Crisis: Sovereign or Distributed?

In the face of a proliferation of texts framing ongoing events and experiences in terms of crisis, a new critical literature has emerged to interrogate the political, moral, and epistemological assumptions and blind spots of this way of understanding the modern world. In this special issue, we engage with this new body of work on crisis by distinguishing between two models—sovereign and distributed. While the sovereign model of crisis fleshes out the link between crisis and political power, the distributed model points to the social fragmentation and confusion that crisis-claims can provoke when they are made outside established institutional channels—when they are distributed across disparate audiences. Understanding the relationship between crisis and sovereignty on the one hand, and between crisis-claims and their audiences on the other, sheds new light on the narrative and performative effects of crisis.