States manufacture and manage crises to justify self-assertion and restructuring.

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

According to the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ambivalence—the ability to regard the same act as both unjustifiable and necessary—is central to the sovereign power of modern democracies. Such a breech in logic comes to be reasoned through “exceptional” moments of crisis, which the state uses to suspend established codes and procedures and to legitimize government abuses of power. Agamben claims that what characterizes modern democratic Western politics is that the exceptions have become the rule. The state of exception, he writes, becomes “the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rest[s].” Thus the United States was not necessarily in an exceptional state of crisis during George Bush’s War on Terror but rather operated through a perpetual “state of exception”—from the Cold War through the continued War on Terror. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 363 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: 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; Manufactured crises enable states to restructure by projecting threat outward. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 271; A government can manufacture crisis to construct its own people as enemy — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 111 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Manufactured crises enable states to restructure by projecting threat outward. #expands (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 271
• Democratic states govern through a permanent state of exception rather than true crisis #complicates (0.78) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 363