Crisis? What Crisis? Crisis as a Perspective onto Global Governance

Speaker: Dr. Tom Pegram

Abstract: This lecture will examine the role of crisis in global governance, its evolving concept and impact on IR scholarship. It will address the ambiguity of the crisis concept, seen in terms like “permacrisis” and “polycrisis,” and its use in various contexts such as financial instability and climate change. The lecture will introduce a distinction between conjunctural and structural crises, using the 2008 financial crisis and ongoing climate crisis as examples. It will show how different crisis framings affect institutional responses and our understanding of stability and change in global governance. Finally, it will encourage IR scholars to reflect on crisis as an analytical tool and pay more attention to the political and normative aspects of crisis discourse.