GLOBAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY Global Crisis Theory, Method and the Covid-19 Pandemic Nadine Klopf Global Political Sociology Series Editors Dirk Nabers, International Political Sociology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany Marta Fernández, Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Chengxin Pan, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Australia David B. MacDonald, Department of Political Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada This new series is designed in response to the pressing need to better understand growing complex global, transnational, and local issues that stubbornly refuse to be pigeon-holed into clearly-defined established disciplinary boxes. The new series distinguishes its visions in three ways: (1) It is inspired by genuine sociological, anthropological and philo- sophical perspectives in International Relations (IR), (2) it rests on an understanding of the social as politically constituted, and the social and the political are always ontologically inseparable, and (3) it conceptual- izes the social as fundamentally global, in that it is spatially dispersed and temporarily contingent. In the books published in the series, the hetero- geneity of the world’s peoples and societies is acknowledged as axiomatic for an understanding of world politics. Nadine Klopf Global Crisis Theory, Method and the Covid-19 Pandemic Nadine Klopf Research Group on International Political Sociology Kiel University Kiel, Germany ISSN 2946-5559 ISSN 2946-5567 (electronic) Global Political Sociology ISBN 978-3-031-25139-9 ISBN 978-3-031-25140-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25140-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover illustration: © Dennis Cox/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Tom Neblung Acknowledgments This book benefited from my graduate studies and the early phase of my doctoral research at the Research Group on International Political Sociology at Kiel University. It largely presents a revised and extended version of my master thesis. I wish to thank Anca Pusca and Hemapriya Eswanth at Palgrave Macmillan as well as the series editors Dirk Nabers, Marta Fernández, Chengxin Pan, and David B. MacDonald for making this publication possible. My colleagues in the Research Group on International Political Sociology deserve particular acknowledgment for providing an always supportive but equally critical environment. I am therefore grateful to Merve Genç and Jan Zeemann as well as Frank A. Stengel for his critique on early theoretical arguments and his continuing mentoring. Malte Kayßer provided sophisticated and much appreciated feedback on large parts of the book. I would also like to thank Paula Diehl for her support during my position as her research assistant at Kiel University. Moreover, I benefited from presenting and discussing my research at the 2022 ISA Annual Convention in Nashville, TN and the 2022 EISA Pan-European Conference on International Relations in Athens. My grat- itude therefore extends to Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Erica Resende whose feedback as chairs and discussants helped me to refine my argu- ments. I would also like to express my gratitude to Soian and Alex for their support and endurance in seemingly endless discussions about social theory and struggles in everyday academic life. vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Dirk Nabers for his continuous support throughout the last years. I thoroughly enjoyed our theoretical discussions, which were of invaluable worth for advancing the theoretical arguments presented in this book and developing an academic rigor that has hope- fully become visible in my approach to dislocation. I benefited hugely from Dirk’s always kind but equally merciless critique. Notwithstanding his academic ruthlessness, I met Dirk as an empathetic and understanding person and I am thankful for his always considerate advice. Finally, this book is dedicated to my partner Tom Neblung who deserves my greatest appreciation. I would not have finished this book without his love and support both in times of academic inspiration and personal struggle. Thank you for being the miracle that completes my dislocated identity. Kiel Nadine Klopf Introduction It seems as if our world is shaped by crises that unravel habitual patterns of behavior, disrupt ingrained social practices and institutions, and thus enable us to question established political practices as well as our own actions. Imagining a world without crises appears more like a paradisi- acal conjecture, with crises being perhaps the most loyal companion that persistently confronts us. Crises never seem to vanish but, quite the contrary, regardless of how stable social orders are thought to be they are sooner or later overtaken by crises. That is, crises are not merely exceptional phenomena but characterize a permanent state of society. It is therefore not surprising that crisis has always been a subject of research in various disciplines, yet with different and sometimes controversial perspectives as to what is actually meant by the term. Already in the early days of crisis research within International Rela- tions (IR), Charles Hermann declared that “only the vaguest common meaning appears attached to the concept” (Hermann 1969, 410), which has not been resolved during the last decades but, on the contrary, as Colin Hay and Tom Hunt note almost 50 years later, “[i]t is clear that the language of crisis has, if anything, been cheapened” (Hay and Hunt 2018, 6) such that it can rightly be concluded that crisis “remains one of the most illusive, vague, imprecise, malleable, open-ended and generally unspecified concepts” (Hay 1996, 421). It seems that what prolifer- ates in particular is the observation of the contested nature of crisis, as despite notable contributions that have advanced our understanding of ix x INTRODUCTION the term, we have not yet arrived at the point where it becomes possible to thoroughly theorize the specificity of crisis. What remains absent is a systematization that enables us to disentangle the diverse dimensions that crises are considered to be located at. Traditional approaches are particularly interested in how the behavior of decision-makers is altered during a crisis in contrast to periods of non-crisis whereby crises are restricted to ephemeral occurrences that only temporarily destabilize an otherwise stable social order (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1982; Hermann 1969). Nevertheless, already these early approaches put forward that “decision-makers behave according to their interpretation of the situation, not according to its ‘objective’ character” (Hermann 1972, 12). While still cleaving to an individualist perspective on foreign policy behavior, decision-making approaches open the way towards an understanding of crises that do not regard the latter as mere natural occurrences. This becomes more accentuated in subsequent constructivist research that foregrounds the socially constructed character of crisis, arguing that crises are particularly “what we make of them” (Hay 2013, 23). Notable contributions depart from specifying crises only as temporary occur- rences and are explicitly concerned with the structural underpinning that provides the basis for subsequent crisis constructions. Jutta Weldes, for instance, defines crises as socially constructed threats to state identities that are rooted in existing antagonistic relationships which shape how crises are constructed (Weldes 1999, 41). She thus prominently unveils how the Cuban missile crisis can only be understood with recourse to established U.S.–Soviet relations that rendered possible the construction of these events as a threat to U.S. identity (Weldes 1999, 219). Colin Hay also emphasizes a structural dimension of crises when defining the latter as moments of decisive intervention that are made in response to an accu- mulation of contradictions which, however, merely present the structural precondition for crisis and cannot be equated with crisis as such (Hay 1999, 324). Bob Jessop’s recent critical realist research foregrounds this struc- tural dimension as he stresses that these emerging contradictions stem from an underlying ontological dimension that comprises the interac- tion of causal mechanisms that might potentially develop towards crisis (Jessop 2015, 239). Whereas Jessop remains concerned with an inde- pendently existing materiality as the structural precondition for a crisis, Dirk Nabers’ discourse theoretical approach puts forward how a crisis