David Keen lifts the lid on the constant state of ‘emergency politics’ currently consuming the Global North and argues why the framework of the Global South is key to understanding, and disrupting, these self-reinforcing systems of crisis.

A kind of ‘emergency politics’ is significantly shaping many political systems across the world, and Western democracies are far from immune. It may be that globalization is now helping to ‘import’ into Western democracies not only the large-scale superfluousness and precarity afflicting the rest of the world but also some of the emergency politics that many influential actors in the Global South have for some time been fostering and using to distract, absorb and suppress the energies of discontented populations.

A key part of the problem in Western democracies today, as so often in many parts of the Global South, has been that the underlying functions of overlapping disasters have helped to undermine attempts to relieve them, contributing greatly to the ineffective or actively counterproductive nature of responses.

Global South precedents, patterns and lessons

In several countries where I have investigated disasters (including Sudan, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka), a key part of politics has come to be the instrumentalisation of disaster and emergency, while a second important part has been the attempt to limit the political fall-out from disaster, pointing towards an agenda of legitimising disaster.

Emergency politics in the Global South is partly about sealing yourself off from the costs of disasters. At the extreme, elites creating a crisis obtain many benefits and incur very few costs, a situation that feeds into disasters themselves and even into what Mark Duffield has called ‘permanent emergency’. The trajectory of disasters in the Global South has been closely related to changes in the distribution of costs and benefits. So relatively powerful groups will tend to relieve disasters when they are incurring costs and they will tend not to relieve disasters (and indeed to make them worse) when they are reaping benefits. Famines in Sudan and Ethiopia in the 1980s were only seriously addressed when media reports belatedly exposed the severity of the problem — and in Sudan’s case the manipulation of famine for profit, oil and military advantage.

Crises in the Global South can help to throw light on crises affecting the Global North. Disasters in the Global South have routinely yielded beneficiaries, and these benefits can help to explain why these disasters occurred and why they have frequently persisted. Today, as a great many disasters have in effect ‘come home’ to the Global North, so too have some of the benefits of disaster as well as the closely related instrumentalisation of disaster. Suffering is increasingly being welcomed and put to use in Western democracies, mirroring a disturbing phenomenon that has been documented in Africa, Asia and Latin America over several decades.

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Suffering is increasingly being welcomed and put to use in Western democracies, mirroring a disturbing phenomenon that has been documented in Africa, Asia and Latin America over several decades.

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