The Timescales of Crisis: From Risk to Resilience in International Politics

“Crisis” is everywhere in world politics: wars that reshape regional security, humanitarian catastrophes that leads to loss of life and strain international institutions, climate-fuelled disasters that test state capacity, and the long afterlives of pandemic governance. Yet what is a crisis? Who defines it, by what criteria, and with what consequences? Crisis is also a way of organising time, deciding what counts as urgent, what becomes normalised, how long an “emergency” lasts, and when (or whether) recovery begins.

This event brings together Professor Helge Jordheim and Professor Einar Wigen (University of Oslo) for an interdisciplinary conversation on how crises are made legible through the concepts and temporal frames used to interpret them. The discussion will explore the move from risk to crisis to resilience and ask what changes when politics is governed through countdowns, thresholds, “turning points”, and open-ended states of exception.

Key questions include:

• Why are some dangers treated as sudden shocks, while others unfold as slow emergencies?
• How do institutions and expert languages shape what counts as a crisis, and for how long?
• Who gets to set the tempo of response, and whose timelines are ignored?
• What does “resilience” assume about recovery, responsibility, and the future?

The wide-ranging discussion is anchored in inter-disciplinary debates probing how language, institutions, and historical memory shape what becomes possible in moments of disruption.

About the Speakers

• Prof Helge Jordheim, Director of Centre for Global Sustainability at the University of Oslo
• Prof Einar Wigen, Professor of Middle East Studies, University of Oslo

This event is organised by the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (CISD) at SOAS University of London.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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Host or Publisher SOAS Politics, University of London