Democracy under test: Emergency

Title: Democracy Under the Test of Emergency
Type of Event: Panel discussion on the release of the book Emergency (Hermès, CNRS)
Description:
When there is an emergency, there is no time left to discuss or reflect: immediate action is required. Yet declaring an emergency always involves persuading others that time is short, and it demands a collective response. The humanitarian field demonstrates this: even when faced with the most critical form of emergency, one cannot dispense with talking about it or deliberating on it.
Calls for “ecological emergency” or “democratic emergency” often sound like incantations that struggle to produce results. On the other hand, states of emergency declared by governments are harshly effective: they suspend debate and curtail collective deliberation in the name of a higher imperative - security.
The rise of the rhetoric of emergency in public debate therefore raises questions: does it reflect the effectiveness of this mode of action? And if emergency, as a tool of power, silences dissent and encroaches on freedoms, can we still imagine action driven by emergency that is not a democratic dead end?
The edited volume Emergency (Hermès, CNRS) outlines critical perspectives not only on the multiplication of powers of exception but also on critical uses of the rhetoric of emergency - for example in climate or democratic emergency discourses - that replicate this authoritarian slope in ways both ineffective and dangerous. It invites the question: is “emergency” just a word of power, or can its proclamation also serve as a lever for critical thinking?
The volume opens with humanitarianism, the historical and semantic matrix of the concept; then examines emergency medicine, analysing how managerial logic in the public hospital contradicts the temporality of care; lastly, it interrogates how emergency legitimises powers of exception and may bypass democratic debate.
This panel will bring together the book’s coordinators, Nicolas Le Merrer (UBO‑HCTI) and Marion Pollaert (Centre Jean Pépin); political scientist and constitutionalist Eugénie Mérieau (Université Paris 1 Panthéon‑Sorbonne); and psychiatrist Jamal Abdel Kader (film État limite), who contributed to the volume. The discussion, which the public is invited to join, will be moderated by Hugo Mosneron Dupin (ED540), whose work focuses on environmental humanities and the philosophy of economic science.