The Politics of Catastrophization

"The main thrust of my argument is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding "emergency" in terms free from the discourse of sovereignty and its legal implications, in a way that still holds open a certain, limited place for the sovereign decision on the exception. While I am joining here scholars like Ann Stoler who insists on "degrees of sovereignty," or Thomas Aleinikoff who speaks about sovereignty's "semblances", the theoretical context of my argument is different from theirs: it is an attempt to construe a political theory of man-made disasters and use man-made disasters as view point from which it becomes possible, in fact necessary to revise some of political theory's basic concepts. The immediate political context of this project and its initial motivation has been an attempt to provide a comparative-theoretical perspective for the recent catastrophization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and of the Gaza Strip in particular."--Abstract on item.