Crisis Studies

"Hot peace, cold war, hybrid war, crisis, and conflict." Recent geopolitical developments in the wider Black Sea region have brought to the forefront these terms in the media terms such as hot peace, cold war, hybrid war, crisis, and conflict, but what do they mean? Public discourse abounds with references to the concepts of violence, crisis, conflict, and war, often as if they mean the same thing. Frequently, the use of these terms is inadequate to fully describe current affairs. What is the meaning of these important terms? What is the difference between conflict and war? When should we describe an event as a crisis, and when should we use the term, violence, instead? What is meant by recently coined phrases such as "hot peace," or "positive peace?" Is it correct to use the word war in any context involving a confrontation? These are questions to which this article attempts to answer.
Key words: hot peace, cold peace, cold war, negative peace, crisis management, structural violence, direct violence, conflict, total war, hybrid war.

During the first decades of the twentieth century different attempts were made to unify the diversifying and specializing sciences. One of these attempts manifested as the History of Science. Established in 1913 with the academic journal Isis, its first article written by George Sarton clarified that the field was created to keep connected and synthesize the sciences, which had become highly stratified over the previous century. The primary concern was that scientists would lose the ability to communicate across disciplines, that the many branches would disintegrate into ever-increasing specializations, and that science itself would lose its meaning. 1 This thesis looks at another attempt to unify the sciences that emerged at this time in Germany: phenomenology. Edmund Husserl created phenomenology to provide the unified foundation of the sciences. The phenomenologist who accomplished this was one of his students, Edith Stein. This thesis looks at Stein's historical context: the intellectual influences and the European cultural crisis that conditioned phenomenology's first decades. This thesis then examines Stein's phenomenology and its consequences. My analysis found that as a result of her phenomenological investigation of empathy, Stein asserted the foundation of the sciences is the unfolded person.

This article examines how grassroots actors initiate and engage in sustained forms of collective action so as to transcend dramatic situations of large-scale societal crisis.  Merging strands of sociolinguistic scholarship with social movement theory, the concepts of ‘stance’ and ‘stance-taking’ are presented as a way to understand how individuals collectively exert their agency in the face of macro-structural instabilities and uncertainties.  Stance is defined as the agentive and solidaristic position taken up by a group of actors in order to navigate and overcome destabilizing moments of social rupture. Consequentially, stance-taking is defined as the situational ensemble of discursive, organizational and dramaturgical practice through which stances are ultimately developed and deployed. In addition to shedding light on how people articulate their agency under conditions of macro-structural volatility, analysis of the social construction of stance promotes multi-dimensional understandings of how social movements intensify and expand in times of crisis. As a way to illustrate the analytical purchase of these concepts, attention is given to the stance-taking practices that fueled the rise of mass public protests in Buenos Aires (Argentina) at the height of a severe national crisis in 2001.

Forthcoming 2018 in 'Sociological Focus' (Taylor and Francis)

Here's a resource I've put together on the global production crisis (a.k.a. global financial crisis). It dissects ‘Secular stagnation or financial cycle drag?’, a recent speech by Claudio Borio, a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements, testing his argument against observable facts rather than from any particular ideological perspective.
I'd appreciate any critical comments/suggestions for improvement.

Living with a broken and infected planet
We are living with the new pandemic regime. It is a crisis regime. Listening closely and carefully to the vocabulary that regimes use is illuminating. This vocabulary is useful to study in order to understand the orientations on which regimes base their politics. Words articulate the regime. Words are not only information or report, they become instructions and orders as they perform, putting the regime’s governance into action and law.


https://www.thesitemagazine.com/elke-krasny

Taking the recent omnipresence of crisis rhetoric around the Mediterranean as a starting point, the introduction lays out the main terms of this collection—crisis and critique—in their interrelation, as it emerges through the matrix of various declared crises in the Mediterranean. If today’s crisis rhetoric often works to restrict political choices and the imagination of alternative futures, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or produce alternative modes of representation that can voice marginalized subjectivities and liminal experiences? Can crisis become part of contrarian or transformative languages by scholars, activists, and artists or should we forge different grammars to understand present realities in the region? Boletsi, Houwen, and Minnaard unpack the concept crisis and its operations alongside the concept of critique in our professed “postcritical times.” Underscoring the diagnostic rigor of critique in approaches to crisis-frameworks, they plead for cri...

Taking the recent omnipresence of crisis rhetoric around the Mediterranean as a starting point, the introduction lays out the main terms of this collection—crisis and critique—in their interrelation, as it emerges through the matrix of various declared crises in the Mediterranean. If today’s crisis rhetoric often works to restrict political choices and the imagination of alternative futures, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or produce alternative modes of representation that can voice marginalized subjectivities and liminal experiences? Can crisis become part of contrarian or transformative languages by scholars, activists, and artists or should we forge different grammars to understand present realities in the region? Boletsi, Houwen, and Minnaard unpack the concept crisis and its operations alongside the concept of critique in our professed “postcritical times.” Underscoring the diagnostic rigor of critique in approaches to crisis-frameworks, they plead for cri...

Carta a las/os lectoras/es Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, "Crisis y desastres: im-posibilidades de reparación y cuidado en las sociedades contemporáneas", N.o 45 (octubre-diciembre 2021).

https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/toc/antipoda/45

https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/pb-assets/antipoda/editorials/Editorial2_Ant%C3%ADpoda45-1637278164.pdf

https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/multimedia/antipoda

Migration in general has been essential to the history of mankind and is largely responsible for part of our human legacy and, throughout history, is seen as beneficial e.g. where gene flows and economic impact are concerned. Migration periods are punctuating the histories of many regions and is a phenomenon well-known by archaeologists (e.g. Burmeister 2000; Hakenbeck 2008). In contrast, much less attention has been given to conflict-induced mobility – active or passive (as deportation) –, which forms a particular case within migration studies. Characterized by urgency, unplanned departure, short-term duration and considerable risk, it is more than amply illustrated by the present-day refugee crisis. This crisis, although particularly heavy in its human toll, and inviting both the worst and best of human reactions, is, however, neither exceptional nor unique, only closer at home and better covered by the media than similar events in more distant parts of the world in the last decades. From the point of material studies, this refugee crisis allows an appreciation of the diversity of archaeological evidence accompanying the events: from children’s cemeteries, make-shift camps, abandonment patterns along refugee routes, increased border security, hotspot infrastructures, to, what has been described as ‘refugee porn’ including Ai Weiwei’s installations. The related question is then also how we can record, explore, and understand the materiality of the experience of forced and undocumented migration today, in its diverse forms (Hamilakis 2016)? Without neglecting the variety of push and pull factors, conflict-induced movement processes imply a variety of temporal and scalar categorisations. Temporal since at least three broad episodes may be identified: (1) the forced departure from the natal settlement, where archaeological evidence should be forthcoming illustrative of sudden abandonments and conflict, (2) the passage itself, direct or with intervals, following either maritime and land routes or both, again with potential repercussions on material culture which could imply temporary shelters or intrusive elements, and (3) the arrival or settling at the final destination, prioritising basic survival needs. Scalar too since such movements can be indivual, household-based, extended group-related or massive. Moreover, the impact on the homeland, the frequency of movements, the prior existence of social networks, the nature and scale of transport facilities, the receptiveness of the host country are all elements that need to be taken into consideration and all have material correlates.
The present meeting has different aims: it wants to explore (1) whether a distinction between migration in general and conflict-induced migration in particular can be made in the archaeological record, (2) whether the concept of conflict-induced migration is at all relevant to understand the collapse of Bronze Age societies in the 13th c. BC. Moreover, (3) we also hope to see how present-day archaeology can help us to understand earlier assumed cases of conflict-induced migration in general and the 13th c. Mediterranean in particular since, in popular discourse, the present Syria exodus is comparable with what some assumed happened in a reverse direction during the Mediterranean Late Bronze Age . Moreover, (4) following ethnoarchaeological research, Hodder (1979, 1982), insisted that the active signalling of ethnic identity may be more pronounced in contexts characterized by severe economic stress and competition and we want to explore whether there is archaeological evidence for this.

Podemos aprender cuestiones importantes sobre este evento particular denominado "crisis 2001". Quizá esta meta de conocimiento sea algo frustrante para quienes esperan conocer las causas de las crisis y cómo superarlas, pero de acuerdo a mi intención de estudiar cómo las personas experimentan, piensan, hablan sobre la crisis, sostengo que por este camino podemos realizar contribuciones a la agenda de investigación sobre los modos de pensar la Argentina por parte de los argentinos. Al mismo tiempo, entiendo que el estudio de circunstancias críticas como la que aquí refiero puede ayudarnos a entender mejor la índole de estos eventos más allá del caso específico argentino, así como el modo en que los actores se las arreglan para organizar las experiencias de lo vivido y generar respuestas. Voy a proponer un recorrido que permita, en primer lugar, entender cómo se constituyen los eventos que llamamos habitualmente crisis. Y para ello, quiero detenerme en especial sobre el lugar que tienen los medios de comunicación. Quiero sugerir aquí que en nuestras sociedades los medios tienen un papel decisivo en la definición de la existencia y sentido de los eventos en tanto "crisis", y qué esto posee consecuencias muy especiales. Definir una situación como ?crisis? no es algo independiente de las interpretaciones de la misma buscando causas, responsabilidades y salidas. Estas tareas interpretativas sólo pueden ser gestadas por ciertos personajes públicos que dispongan de una determinada autoridad, lo cual dependerá de las circunstancias cambiantes en cada caso, y de la potencialidad de reconocimiento de tal autoridad por parte de las diferentes audiencias. Al menos en el caso argentino, una vez instituida la crisis, los medios de comunicación apelaron a la autoridad de ciertos intérpretes, quienes a través de sus intervenciones públicas activaron la circulación de narraciones sobre los orígenes de la nación. A través de éstas, pretendieron hacer inteligibles las causas de los males presentes como un episodio de los males del pasado. La producción y circulación de imágenes de futuro en tiempos de incertidumbre dependía de si esta cadena fatídica podía ser rota para siempre.