Manufactured crises enable states to restructure by projecting threat outward.

Evidence

“Crises” may be manufactured, seized upon, massaged and managed as they are seen to provide especially fertile ground, productive opportunities, for state self-assertion, renewal, and restructuring. Social threat is attributed to an outside. The threat may be taken as the figure of an interior abjection, the alien within, or the unknown stranger, the threat from without. The (invented) threat to state coherence and power – a war on terrorism, most recently – is ascribed in either case to state externalities. Terrorism, in the instance at hand, is always projected as the product of the alien and alienated, those seeking to threaten survival of the state and the way of life for which it takes itself to stand. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 271

Categorization

• XREF: Strong resonance with the ‘moral panic’ literature (Cohen, Hall) and my earlier reading on panic theory — manufactured crisis as a state tool, not a grass-roots phenomenon. — connects to: The state’s crisis-management role grew in the post-Fordist era rather than shrinking — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1034; Occupying states use engineered chaos and panic as an intelligence-gathering device — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 673
• SEED: Essay angle: the manufactured crisis as state technology — how ‘invented threats’ license restructuring and renewal, tracing the pattern across wartime and pandemic politics.