Economic emergencies: exception, government and the management of the economy

What is an economic emergency, and what are its contemporary legal, discursive, political, and institutional implications for emergency management? We identify and critically discuss two main strands in the vast interdisciplinary literature on economic emergency, which we call the legal (or constitutional) and the discursive-institutional approach. The first line of inquiry is inspired by Carl Schmitt’s political theology of sovereign exception: when applied to the economy, it mobilizes military analogies to view the latter as a potential threat from the ‘outside.’ Its management requires consequential and urgent actions suspending the normal order. The second, discursive-institutional approach builds on the Foucauldian idea of governmental techniques of power as a logic of emergency management, not through a suspension of the law, but via internally economized emergency devices that are then made permanent. Extending these approaches to the practice of economic emergency management, we provide a two-dimensional approach which integrates the exception declaration with emergency scripts and classifies economic emergency according to these dimensions. We offer empirical examples of each configuration, and we reflect on how our conceptualization of economic emergency can contribute to opening a cross-disciplinary field of emergency studies including such lines of sociological inquiry as economic expertise and regulation.