A classic definition of crisis within International Relations (IR ) comes from Charles Herman (1969, see also Herman and Brady 1972), who refers to crisis as (1) a situation that threatens high-priority goals of the decision-making unit, (2) restricts the amount of time available for response before the decision is transformed, and (3) surprises the members of the decision-making unit by its occurrence (Herman 1969: 414). As such, crisis is understood in terms of something that happens—an unexpected event —and has to be dealt with, managed. In a way, crisis is treated as an independent variable that triggers some kind of response that affects the behavior of states. It should come then as no surprise that the notion of crisis entails connotations of something that is negative, dramatic, harmful, unexpected, traumatic, unpredictable, abnormal, and undesirable that has to be put managed and put under control.
Perhaps this is why Colin Hay (1996, 2013) argues that the word “crisis ” is used pejoratively and employed simultaneously to designate momentary emergencies, recurrent derailment, and enduring cataclysm. Crises can be conceptualized as moments in which “interventions are both possible and plausible.” (Hay 1996: 425) Sometimes such moments may even be desirable, empowering actors (both domestic and international) to exercise the autonomous capacity to act upon them, contain them, solve them, and surpass them to re-impose order.
This description seems to fit an overwhelming body of literature that deals with crisis in IR (see Carr 2001 [1939]; Morgenthau 1948; McCormick 1978; Gilpin 1981; Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1982; Allison and Zelikow 1999). Indeed, most of the IR literature produced during the Cold War was very much concerned with crisis perceptions and decision-making in response to crisis 1 as well as crisis management .2 These authors share a materialist, objectivist, rationalist approach to crisis that favors agency over structure , and which implies that crises are self -evident phenomena—like wars, financial turmoil, or natural catastrophes—that stand as “threats to basic values” (Brecher 1984: 239). Therefore, responses in terms of shifts in foreign and security policy would center around the “perceptions of the top-level decision-maker,” with “high probability of involvement in military hostilities”3 (Brecher 1984: 239).
However, a brief look at IR literature after 9/11 reveals a shift from this traditional way of conceptualizing crisis .4 Instead of crisis being depicted and represented as “exogenous shocks” in response to policy and decision-makers react to and solve (i.e., agent-centered approaches), we observe a growing number of works that emphasize crisis as “endogenous constructions,” where ontological questions about the relationship between agent and structure are integrated and thus problematized (for this distinction, see Widmaier et al. 2007: 748).
A recent study by Dirk Nabers offers a new and useful way to analyze crises in IR. Nabers argues that the bulk of the traditional IR crisis literature is strictly materialist and objectivist and, as such, privileges agency , decision-making, and crisis management at the expense of more structural accounts of the nature of crisis (Nabers 2015: 5). Although crisis and change are inextricably linked, they are only rarely considered jointly in the IR literature, he adds. He offers what he calls a theory of crisis and change in global politics , which is more concerned with the structural aspect of crisis and how it enables an open-ended project for global politics and social change .
For Nabers, “crisis represents a situation in which our everyday beliefs of how the world works are thoroughly disrupted by an event that is out of our control” (2015: 44). In a way, it is comparable to trauma due to its difficulty in being assimilated, domesticated, represented, and communicated (see Edkins 2003; Resende and Budryte 2013). The likely result of this disruptive process, Nabers argues, is a social change in the form of community (re)building and the construction and/or transformation of a (new) collective identity . Therefore, inherent crises of social structures as well as the disruption of all fully familiar subjectivity are at the root of any kind of social , cultural, or institutional change . Any transformation of the social , of smaller or larger extent, should then be understood as being engendered by crisis . Hence, the duality of the crisis /change nexus pointed out by Nabers (2015).
In a way, this shift in literature has been anticipated by Jutta Weldes’ investigations in the late 1990s about the cultural production of crisis . Claiming that crises are always “cultural artifacts” and thus not objectively identifiable, Weldes (1999) argues that when particular events threaten the identity of a state , they become constituted as crisis which, in turn, help consolidate, reaffirm, transform, and/or appease a particular writing of a state identity . As a result, one is led to recognize that there is no ontology of crisis to be grasped beyond the practices that generate said crisis in the first place. There is no objective status of crisis that would require governmental response to it or its containment and/or management . Instead, she argues, “events that are ostensibly the same will in fact be constituted as different crises, or not as crisis at all, by and for states with different identities” (Weldes 1999: 37).
Drawing on Nabers, this book is built on the key assumption that any social inquiry into global politics should transcend the canonical emphasis on intergovernmental relations with the privileged agency conferred to the role of states. Following a not so recent trend in social theory, we conceptualize the social realm as a discursive space of infinite, endless articulations in which power attempts to transform social relations in an open process to constitute society (Laclau and Mouffe 1985).
Furthermore, it is not surprising that the study of crisis is often linked with the study of hegemonic social relations, both globally and locally. According to Friedman’s (1994) thesis of “dehegemonization bringing dehomogenization,” the decline of central authority paves the way for the revival of previously repressed identities, visions, and movements in the society. The events in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War mark the fall of the core visions and civic identity movement around which different groups, organizations, and individuals rallied. The decline of dominant discourses often reinforces the emergence of new, alternative ones, rendering some agents and structures more visible while disempowering others.
This growing body of literature on crises as social phenomena in IR has not yet paid enough attention to re-conceptualizing crises as social phenomena in contexts outside of the “West .” Therefore, with this line of inquiry (and intent to contribute to the body of literature on crises as social phenomena), we propose to turn our lenses to Ukraine (which has been described as “classic crisis ” by Menon and Rumer 2015) in order to engage with some of the assumptions prescribed above: What is the relationship between crisis and change ? Is there a...