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EMERGENCY CLAIMS AND DEMOCRATIC ACTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2015

Jennifer C. Rubenstein
Jennifer C. Rubenstein*
Affiliation:
Politics, University of Virginia
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Abstract:

The straightforward normative importance of emergencies suggests that empirically engaged political theorists and philosophers should study them. Indeed, many have done so. In this essay, however, I argue that scholars interested in the political and/or moral dimensions of large-scale emergencies should shift their focus from emergencies to emergency claims. Building on Michael Saward’s model of a “representative claim,” I develop an account of an emergency claim as a claim that a particular (kind of) situation is an emergency, made by particular actors against particular background conditions to particular audiences, which in turn accept, ignore, or reject that claim. Emergency politics, in turn, consists of many different actors making and not making, accepting, and rejecting, a wide range of overlapping and competing emergency claims. I argue that scholars should shift their focus to emergency claims because doing so helps us see the fraught implications of emergency politics for marginalized groups. I examine three such implications: emergency claims are often “Janus-faced,” meaning that they function simultaneously as “weapons of the weak” and weapons of the strong; they are often regressive, including by discriminating against victims of chronic bad situations, and they often perpetuate and exacerbate existing social hierarchies. Noticing these troubling features of emergency politics raises a question that I do not address here: What might plausible alternatives to emergency politics look like?

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Fall 2015 , pp. 101 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2015 

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References

1 People can also benefit from emergencies. See Keen, David, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).Google Scholar

2 Data from the “Emergency Events Database” and “Complex Emergencies Database” maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium; see also Leaning, Jennifer and Guha-Sapir, Debarati, “Natural Disasters, Armed Conflict, and Public Health,” New England Journal of Medicine 369, no. 19 (2013): 1836–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Although this essay engages primarily with the contemporary literature on emergencies, emergencies have also been a major theme in the history of political thought. On the canonical thinkers, see Caney, Simon, “Global Injustice and the Right of Necessity,” (unpublished manuscript.); Lazar, Nomi Claire, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Honig, Bonnie, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).Google Scholar For a historical and sociological perspective on emergencies that emphasizes humanitarianism, see Calhoun, Craig, “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 (New York: Zone Books, 2013).Google Scholar

4 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 ( Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 54–55 Google Scholar).

5 As will become apparent, I mean “Janus-faced” in a colloquial sense, as one entity with two opposing aspects.

6 “Weapons of the weak” is a reference to Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).Google Scholar The difference between “of” and “for” is significant; as we will see, individuals and groups sometimes contest emergency claims made “for” them.

7 See, e.g., Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972)Google Scholar; Singer, Peter, The Life You Can Save (New York: Random House, 2009)Google Scholar; Unger, Peter, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Richard, Globalizing Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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9 Honig, xv.

10 While there is a large literature on catastrophes, I do not discuss catastrophes here. The crucial difference between catastrophes and emergencies for present purposes is that in catastrophes but not emergencies, the bad outcome has already occurred. This is the same basic distinction as that between disasters and emergencies. (Other distinctions are sometimes drawn between disasters and catastrophes. See Quarantelli, E. L., “Catastrophes are Different from Disasters: Some Implications for Crisis Planning and Managing Drawn from Katrina,” published June 11, 2006, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Quarantelli/.)Google Scholar

11 See http://www.cred.be/projects.

12 “About the Agency,” FEMA, last modified July 14, 2014, http://www.fema.gov/about–agency. My italics.

13 “Emergency, n.,” OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/61130?redirectedFrom=emergency (accessed July 23, 2014).

14 “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.

15 Brauman, Rony and Neuman, Michaël, “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.Google Scholar

16 A Google Ngram of these terms in English from 1800 to 2008 shows that “impending disaster” is used about fifty times more often, and “impending crisis” is used about twenty-five times more often, than “impending emergency.”

17 I thank James Nickel for this example.

18 Cited in Holley-Walker, Danielle, “The Accountability Cycle: The Recovery School District Act and New Orleans’ Charter Schools,” Connecticut Law Review 40 (2007): 125.Google Scholar See also Adamo, Ralph, “Squeezing Public Education: History and Ideology Gang Up on New Orleans,” Dissent 54, no. 3 (2007): 44–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 The fact that “build back better” is not assumed, but must be stated explicitly in the context of disasters, suggests that the dominant understanding of what constitutes an appropriate response to disasters might also be returning things to the status quo ante.

20 Darcy, James and Charles-Antoine Hofmann. 2003. “According to need? Need assessment and decision-making in the humanitarian sector.” Report #15, Humanitarian Policy Group. London: Overseas Development Institute.

21 “Crisis, n.,” OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44539?redirectedFrom=crisis (accessed July 23, 2014).

22 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 Scarry, Elaine, Thinking in an Emergency (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).Google Scholar 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).

23 A Google Ngram shows that for the last few decades, “midst of a crisis” has been used about twenty-five 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 greater prevalence of “crisis” over “emergency” is taken into account.

24 Saward, Michael, “The Representative Claim,” Contemporary Political Theory 5, no. 3 (2006): 297–318 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saward, Michael, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also, Schaap, Andrew, “Critical Exchange on Michael Saward’s The Representative Claim,” Contemporary Political Theory 11, no. 1 (2012), 109–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 The existing literature on emergencies and disasters has generally not done this. A partial exception is Dauber, Michele Landis (The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012])CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which does focus on intentional emergency claim-making, although Dauber does not use this term. While Klinenberg, Eric, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed discusses media coverage, his main focus is on coverage of the heat wave itself, not how that coverage interacted with other emergency claims. In Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976) and A New Species of Trouble: Explorations of Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York: Norton, 1994), Kai Erikson draws broader conclusions from the specific cases he studies, but, again, he does not discuss interactions among emergency claims.

26 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 will kill us all if we don’t act now.”

27 Saward, The Representative Claim, 36.

28 Ibid., 36–37.

29 When the subject and maker are the same entity, the maker’s claims about the subject’s competence as a judge will often be embedded in the subject’s claims about the situation the subject is calling an emergency. For example, the subject might adopt a bearing that conveys her competence as a judge.

30 While democratically legitimate emergency claim-making does not rely on coercion or manipulation, emergency claimants are not limited to only making dry, logical arguments. They can — and certainly do — also try to get audiences to accept their claims by inciting emotions such as fear or pity.

31 Erikson, A New Species of Trouble, discusses how disasters change people’s identities. Montanaro, Laura (“The Democratic Legitimacy of Self-Appointed Representatives,” The Journal of Politics 74, no. 3 [2012]: 1094–1107)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Saward, The Representative Claim, discuss how representatives call forth constituencies.

32 While background conditions are not part of his basic model, Saward discusses them. See Saward, The Representative Claim, 72–77.

33 “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.

34 Ophir, Adi, “The Politics of Catastrophization” in Fassin, Didier and Pandolfi, Mariella, eds., Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013), 73.Google Scholar

35 For example, Smith, Daniel, “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-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?gwh=535D1D13FC67B07E098A8E4F08232C33&gwt=pay&assetType=nyt_now.Google Scholar

36 Tobin, Mike, “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/.Google Scholar

37 Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago; Erikson, Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood.

38 In “Utilitarianism, Integrity, and Partiality,” Journal of Philosophy, 97, no. 8 (2000): 421–39, Elizabeth Ashford argues that “the source of the extreme demandingness of morality is that the current state of the world is a constant emergency situation.” If anyone accepts this claim, that would count as an exception to my argument about the need for emergency claims to invoke historical benchmarks to be accepted. However, even if people do accept this claim, a central upshot of this essay is that Ashford’s emergency claim is far more dangerous and less beneficial than she suggests.

39 Malkin, Marc, “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-the-female-asian-macgyver.Google Scholar

40 Thanks to Rachel Slotter for helping me to see the theoretical importance of fashion emergencies.

41 Cited in Landis, Michele,“Fate, Responsibility, and Natural Disaster Relief: Narrating the American Welfare State,” Law and Society Review 33 (1999): 258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 In contexts ranging from extreme sports to drunk driving, 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 if no effort were made to assist them. Martha Nussbaum refers to this as an issue of “proportionality.” Nussbaum, Martha, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 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 Landis, “Fate Responsibility, and Natural Disaster Relief,” 260.

44 Critics of the duty to rescue working within the duty to rescue paradigm often focus on whether the existence of complications and uncertainties about a situation releases people from obligations to aid distant others; they generally do not discuss how the content of these complexities, such as the potential for emergency claims to empower those already in power, alters obligations. For example, Schmidtz, David, “Islands in a Sea of Obligation: Limits of the Duty to Rescue,” Law and Philosophy 19, no. 6 (2000): 683–705.Google Scholar Partial exceptions include Wenar, “Poverty is no Pond” in Illingworth, Patricia, Pogge, Thomas, and Wenar, Leif, Giving Well: the Ethics of Philanthropy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, and Badhwar, Neera, “International Aid: When Giving Becomes a Vice,” Social Philosophy and Policy 23, no. 2 (2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Fassin, Didier and Pandolfi, Mariella, Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013).Google Scholar

46 Klein, Shock Doctrine; Gunewardena, Nandini and Schuller, Mark, eds., Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008.)Google Scholar

47 I plan to pursue this task in future work. Gross and Ní Aoláin (Law in Times of Crisis: Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice) offer a useful overview of these mechanisms.

48 Martin, Roland S., “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.Google Scholar

49 It also depends on what is owed to people affected by chronic situations and whether there are other paradigms in place for directing attention and resources to chronic situations. I do not address these issues here.

50 For a related discussion, see Rubenstein, , “Distribution and Emergency,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 3 (2007), 296–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 In 2013, the Congressional Black Caucus convened what was widely called an “emergency summit” (formally, the “National Summit on Violence in Urban Communities”) in Chicago. 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. In 2014, the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence held a panel discussion called “Lives on the Line: Dismantling Chicago’s Gun Violence Epidemic.” See “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/. Also in 2014, Jesse Jackson described the gun violence situation in Chicago as an “emergency state.” 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/. Roland Martin argued that Chicago “is quickly being lost to guns, gangs, drugs and hopelessness.” Roland S. Martin, “Send the National Guard to Chicago.” But see also Johnson, Mason, “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/.Google Scholar

52 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_department_undercounts_murder_and.html.Google Scholar

53 “No Plan for Reconstruction for Chicago: Statement By Reverend 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 federal resources.”

55 WGN Web Desk, “Rev Jackson on Chicago’s violence: ‘It’s an emergency state.’” My emphasis.

56 “No Plan for Reconstruction for Chicago: Statement By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.”

57 Martin, Roland S., “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 Google Scholar

58 Ibid.