Conceptualizing the After-Crisis through Ethnographies of Postcrisis Situations in Africa

Abstract

Conceptualizing the After-Crisis through Ethnographies of Postcrisis Situations in Africa1 Maarten Bedert (bio), Astrid Bochow (bio), and Rijk van Dijk (bio) Introduction Many scholars have been exploring the local effects of global responses to extensive humanitarian crises on the African continent—for example, crises resulting from natural disasters, such as drought (De Waal 2005), violent conflict (Abramowitz 2014), and epidemics (Nguyen 2010). The socioeconomic and political effects of interventions by international organizations have been studied ethnographically by looking at how new structures, resources, knowledge, and expertise have been introduced in local contexts (Beckmann, Gusman, and Shroff 2014; Bedert 2020; Duffield 2002; Smernoff 2013; Turner 2004). An often overlooked question is: what happens when the crisis has ended? As international interventions wind down, they leave behind certain material and immaterial infrastructures, including structures of knowledge and labor.2 Even though, commonly, these are intended to last for the duration of the crisis, new crises often emerge as support is withdrawn and these infrastructures dwindle or are used in new and different ways. This contribution aims to conceptualize the notion of postcrisis as it reflects critical junctures and disjunctures (Vigh 2008) that, in these terms, must be unpacked analytically. Rather than the end of crisis and a presumed return to normalcy, we consider a transmutation of crisis that often emerges in the new situation. The postcrisis can signal a number of processes by which it reappears in a different fashion, based on different modalities and conditions, or creates a new crisis, leading to different effects for distinct groups in society. While a crisis may be solved for one group, it may resurface for yet another group. This transmutation, we argue, needs to be analyzed as a postcrisis crisis. As Reinhart Koselleck points out, the term crisis derives from the Greek word krisis (judgment, decision) and is often translated as “turning point” (Koselleck 2006, 358; Roitman 2017). Therefore, crises are thought of as moments of a distinct, albeit short, temporal condition. Many people [End Page 1] associate crisis with an experience of temporary abnormality (Vigh 2008, 7) in contexts of war, violence, bereavement, disease, or any other life-threatening situation. In recent years, anthropologists working on epidemics, civil unrest or war, poverty, and hunger have pointed at the chronicity of crisis (Vigh 2008), or a “routinization of emergency,” as Didier Fassin (2012, 183) did—meaning that, for many people, these life-threatening situations are ongoing, and people have no experience of what it means to live under secure, safe, and comfortable living conditions. Regarding the continuity of a crisis, many authors point at what can be called the construction or the proclamation of crisis by media and politics, thereby seeing this as a political tool, which supports certain power structures and weakens others (Agamben 2005; Calhoun 2010; Fassin 2012; Fassin and Panadolfi 2010; Nguyen 2009; Roitman 2014). Also, regarding the COVID-19 crisis,3 Giorgio Agamben has remarked on how the Italian government has used the virus to call a state of exception. Far from being a new phenomenon, the state of exception has become the new normal. The rhetoric of a sense of emergency ultimately leads, in Agamben’s eyes, to a context in which restrictions are gradually reducing life to the purely biological (Agamben 1998). Janet Roitman (2014) elaborates on the way a crisis is constructed as an object of knowledge. She argues that crisis is a narrative device, through which a particular and exceptional social, economic, and political reality is invoked while others are denied or ignored. Others describe infrastructures that have been put in place by diverse actors, such as governments, international organizations, and local NGOs, and describe the effects that these, often temporary, infrastructures have on local economies, job markets, housing arrangements, medical care, and the management of livelihoods (McKay 2017). An ethnographic approach to the lived experience of postcrisis situations might provide new insights into crisis as a sociopolitical project (see also Visacovsky 2017), which seems to favor the temporality of crisis as it intersects with normality but falls short when accounting for the aftermath of this political invocation. The contributions in this special issue offer ethnographic explorations that question what happens when the exceptional...