Governing Traumatic Events

Introduction From point of view of Western states and media, stuff of global politics is increasingly dominated by stories of crisis, emergency, and catastrophe. So-called traumatic events of one kind or another--terrorist attacks, natural disasters, global pandemics, and (even) financial crises--occupy news and policy discourses on an almost daily basis. Indeed, seems that is fast becoming a paradigmatic lens through which dynamics of contemporary international politics are framed, understood, and responded to. The everyday prevalence of what we might call discourse of traumatic presents a quandary for those political analysts seeking to develop critical theoretical or disciplinary insights with which to diagnose, address, or engage this emergent global milieu. On one hand, our understanding/understandings of and traumatic tend to be dominated by ascendancy of managerialist discourses of humanitarianism, psychology, and newly emergent frame of resilience planning. These (often overlapping) discourses usually address question of how to respond to traumatic events in terms of a problem-solving exercise, seeking to better manage outcomes of traumatic more efficiently without first unpicking power relations which produce and are sometimes sustained by trauma. (1) On other hand, there has been a curious naturalization of specific events as emblematic of critical concerns. For instance, while scholars of international relations have been drawn to spectacle of particular events, most notably less attention has been paid to concept, discourse, and practice of traumatic as a political problematic as such. At one end of a spectrum, is possible to identify a generalization of knowledge about traumatic events, seeking depoliticization, management, efficiency, and so on. At other end, we detect a fetish for particular: as an arresting device for rethinking political. However, both approaches fail to capture how governing traumatic events is a complex and movable feast. Refusing a choice between general and particular in this way, pressing task facing critical scholar is rather to question how they produce and sustain each other: how general concept of is read from specific events and interpellated into others, and to analyze how these practices generate differential political effects among populations. (2) Far from being exceptional, we would argue, repertoire of traumatic may be quite ordinary, a banality of established and establishing knowledge practices that render the event governable; in other words, can be understood as a normalizing discourse of power. On this view, increasing incidence of events produced as traumatic carries its own set of political narratives that can be unpicked. There are important historical markers--Chernobyl, Lockerbie, 9/11, Tsunami, Katrina--and an established (and highly emotive) accompanying vocabulary of shock, devastation, anger, and blame. The political logics entailed then become quite recognizable. Governments need to coordinate, humanitarian organizations need to mobilize resources, people on ground are portrayed as helpless victims. Political energy is drawn to a specific and limited narrative of disaster and response where human experience is portrayed in universal terms: subject to unthinkable, unimaginable, that we all need to survive. An ethics of pity is quickly marshalled, a politics of empathy constructed: something of human persists and such events remind us of that. (3) In these and other ways, traumatic events are always already governed or known. Rendered thus, question of governing traumatic events becomes an enquiry into possibility, and indeed impossibility of knowing trauma so that it might be in new and more effective ways. …