in Iraq, and discursively created an object, the
situation describe above, in order to forge a match between the situation in Iraq and criteria for
what counts as an emergency (which, again, I describe in detail below). He did so for several
audiences, including the country representatives to the U.N. Security Council listening to his
presentation and the US public. He made his emergency claim against the backdrop of post-9/11
political culture. Insofar as various audiences accepted his arguments (which some did more
than others), Powell’s emergency claim succeeded.
We now have a sketch of the “moving parts” of a single emergency claim. But—this is
crucial—emergency claims virtually never operate in isolation. They are, instead, often
contested, by members various audiences. In addition, simultaneous emergency claims support,
“Transcript of Powell’s U.N. Presentation,” delivered February 5, 2003,
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript.10/index.html
29
14
contradict, and compete with each other, and with other kinds of claims.30 For example,
environmentalists who claim that climate change is an emergency must contend with those who
claim that it is a disaster, crisis, or catastrophe—or none of these things.31 Subjects of
emergency claims about the environment must also jockey for attention and resources with
subjects of other kinds of claims, e.g. claims about the “financial crisis” or about the situation in
the Middle East. Subjects of emergency claims can also draw comparisons to other emergencies
to strengthen their own claims. For example, demanding additional funds to address gun
violence in Chicago (an example I return to below), Jesse Jackson wrote: “If we can find the
money necessary to help children on the borders, $2 billion can come to Chicago to make where
we live safe and secure.”32
Not only do contemporaneous emergency claims interact with each other, but earlier
emergency claims help to shape the backdrops of assumptions and perceptions, institutions and
laws, against which later emergency claims are made. This is how we should understand cases
in which situations are socially recognized as emergencies without anyone explicitly claiming
that they are emergencies. These cases of—apparent—social consensus are often, at least in
part, the result of past emergency claims that were made explicitly, sometimes contested, and
then eventually widely accepted. However, recognizing their historicity helps us to notice
fissures in this apparent consensus. For example, in the present-day United States, there is
certainly more social consensus among powerful audiences that an elderly African-American
man suffering a serious injury constitutes an emergency than there was in the eras of slavery and
Adi Ophir, “The Politics of Catastrophization” in Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, eds., Contemporary States
of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013), 73.
31
For example, Daniel Smith, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It…and He Feels Fine,” New York Times
Magazine, April 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-itand-he-feels-fine.html?gwh=535D1D13FC67B07E098A8E4F08232C33&gwt=pay&assetType=nyt_now.
32
Mike Tobin, “Amid gangland shootings, Chicago leaders call for federal resources,” Fox News, July 10, 2014,
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/10/amid-gangland-shootings-chicago-leaders-call-for-federal-resources/.
30
15
Jim Crow. However, recognizing the historical processes that yielded this shift helps us to see
that, even today, consensus on this point is far from complete, at both the level of individual
beliefs and actions and the design and everyday functioning of institutions (e.g. health care
systems).
The content of emergency claims
With this account of the moving parts of single emergency claims and interactions among
different emergency claims before us, I turn next to describing the substantive criteria that an
object must be shown to meet in order to be socially recognized as an emergency by a given
audience. While there is some “wiggle room” for the subject to offer her own gloss or slant on
what constitutes an emergency, if she veers too far from the audience’s expectations, her
audience will not only reject her emergency claim; they might not even recognize that this was
the kind of claim she was making.
If an audience understands the concept of emergency along the lines discussed in section
I, the subject, to make a successful emergency claim, must show that a situation meets particular
criteria involving value, threat, and human agency. These criteria trace what I will call an
emergency narrative. This narrative emphasizes the need for immediate action in the present,
but in so doing, it also projects backward in time, telling us how things were before the
emergency occurred, and forward in time, suggesting what this immediate action should
accomplish in the (near) future. The emergency narrative therefore has three stages.
In the first stage, i.e., before the putative emergency occurred, things were normal, in the
sense of both usual for the place or group in question and at least somewhat normatively
acceptable. This requirement of normative acceptability might seem odd: surely people whose
lives are plagued with great suffering and hardship nonetheless face emergencies. Indeed, a
16
central insight of the sociological literature on emergencies and disasters over the past few
decades has been that they systematically harm marginalized groups more than people who are
wealthier and more powerful.33 Nonetheless, for a situation to be socially recognized as an
emergency, it is conceptually necessary that the status quo ante include someone or something of
value. Otherwise, there can be no need for immediate action to prevent or reverse imminent
damage or harm. To put the point another way, claiming that someone with a low level of wellbeing now faces an emergency emphasizes the relative merits of that person’s level of well-being
prior to the emergency. For example, describing a person with terminal cancer as having a
medical emergency because her chemotherapy port is infected emphasizes the relative merits of
“merely” having terminal cancer. In other words, to accept an emergency claim, the audience
has to be persuaded that things were in some sense okay before the emergency, or at least that
there was something about the situation worth preserving or protecting.
In the second stage of the emergency narrative, there is an “unexpectedly arising”—and
so, typically, rapidly-arising—threat to at least some of what was of value in the first stage. In
other words: things become abnormally bad. There are at least three possible benchmarks for
identifying situations as abnormally bad: how things used to be in the place (or for the individual
or group) in question, how things are in other places (or for other individuals/groups), and how
things are in absolute terms. Of these, only the first is necessary for a situation to be socially
recognized as an emergency. No matter how bad a situation is in absolute terms or compared to
how things are elsewhere, it is unlikely to be socially recognized as an emergency if it has
persisted unchanged for a long time—that is, if it fails to conform to the OED’s definition of
emergencies as “unexpectedly arising.” Imagine, for example, that a mid-level executive emails
33
Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002); Kai Erikson, Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1976).
17
his colleagues: “I’m sorry, but I can’t make the meeting today. We have a family emergency—
my daughter has severe autism and every day with her is incredibly difficult.” The executive’s
situation is bad compared to that of many other people, and perhaps bad in absolute terms (if his
own life is severely constrained because of his daughter’s condition). But because the situation
is not unexpectedly arising, it does not qualify as an emergency. The executive is not using
“emergency” in a metaphorical or hyperbolic sense. His usage is entirely wrong; it suggests that
he does not know what the word means.
In contrast, consider another (intentionally frivolous) example: the actor Olivia Munn
wanted to wear a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes to the premiere of her new TV show, but
discovered just before the event that the shoes were too small. She took immediate action to
rectify the situation by heating the shoes with a hair dryer to make them pliable, and then
stretching them.34 E! Online’s description of this episode as a “fashion emergency” was
therefore entirely apt. Even just calling the situation an emergency—while shallow and
hyperbolic—would have made sense in a way that the executive’s usage did not. But the
modifier “fashion” makes the description more plausible still, by limiting the scope of the
relevant comparisons to the sartorial realm. The situation was an emergency because of an
immediate threat to a (sartorially) valuable state of affairs—one in which Munn could wear her
shoes to the premier. The crucial difference between Munn and the executive is that while the
executive was badly-off in relative and absolute terms, his situation had been ongoing for some
time, whereas Munn was well-off in relative and absolute terms, but she faced a rapid negative
divergence from the status quo ante, in which she expected to be able to wear the shoes. (The
Marc Malkin, “Olivia Munn’s Louboutin Fashion Emergency: ‘I Am the Female Asian MacGyver!’” E! Online,
dated June 21, 2012, http://www.eonline.com/news/325144/olivia-munn-s-louboutin-fashion-emergency-i-am-thefemale-asian-macgyver.
34
18
fact that Munn’s situation would never have been described as an emergency if she were a man
is also worth noting.)
While comparisons to how things used to be are almost always necessary and sometimes,
as in the case of Munn’s fashion emergency, sufficient for emergency claims to be persuasive,
they are not always sufficient. For example, suppose that a billionaire who spends her money
only on herself will lose a few million dollars if she does not attend quickly to the paperwork for
one of her investments. While she might consider this an emergency, the rest of us are unlikely
to accept it as such: even though it involves the threat of a rapid negative divergence from the
status quo ante, the billionaire’s high level of material well-being, both relative to others and in
absolute terms, seems likely to make an emergency claim about her situation unpersuasive to
most audiences.
One implication of all of this is that one obvious way to deflate and counteract an
emergency claim is to argue that the situation in question is indeed regrettable, but not
particularly abnormal for the place or group in question. This is what the American Red Cross
argued during the Great Depression, when, explaining its refusal to aid farmers whose crops had
been decimated by drought, it stated that drought was but “one of the many hazards of farming—
like the boll weevil or a bad harvest.”35 The implication here is that because farmers have
always dealt with drought, such that he current situation is not much worse than the past, it
cannot be an emergency.
The third stage of the emergency narrative is the claim that immediate action can and
should be taken to arrest or reverse the abnormally bad situation, and return things to the status
quo ante— or at least prevent further divergences. This involves, first, showing that the situation
in question is not a lost cause: so long as action is taken quickly, human agency can, at least
35
Cited in Landis, “Fate Responsibility, and Natural Disaster Relief,” 258.
19
potentially, avoid or reverse at least some damage. (I here treat the imminent threat of something
bad happening as itself bad.) When individual lives are under threat, it also involves showing
that those affected deserve help and/or protection. At the least, they do not deserve what will
happen to them if no one comes to their aid or protects them.36 The idea that emergency-affected
people do not deserve to suffer or perish as a result of the emergency, and so should be helped,
give emergency claims an activist, secular cast: to call a situation an emergency is to reject the
idea that the situation should be accepted as God’s will.37 Indeed, we generally do not first
recognize situations as emergencies and then decide whether intervention is morally or
pragmatically necessary; instead, we recognize situations as emergencies because we think that
intervention is necessary. The duty to act is so constitutive of the concept of emergency that we
seem to be more likely to not recognize a situation as an emergency than we are to recognize it
as an emergency but say that action of some kind is not required to address the situation. “It’s an
emergency but nothing should be done” is almost a contradiction in terms.
For the situation to be recognized as an emergency, the purpose of immediate action must
be to return things to the status quo ante, or at least prevent them from diverging from it further.
If the purpose of immediate action is more radical, then the situation begins to look less like an
emergency, and more like a social transformation, reformation, or revolution (albeit one sparked,
although not necessarily fundamentally motivated, by an unexpectedly-arising divergence from
the status quo ante).
Emergency claims and social construction
36
We often perceive as emergencies situations in which victims are culpably causally responsible for their own
predicament, but are not seen as deserving the suffering that would result from the full effect of their actions were no
effort made to assist them. Martha Nussbaum refers to this as an issue of “proportionality.” Martha Nussbaum,
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotion (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 311.
37
Thus, victims are sometimes said to deserve help precisely because what happened to them was an “act of God” in
a figurative sense, rather than the result of their own foolishness or indolence. See Michele Landis, “Fate,
Responsibility, and Natural Disaster Relief: Narrating the American Welfare State,” Law and Society Review 33
(1999), 260.
20
The emergency claims approach is entirely consistent with, and is intended to contribute
to, the literature on “social construction” in general, and the social construction of emergencies,
disasters, and crises, in particular. Like other work in this vein, the emergency claims approach
emphasizes that emergencies are not natural, objective, or given, but rather, at least in large part,
the direct or indirect result of human actions and perceptions.38 However, to further clarify the
emergency claims approach, it is worth noting two ways in which it differs from much of the
literature on the social construction of emergencies, disasters, and crises.
First, the emergency claims approach takes a wide-angle view from the very start. While
it attends carefully to individual emergency claims, it situates them within a broader economy of
successful claims, failed claims, and claims that could have been but were not attempted. The
thought underlying this approach is that it is difficult to understand any single emergency claim
without reference to this bigger picture. In contrast, several of the classic works on the sociology
of emergencies and disasters, such as Kai Erikson’s work on the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood and
Klinenberg’s account of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, focus primarily on a single
emergency/disaster.39
Second, much of the literature on the social construction of emergencies, disasters, and
crises focuses on revealing the hidden effects of social structures and unspoken assumptions. In
contrast, as should now be clear, the emergency claims approach focuses, in the first instance, on
38
On social construction in general, see, e.g. Berger, Peter L. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor, 1967; Sally Haslanger. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and
Social Critique. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. On disasters in particular, see Anthony Oliver-Smith
and Susannah M. Hoffman, The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective (New York: Routledge,
1999);
39
Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002); Kai Erikson, Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1976). While Klinenberg discusses media coverage of the heat wave, his main focus is still on
coverage of the heat wave, not how that coverage interacted with other emergency claims. An exception is Michele
Landis Dauber (The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State. Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2012), who does focus on intentional emergency claims in the context of the Great
Depression.
21
intentional, explicit, acts of claim-making. From the perspective of the emergency claims
approach, the hidden effects of social structures and implicit assumptions are important because
they help to constitute the background against which emergency claims are made. However,
making these hidden effects and assumptions the center of our analysis often means directing our
attention—albeit critical attention—to structures created, and assumptions held, by dominant
social groups. In contrast, focusing on emergency claim-making puts the political agency of
makers and subjects of emergency claims, and potential makers and subjects of such claims,
including members of marginalized groups, at the center of our analysis. To emphasize, social
structures and underlying assumptions are part of the story; they are just not the whole story.
III. The Janus-faced quality of emergency claims
With this account of the emergency claims approach before us, we can now ask: why
should scholars interested in the moral and political dimensions of large-scale emergencies study
emergency claims? As I noted at the outset, studying emergency claims directs our attention to
emergency politics, which in turn directs our attention to the question of how emergency politics
affects marginalized groups (both those previously marginalized and those marginalized by the
effects of a particular situation, e.g. the conflict in Syria). Studying emergency claims not only
directs our attention to this question; it also provides a promising basis for addressing it, because
it helps us to see that successful emergency claims are often “Janus-faced.”
On the one hand, successful emergency claims direct attention and resources to people in
desperate need, and motivate forceful action, up to and including the use of violent force, to
protect and assist groups in danger. By providing powerful, albeit temporary, loci of affective
solidarity to address pressing issues, successful emergency claims prompt people to put aside
their petty differences and work together. These effects of emergency claims are difficult to
22
measure empirically, because they are difficult to disentangle from the effects of other factors.
Nonetheless, emergency claims are, at the very least, integral aspects of efforts to address a host
of pressing issues affecting marginalized groups, including famines, poverty and violence in
Latin America, war, epidemics, climate change, gun violence, and childhood obesity. This is the
first “face” of emergency claims: they can be incredibly powerful weapons of, or on behalf of,
the weak.
On the other hand, successful emergency claims can also contribute to or instantiate
injustice and domination, in several different ways. First, emergency claims can be used by
those in power as a pretext—or sincerely-given reason—to suspend or override normal rules and
procedures, and further entrench and extend their dominance. In this respect, emergency claims
can be potent weapons of the strong. This is their second “face.” As the literature on emergency
powers has amply illustrated, emergency claims have been used in this way by governments to
extend their power over their own populations.40 Declaring situations humanitarian emergencies
can also enable regimes to violate the civil and political liberties of citizens of other countries.41
Finally, not only political executives and military leaders, but also non-governmental
organizations and religious groups (e.g. those that provide emergency aid), corporations (e.g.
those that provide security, logistical support, or insurance in emergency situations), and other
entities can not only benefit materially, but also enhance or entrench their own power, by
40
Rossiter, Clinton, and William J. Quirk. Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern
Democracies. Revised edition. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 2002;
Lazar, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies; Owen Gross and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. Law in Times of Crisis:
Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Carl Schmitt, Political
Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
41
Fassin, Didier, and Mariella Pandolfi. Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and
Humanitarian Interventions. Zone Books, 2013.
23
claiming that particular situations are emergencies, or by drafting off of emergency claims made
by others.42
A central insight of the emergency claims approach is that successful emergency claims
not only have the two “faces” just described, but these faces are intertwined and sometimes
mutually constitutive: claims that a group needs to be rescued are connected to claims that the
would-be rescuer needs more power to engage in said rescue; conversely, claims to more
extensive power are often justified with reference to the need to engage in rescue. Indeed, the
very features of emergency claims that make them effective weapons of the weak—their ability
to motivate people to accept what they normally would not, in the name of quick and decisive
action to address an imminent threat—also makes them potent weapons of the strong. The
emergency claims approach helps us to see this by conceptualizing emergency claim-making as a
political activity, one that can have a range of effects.
So far I have discussed two faces of emergency claims. But the latter face—that of
emergency claims as weapons of the strong— involves several other kinds of injustices that are
overlooked even by literatures critical of emergency powers. In other words, the second face of
emergency claims, their face as “weapons of the strong,” has several additional aspects, to which
I now turn.
While successful emergency claims can enable powerful actors to extend their power,
and so act unjustly, failures to make—or accept—emergency claims can also be unjust. (If we
look only at emergencies, understood as either objective or socially-constructed events, these
failures, non-attempts, and refusals never come into view.) For example, if an official agency
charged with making emergency claims systematically declines to make them on behalf of
42
Klein, Shock Doctrine; Nandini, Gunewardena, Mark Schuller, eds. Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal
Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction. Lanham, Md: AltaMira Press, 2008.
24
members of a particular racial or ethnic minority, that is an injustice. Likewise, actors can act
unjustly if they reject emergency claims for similarly illegitimate reasons. These injustices can
operate in the register of material resources, and so have distributive aspects, denying a group
resources that its members are owed; they can also operate in the register of respect and
recognition, and so have symbolic or psychological aspects. Indeed, because emergency claims
are in part claims about value, rejecting a group’s emergency claim can be akin to saying, “you
have no value.” For example, discussing the issue of gun violence in Chicago, Roland Martin
wrote that “there is no doubt in my mind that if 16 people were killed in one weekend on the
prosperous North Side of Chicago, this country would be up in arms. It would be the No. 1 story
in every newspaper and on every news channel nationwide.”43 On Martin’s account, the failure
to accept an emergency claim made by and on behalf of residents of the South and West sides of
Chicago regarding violence in their communities amounted to, among other things, a
misrecognition based on class and, though Martin does not mention it explicitly, race.
Taking a more structural view of the injustices just described, we might say that social
injustice in any given society (at, above, or below the level of the nation-state) will at the very
least “seep into,” and more likely, profoundly shape, patterns of successful, failed, and nonattempted emergency claims in that society. For example, social devaluation of groups such as
African-Americans in the US can lead to their claims being ignored or rejected, while severe
material inequality or low levels of absolute well-being can make it difficult for groups to
organize to press their claims effectively. We do not need to agree on a thick account of what is
socially unjust to agree that in a society with significant social injustices, those injustices are
likely to manifest in emergency politics.
Roland S. Martin, “Send the National Guard to Chicago,” The Daily Beast, dated July 9, 2014,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/09/send-the-national-guard-to-chiraq.html
43
25
In short, patterns of successful, failed, and non-attempted emergency claims in a society
will likely track larger patterns of privilege and deprivation, power and powerlessness, in that
society. Because of the Janus-faced nature of emergency claims, however, the implications of
this are likely to be complex. If emergency claims were only tools for procuring additional
attention and resources, then we might expect already-powerful groups to have more successful
emergency claims than their circumstances warrant. Likewise, if emergency claims were only
tools for controlling and monitoring populations, we might expect weak and marginalized groups
to have emergency claims made about (or by) them accepted at higher rates than one might
otherwise expect. However, because emergency claims frequently operate in both of these ways
simultaneously—that is, because they are Janus-faced— and because members of marginalized
groups generally face more severe threats than members of more powerful groups, and so have
more “raw material”44 to work with in making emergency claims, we should not expect to see
either a clearly direct or clearly indirect correlation between successful emergency claims made
by and on behalf of a group and that group’s social power.
Now suppose, counter-factually, that we could somehow erect an impermeable barrier
between society at large and emergency politics, such that the injustices in the former did not
shape or seep into the latter. In this case, I now want to argue, emergency claims would still be
sources of injustice and domination, because of their very content and structure.
A first source of injustice that is a feature of emergency claims themselves, rather than
the broader society in which these claims are made, is that emergencies “urgently demand
immediate action,” but only for situations that are “unexpectedly arising.” But why should only
situations that are unexpectedly arising demand immediate action? The implications here is that
By “raw material” I do not mean pre-social brute facts; I mean that they face threats to things that are widely
perceived as having value, such as their lives or their children’s lives.
44
26
such situations should take priority over situations that are not unexpected, but why should this
be so? There are several possible explanations: perhaps people are less blameworthy for bad
situations that are unexpected, because they could not have prevented them. Perhaps situations
that arise unexpectedly are more tractable than ones that have been going on for a long time, or
provide a “window of opportunity.” In a somewhat different vein, perhaps limiting demands for
immediate action to cases that are unexpected ensures that the burden on those from whom
action is demanded is not too great.45
Let us leave aside for the moment the question of whether blameworthiness, tractability,
and considerations of demandingness are good reasons to prioritize some cases over others.
Even if they are, unexpectedness does not track any of these three features particularly closely:
victims of ongoing bad situations are not necessarily responsible for them. Conversely, the fact
that a situation was not predicted does not mean that it was not predictable: prediction is usually,
at least to some extent, a political choice. Likewise, the fact that a situation was unexpected does
not necessarily mean that it is more tractable than one that is ongoing; finally, while
demandingness is a concern, there are many possible other ways to limit these demands other
than by prioritizing unexpected situations over those that are expected (and therefore
inadvertently creating a disincentive to invest in prediction). Whether, and the extent to which,
this is an injustice depends on a) one’s prior substantive view about what is owed to people
affected by chronic situations and b) whether there are other effective paradigms in place for
directing attention and resources to these situations.
If giving priority to situations that are unexpectedly arising is intrinsic to the concept of
emergency, and so to emergency claims, then it makes little sense to search out “objective”
45
While they are more familiar in disaster contexts, window of opportunity arguments can also be made in
emergency contexts if the cost of not engaging in emergency response is higher than providing emergency
response (e.g. because without it, the situation will become a disaster).
27
criteria for identifying “true” emergencies. What we need instead, in at least some domains, are
criteria for determining when particular kinds of interventions are required—regardless of
whether those situations can plausibly be pitched as, or are likely to be accepted as, emergencies.
For example, we might want criteria for determining when humanitarian aid should be provided
or when states should receive rapid funding to restore electricity after storms. However, far from
identifying “true” emergencies, one purpose of these criteria is to help us resist the pull of factors
that a) make situations more likely to be socially recognized as emergencies but b) are morally
irrelevant to the question of whether those situations should get priority, e.g. factors such as that
they are unexpectedly arising. The distinction between situations that arise unexpectedly and
those that are expected might be important for other reasons, for example it might influence
which strategies or tools are most appropriate for addressing the situation. But insofar as it is
irrelevant that a situation arose unexpectedly, whether the situation can be deemed an emergency
or not is also irrelevant.46 Using successful emergency claims as a basis for allocating attention,
resources, and other interventions therefore systematically disadvantages people affected by
chronic situations.
In addition to creating a bias toward situations that are unexpectedly arising, allocating
resources in response to effective emergency claims can also be both regressive, by which I
mean disadvantageous to poor people, and conservative, by which I mean tending to return
things to the status quo. As I argued above, to be recognized as an emergency, a situation
typically must be characterized by a negative divergence from the status quo ante. As a result,
the worse a group’s “normal” level of well-being, the worse things have to get before its
situation can plausibly be labeled an emergency. For example, as I noted above, during the
46
Readers who reject my claim that emergencies are unexpectedly arising can still accept the form of this argument.
For example, the same argument holds if we replace “unexpectedly arising” with “rapidly arising” or “dramatic.”
28
Great Depression drought was not enough for the Red Cross to recognize farmers’ situation as an
emergency, because farmers dealt with droughts regularly. Had the farmers been better off, in
particular, had they not had to deal with drought regularly, then, by its own logic, the Red Cross
would have had to recognize drought as an emergency. While this feature of emergency claims
makes emergency politics sensitive to context, in that the meaning of a group’s present situation
is interpreted in light of its recent history, it also makes it more regressive than a politics that
allocated resources based on comparisons across groups or to absolute standards.
Emergency claims are also potentially regressive in a second way: if the goal of an
emergency claim is to return things to the status quo ante, then even emergency claims that work
perfectly will return badly-off groups to their previous (bad) position. In other words, the
structure of emergency claims is regressive (i.e. disadvantageous to poor, marginalized, or
otherwise badly-off people) both in how it identifies emergencies— via the presence of a rapid
negative divergence from the status quo ante— and in how it conceives of the task of responding
to emergencies— as returning things to how they were previously. In short, the worse-off you
are, the more difficult it is to get something bad that happens to you socially recognized as an
emergency, and the less such recognition will benefit you… insofar as a successful emergency
claim functions as a weapon of the weak. If it is also a weapon of the strong, the benefits of
success are murkier.
Emergency claims are not only often regressive; they are also often conservative, in that
they involve efforts to restore the status quo ante. Conservatism, understood in this way, is not
in itself just or unjust. Indeed, the conservatism of emergency claims can constrain efforts by
those in power to use (situations that are socially recognized as emergencies) as smokescreens
for power-grabs. But the notion, implicit in emergency claims, that the hoped-for goal is to “get
29
things back to normal,” makes it very difficult for poor and marginalized people, or anyone else,
to use emergency claims to transform their lives.
Drawing all of this together, the emergency claims approach helps us to see that
emergency politics is a fraught enterprise for marginalized groups, because such claims are often
Janus-faced: on the one hand, they can direct attention and resources to people in dire need, and
provide a basis for (temporary) solidarity among groups whose members normally disdain each
other. On the other hand, emergency claims can contribute to or constitute a wide range of
injustices, both in their interactions with broader social injustices and because of the content and
structure of emergency claims themselves.
IV. The emergency claims approach and gun violence in Chicago
To further clarify the emergency claims approach and illustrate the kinds of insights it
offers into the political and moral dimensions of (situations that are socially recognized as)
emergencies, I turn now to an example: high levels of gun violence in Chicago, Illinois over the
past few years. This case is large-scale enough that it is clearly political in a conventional sense
(unlike the examples featuring individuals often used in the literature on the duty to rescue), but
it is nonetheless more manageable as an example, than, say, the Iraq War. Even so, my
discussion does not even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
Over the past few years, many politicians, journalists, scholars, and others have made
emergency claims about gun violence in Chicago. For example, in 2013 the Congressional
Black Caucus convened a summit, formally the “National Summit on Violence in Urban
Communities” but generally referred to as an “emergency summit,” in Chicago.47 In 2014, the
Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence held a panel discussion called “Lives on the Line:
Trymaine Lee, “Gun violence in Chicago: Black leaders convene ‘emergency summit,” MSNBC, last updated
October 2, 2013, http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/gun-violence-chicago-black-leaders.
47
30
Dismantling Chicago’s Gun Violence Epidemic.”48 Also in 2014, Jesse Jackson described the
gun violence situation in Chicago as an “emergency state”49 and Roland Martin argued that
Chicago “is quickly being lost to guns, gangs, drugs and hopelessness.”50
An in-depth analysis of the gun violence situation in Chicago using the emergency claims
approach would examine who is making and not making these emergency claims, who is
contesting or ignoring them, and who is accepting or rejecting them. It would also examine the
basis on which makers present themselves or others as appropriate subjects of emergency claims,
that is, as appropriate judges of whether the situation is an emergency, what “raw materials” (i.e.
referents) subjects refer to describing the situation as an emergency, and how they shape that raw
material into an object—a persuasive emergency narrative. This analysis would also examine
how these emergency claims relate to past emergency claims, how they interact with other,
contemporaneous emergency claims, and the extent to which similar claims are being made in
other cities with the same or higher levels of gun violence. In particular, it could address the
puzzle of why Chicago has so often been portrayed and perceived as, in one commentator’s
words, the “Murderiest Murder City in Murderland,” when empirical data does not support this
description.51
Given space constraints, however, I want to focus narrowly on statements made by Jesse
Jackson and Roland Martin, both of whom made emergency claims about gun violence in
Chicago. The emergency claims approach shows us that both Jackson and Martin were
“Lives on the Line: Dismantling Chicago’s Gun Violence Epidemic,” Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, dated
May 9, 2014, http://smartgunlaws.org/lives-on-the-line-dismantling-chicagos-gun-violence-epidemic/.
49
WGN Web Desk, “Rev Jackson on Chicago’s violence: ‘It’s an emergency state,’” WGNtv.com, dated July 7,
2014, http://wgntv.com/2014/07/07/rev-jackson-on-chicagos-violence-its-an-emergency-state/.
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Roland S. Martin, “Send the National Guard to Chicago.”
51
Mason Johnson, “Chicago Not Actually ‘Murder Capital’ Of, Well, Anything,” CBS Chicago, dated September
26, 2013, http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/09/26/chicago-not-actually-murder-capital-of-well-anything/.
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grappling with the Janus-faced nature of emergency claims, which helps to explain otherwisepuzzling features of their statements.
After the weekend of July 4th 2014, in which 82 people were shot in Chicago (and 14 of
those people died),52 Jackson released a statement that began, “In Chicago there are zones of
terror and deprivation. Deprivation of an underclass that leads to terror in a city facing an
undeclared emergency that should be declared a ‘state of emergency.’” 53 In a follow-up
television interview, Jackson exhorted, “We’re crying out, the FBI must intervene,” and
requested $2 billion in federal funds.54 On the one hand, in both his written statement and
television appearances related to it, Jackson was clearly trying to use an emergency claim to
direct attention to, and procure additional resources to address, the issue of gun violence in
Chicago. That is, he was using an emergency claim as a weapon of the weak. Yet in an
appearance on a local Chicago television news station, the interviewers persistently pressed
Jackson to talk about the situation in Chicago in the way that Jackson himself had initially
presented it: as an emergency. Yet Jackson resisted, just as persistently, pushing the
conversation toward more structural analysis and solutions:
Jackson: “We need not only more teachers but more coaches, and some plan for an
economic reconstruction bank.”
Anchor: “But how do you stop the violence? How do you stop what’s happening on
the streets?”
[]
Voorhees, Josh, “Blood on the Fourth of July” Slate, dated July 10, 2014,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/chicago_july_4_shooting_spree_the_police_depar
tment_undercounts_murder_and.html.
53
“No Plan for Reconstruction for Chicago: Statement By Revered Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.,” dated July 7, 2014,
http://rainbow.3cdn.net/3c25750fbb98e336e5_nzm6iy007.pdf.
54
Mike Tobin, “Amid gangland shootings, Chicago leaders call for gederal resources.”
52
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Jackson: “there’s nothing wrong with people, the structure must change. And while
we must share the pain and burden of this, we must also share the opportunity.”
Anchor (interrupting): “But let me ask you this, sir. You’re looking at the broader
picture, something long-term. What do we do right now, say, this weekend?...
Jackson: “we need an infusion of jobs right now.”55
Likewise, in the public statement cited above, Jackson goes on to argue that the “’state of
emergency’ [in Chicago] requires remedy and resources. It requires social and economic
reconstruction, not just the emptying of guns and the filling of jails.”56 “Reconstruction,”
however, is an activity that is generally undertaken after disasters, not emergencies. The
specific set of policies known as “Reconstruction” after the Civil War in the United States
was certainly not an effort to return things to the status quo ante. Whether or not Jackson
intended that specific historical reference (it is hard to imagine that he did not), what he
describes is far more radical, structural, and transformative than his earlier invocation of a
“state of emergency” suggests.
Why does Jackson call the situation in Chicago an emergency, and then in the next
breath seemingly back away from this assertion? The answer, I think, is that he is trying to
navigate the Janus-faced nature of his emergency claim: after deploying it as a weapon for
the weak (to direct attention and resources to the problem of gun violence in Chicago), he
sought to push it to one side in order to avoid the status quo bias and focus on short-term,
non-structural solutions that emergency claims can also engender.
55
56
WGN Web Desk, “Rev Jackson on Chicago’s violence: ‘It’s an emergency state.’”
“No Plan for Reconstruction for Chicago: Statement By Revered Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.”
33
Consider, now, a very different approach to the situation of gun violence in Chicago,
suggested by Roland Martin. After describing Chicago as “being lost to guns, gangs, drugs and
hopelessness,” Martin goes on to argue that
There is no reason the National Guard can’t drop a dragnet over the hot spots in Chicago.
They can erect barricades and check points, inspect cars, confiscate guns, run warrant
checks and shut down the cartels in the city. In effect, Chicago needs a troop surge like
what we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we wanted to make the lives of residents there
safer, why not do the same for Americans?57
This is the sort of argument that makes critics of emergency powers cringe. But Martin goes on
to defend his position not, or not only, in the language of necessity or last resort, which is how
proponents of emergency powers usually defend their claims, but rather, as we saw above, in the
language of equity: drawing implicitly on the first face of emergency claims, he suggests that the
absence of the measures that he describes amounts to a distributive or recognition-based
injustice, born of classism and racism (because “if 16 people were killed in one weekend on the
prosperous North Side of Chicago, this country would be up in arms”).58 That is, Martin redescribes what critics of emergency powers see as the second face of emergency claims (their
enablement of unjust domination) as the first face: a source of recognition and resources for the
weak. Is a “dragnet over the hot spots in Chicago” an invitation to oppression or a sign of equal
respect? Martin’s rhetorical strategy perfectly illustrates how the two faces of emergency claims
cannot be torn asunder. It therefore helps us to see how, in analyzing gun violence in Chicago,
or any large scale situation that is socially recognized as an emergency, we must not only study
Roland S. Martin, “Send the National Guard to Chicago.”
Roland S. Martin, “Send the National Guard to Chicago,” The Daily Beast, dated July 9, 2014,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/09/send-the-national-guard-to-chiraq.html
57
58
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the political activity of claim-making, we must begin from the assumption, always overturn-able
based on the evidence, that such claims are Janus-faced.
V. Conclusion
This account of the emergency claims approach suggests the tentative conclusion that
emergency claim-making is, at best, a fraught enterprise for marginalized groups. If this
conclusion holds up under further scrutiny—in particular, if it turns out that emergency politics
is ineffective, or indeed counterproductive, for members of marginalized groups—then the next
question that arises is, What are the alternatives? What other forms of political action, historical
or contemporary, retain the affective urgency, action orientation and potential for solidarity of
emergency claim-making, while avoiding the various forms of injustice and domination
associated with it? Social movements? Commitments to human rights? Appeals to self-interest?
Exploring these forms of politics as alternatives to emergency politics must, alas, await another
day. But I hope to have shown that shifting our gaze from emergencies to emergency claims is a
promising first step in this endeavor.
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