Governing International Emergencies

  • - Governing International Emergencies (Spring 2008)

“The risk society is thus not a revolutionary society, but more than that, a catastrophic society. In it the state of emergency threatens to become the normal state.”

Ulrich Beck – Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity

This seminar examines the growing importance of emergency response and intervention in multiple areas of international activity, including global health crises, conflict management, natural disaster response, and economic development. We will consider various theoretical approaches to these problems developed in social science literatures on emergency, risk, and related topics, and will attempt to bring them into communication with literature about the changing missions and strategic frameworks of key international organizations (such as the WHO, the World Bank, the UN, humanitarian organizations) or national organizations that act internationally (national aid organizations and the US military, for example). In each of these areas we will ask questions such as: Is there a global understanding and imagining of international emergencies? What are the conventions and ethical imperatives governing international response to global emergencies? What international and national organizations are shaping the understanding of the category of emergency and subsequent response? What concepts, practices, and techniques (resilience, preparedness, surveillance, logistics, and situational awareness) are crucial to activity in this area? What is the history of such concepts and practices, and how do they travel from one domain to another?

The class will be organized as a small research seminar that will focus on semester long research projects conducted by participants, who are expected to come with a willingness to engage theory and to play an active role in defining our curriculum. The course is divided into two halves. The first half of the semester will be devoted to background reading on theories of risk, risk society, and emergency, as well as some general background material on international humanitarianism and emergency response. The second half of the semester will be devoted to a participant-led curriculum that deals with specific areas of international emergency such as natural disasters, food crises, health emergencies, and environmental emergencies or crises.

Work for the class will consist of two parts. First, participants will work on one broad area in which practices of international emergency management are being developed, such as food aid, emergency health or pandemic preparedness, natural disaster preparedness and response, or environmental emergencies and crises (we will work collectively on the exact categories). Groups of two or three students focusing on each category will produce web-based information “sites” on these fields (we will talk about the appropriate platform for this – either blog software or drupal). These “sites” will have at least two elements: (1) A narrative about the field that describes when a certain problem was identified; what key organizations, meetings, experts, were engaged in defining it; what defining "events" brought a certain problem into focus, and so on; (2) A page of "resources" such as links to key organizations, experts, scholarly analyses, etc. that are crucial in defining this field.

Second, participants will write a research paper that focuses on a specific set of problems within these broad domains, such as a specific disaster or “crisis” (the 2004 Aceh Tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the AIDS “crisis”), anticipated future disasters (pandemic flu, global warming), or considerations regarding catastrophe preparedness or risk mitigation. We will work collectively on narrowing these down to workable research topics.

Concentration:Conflict and Security